This paper analyses the series of textbooks known as The History of Korean Education (also known as The Theory of Korean Education), which have been published in Korea (including North Korea) and Japan since 1919. Of these, 28 volumes were published i...
This paper analyses the series of textbooks known as The History of Korean Education (also known as The Theory of Korean Education), which have been published in Korea (including North Korea) and Japan since 1919. Of these, 28 volumes were published in South Korea and six in North Korea, in Korean. A further six were written in Japanese, with one published in Seoul and the others in Tokyo. In order to make comparisons about education in ancient Korea before the Three Kingdoms period, I selected 20 volumes, some of which are used in undergraduate university classrooms now. I deal with the on-going intellectual discussion of the problems of 'what' and 'when' of the History of Korean Education that began with the first lecture in the university in 1954 and, also, I consider some bibliographical problems of those volumes. The following three points arise from this study. First, The History of Korean Education is one part of the national cultural history, which also includes literature, philosophy, anthropology, mythology, etc., and these other subjects must be taken into account when commenting on the history of Korean education. Second, only a few pages of each of the 20 selected volumes address the specific questions of ancient Korea; in two of them, more than 5% of the pages deal with this, while in the other 18 there are fewer pages. Volumes published since 1995 give greater attention to the wider issues of ancient Korea. Third, as the basis of my analysis, I propose to use the 'Legend of Hwan-ung' instead of the 'Dangun Myth', because the Hongik-Ingan - the foundation of educational ideas of Korea which were established by official decree in the Educational Act (1949) - is directly related to the legend of Hwan-ung and not to the Dangun myth.