In Korea with Marquis Ito

by George Trumbull Ladd

CHAPTER XIV
EDUCATION AND THE PUBLIC JUSTICE

Until recently neither public education nor public justice, in the modern meaning of these terms, has had any existence in Korea. Even those who were regarded as preferred candidates for government positions in educational and judicial fields were not really fitted for the intelligent and faithful performance of their duties—supposing (what, in most cases, was not true) that they really desired efficiency and true success. For the common people of Korea, indeed for all except the most highly privileged classes, there was no opportunity for learning and no conception or experience of the fair, legal safeguarding of human interests and human rights. The older educational methods, so far as method existed at all, were patterned after those of China; but they were never so thorough or excellent of their kind as were the Chinese. Civil service examinations were indeed required for official preferment. These examinations were exceedingly superficial, and were not guarded against fraud; so that the selection of successful candidates was too frequently made on quite other grounds than those of superior excellence in passing the examinations. To this latter fact the Korean stories of poor and worthy candidates who have been unjustly deprived of the offices to which they were entitled bear an ample and often dramatically pathetic witness. While, as to the almost total absence of even-handed justice, from the central government at the Court down to the most petty of the local magistrates, the entire history of Korea is one continued pitiful story.

With regard to the condition of the public education as late as just previous to, and even after the attempted reforms of 1894, we quote the following description from the Korean Review of November of 1904:

According to Korean custom and tradition, any man who knows Chinese fairly well can become a teacher. There is no such thing as a science of teaching, and the general average of instruction is wretchedly poor. The teacher gets only his deserts, which are extremely small. The traditional Korean school-teacher, while receiving some small degree of social consideration because of his knowledge of the Chinese characters, is looked upon as more or less of a mendicant. Only the poorest will engage in this work, and they do it on a pittance which just keeps them above the starvation line. It has been ingrained in the Korean character to reckon the profession of pedagogy as a mere makeshift which is only better than actual beggary. If you examine the pay-list even of the Government schools, you will find that the ordinary wage is about thirty Korean dollars. This means about fifteen yen a month, and is almost precisely the amount that an ordinary coolie receives. This wretchedly low estimate of the value of a teacher’s services debauches the whole system. The men who hold these positions are doing so because nothing better has turned up, and they get their revenge for the inadequacy of the salary by shirking their work as much as possible.

It would seem from this account that the contemplated reforms of the educational system, which had been inaugurated ten years before, when the old-fashioned civil-service examinations were abolished, had remained, as is customary with all reforms in Korea if not enforced from without, merely matters of so much paper. Another writer[72] about midway in this decade gives a somewhat better account of Korean educational affairs after the Chino-Japan war. The “present favorable aspect of education” at that time this writer attributes to the influence of the war. It is to be noted, however, that the “favorable aspect” covers, for the most part, only the special schools established in Seoul and does not regard the unimproved and still deplorable state of the public education in the country at large. Stricter attention to the extent of this alleged improvement, even within the city of Seoul, shows how limited it really was. Besides well-deserved praise bestowed upon the few missionary schools, only the governmental so-called “Normal School,” in which 30 scholars were enrolled, and which was presided over by Mr. Homer B. Hulbert, and a school for teaching English to the sons of nobles, numbering 35 pupils, are given as examples. Inasmuch as the latter school had the same teacher, and he was justly complaining that his obligation to teach the young Yang-bans interfered with his legitimate work, the cause of the public education could not have made any considerable advances at this time. The same report speaks of a Japanese school maintained in Seoul by the Foreign Education Society of Japan, in the following significant way: “It was organized in April, 1898, as a token of the sincere sympathy for the lack of a sound educational basis in Korea, with the view of giving a thorough elementary course of instruction to Korean youths, and ‘thus aiming to form a true foundation of the undisputed independence of that country.’”

In further proof of the undoubted fact that the reforms of 1894 had accomplished little in Seoul itself, and almost nothing at all in Korea outside of the capital, we may appeal again to the testimony of the writer in the Korean Review: “We do not see,” says this writer, “how the government can be made to realize the importance of this work. When no protest is made against the appropriation of a paltry $60,000 a year for education as compared with $4,000,000 for the Korean army, there is little use in expecting a change in the near future. The government could do nothing better than reverse these figures; but the age of miracles is past.”

“Before suggesting a possible solution of the question,” this writer goes on to say, “we should note with care what is at present being done to provide young men with an education. There are the seven or eight primary schools in Seoul with a possible attendance of forty boys each. This means a good deal less than 500 boys in this city of over 200,000 people, including the immediate suburbs. At the least estimate there ought to be 6,000 boys in school between the ages of ten and sixteen. Practically nothing is being done. As for intermediate education there is a Middle School, with a corps of eight teachers and an average attendance of about thirty boys. The building, the apparatus, and the teaching staff would suffice for about four hundred pupils. There are several foreign language schools, with an attendance of anywhere from twenty to eighty each, and they are fairly successful.... Then there are the several private schools, almost every one of which is in a languishing condition. A Korean will start a private school on the least provocation. It runs a few months and then closes, nobody being the wiser, though some be sadder. When we come to reckon up the number of young Koreans who are pursuing a course of instruction along modern lines, we find that they represent a fraction of less than one per cent. of the men who ought to attend, and might easily be doing so.” Such was then the condition of the public education in Korea even down until after the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war, or in November of 1904.

The foregoing true account of educational matters in Korea is further confirmed and expanded by the Official Report more recently given out in the name of the Residency-General.[73] The report, however, notices the existence of the accepted means of education for the village children in the provinces. These means were employed, after a debased Confucian system, in so-called Syo-bang by a sort of village dominie, who gathered about him the children of the neighborhood and taught them the rudiments of reading and writing the vernacular. There were in 1894 some ten thousand of these schools scattered throughout the peninsula. In the barest rudiments of the native language the instruction they gave was deficient; of modern education in other matters, there was nothing. In Seoul there was also a high-school of Confucian learning (a Syöng-Kyūn-Koan); where the students were taught the three “Primary” and the four “Middle Classics,” and were given some lessons in history, geography, composition and mathematics.