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| Deokcheon Seowon in South Gyeongsang Province was built in the 16th century. / Korea Times file |
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Today Korean education is experiencing a grave chaos. Ever since Korea opened its ports for foreign trade, education has been favorably viewed as one of the most important driving forces behind the national development and successful modernization of the nation.
However, modern education in Korea, deeply invested in the logic of efficiency and competition, revealed a host of problems. Education in Korea is now staggering, having lost sight of the fundamental objective of education to nurture individuals with moral excellence.
Today's classroom is an arena where the most inhumane forms of competition and conflicts occur in the name of education. Perhaps what we are witnessing today is an inevitable consequence of the approaches in modern education that understood education merely as an instrument for national development and growth. In times like this when we clearly realize the limitations of modern education, it would be worthwhile to look back and seek the wisdom of our ancestors found in the seowon education system.
The seowon is a private educational institution of the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910) and its history presents rich and diverse educational and life experiences that are hard to find in today's educational system. Now we need to more actively engage with and reinterpret the rich heritage and wisdom of the seowon education.
During the Joseon Kingdom, the seowon academies were commonly referred to as the source of the vitality of the state. In other words, the seowon was a place where the nation's healthiest and rawest life force was alive and kicking. A sense of pride that the seowon was responsible for training seonbis, or a group of Confucian scholars who led the Joseon government, gave birth to the seowon's unique culture.
The seowon was a place where these Confucian scholars committed to a passion for seeking the truth towards sagehood in the realm of Neo-Confucianism. Through the seowon education, the seonbis strived to attain and accept the most fundamental order governing the world, or what is called "li."
The seowon also provided a stable supply of learned bureaucrats who served as pillars for the Joseon's yangban bureaucracy. In other words, culture and philosophy of the Joseon was born, and flowered at these seowon academies.
However, history also reveals a dark side of the seowon. Several years into the King Injo's reign in the 17th century, the harmful social effects of the seowon academies already started to emerge. They brought in peasants for forced labor and the samevirtuous individual was memorialized at multiple academies, aggravating overwrapping and overpopulation of the seowon schools.
In addition, many seowon schools lost their essence and turned into empowered political institutions, serving as an apparatus for political strife. While the seowon's original purpose of fostering a next generation of seonbi scholars became almost obsolete, only the function of the seowon as a shrine for ancestral rites memorializing ancient Confucian sages remained.
Reflecting such a state of affairs, a succession of regulatory measures and policies as well as arguments for demolishing the seowon schools followed after the reigns of King Sukjong and King Injong.
In order to build a new future for education in Korea, however, it is important for us to clear these harmful aspects of the seowon education and to take a more active interest in learning from the tremendous cultural assets it provides.
First, one can argue that the greatest appeal of the seowon education model is that it aspired to foster well-rounded and moral human beings. The true study that the seowon education system promoted was the one where knowledge and virtue are not divorced in terms of ideology, and knowledge and action are not disconnected in practice.
A well-rounded person in whom knowledge and living blend in harmony was the exemplary human character the seowon aimed to nurture. The seonbi scholars found their role model in the ancient virtuous men including Confucius. The genealogy of these sages was the line of preaching moral philosophy that the seowon regarded most highly. This doctrine of study, in which one aspires to become a "seongin," or a virtuous man, was unique to the Joseon.
The ultimate goal of the seowon education was to attain a profound understanding of the Heaven's will and to reach a high spiritual realm where the mind can frolic freely without any reservations. The seonbi scholars wanted to learn from nature how to be free from avarice and how to maintain selfless purity.
As a natural result, the main point of their study was set on the study of "gyeong," or the pursuit of mind, with a focus on clearing the mind and exercising restraint so that selfish interests do not intrude upon one's mind. The gyeong also means what is called "geukgibokrye," that is to say, to overcome oneself and to observe proprieties.
Another precious educational heritage the seowon education has passed down to us isthe relationship between the master and his students based on mutual respect. The seonbi's path to sagehood was far and distant and the disciples needed a psychological role model who is more easily accessible. To these scholar students, it was their master at the seowon.
Although it is easy to assume that the seowon masters must have had authoritative and highbrow attitudes, it cannot be more wrong than to have such a misconception. A teacher is only a facilitator who helps his students to find the path on their own. Master Toegye Yi Hwang once likened a master to a small spring in a mountain.
In other words, a master, like a mountain spring, is a base where each of his students, drinks up water according to the degree of his thirst and leaves for his journey forward. Thus, the relationship between the master and his disciple is a complementary one where each helps one another to complete one's goal on the same path. It was through this reciprocal relationship between the teacher and the students that the Joseon's seonbi culture fully flowered and achieved ideological maturity.
In summary, the seowon education presents us an example of the dignified seonbi culture of the Joseon era. The seowon education manifests profound philosophy behind it. Its doctrine of study teaches us that there are realms of the mind and the truth that transcend the finite world of reality and history.
Chung Soon-woo is a professor at The Academy of Korean Studies.
