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Through General Terauchi Masatake, Japan began its colonial rule of Korea. As the first governor-general, Terauchi’s goal was to subordinate the new colony to the Japanese system; thus, emphasis was given on Japanese education, and the status of English education significantly weakened. |
This is the 12th in a series of articles about history of English education in Korea ― ED.
By Kim Eun-gyong
Contributing Writer
In May 1910, Japan appointed General Terauchi Masatake, war minister and a prominent militarist, as the new resident-general of Korea, and his specific mission was the annexation of Korea. He drafted the terms of the Treaty of Annexation with Korean Prime Minister Yi Wan-yong, taunted by many Koreans as the arch-traitor of the country and a former student of the Yugyeong Gongwon.
Japan formally annexed Korea as part of the Japanese Empire after Terauchi secured Yi’s signature on the treaty on August 22, 1910. The residency-general was abolished as of October 1, and Japan began its colonial rule through the governor-general.
As the first governor-general, Terauchi’s goal was to subordinate the new colony to the Japanese system, and thus he held a tight, repressive regime throughout his rule. Immediately after the conclusion of the Annexation Treaty of August 1910, Japan began to refer to its language as the national language of Korea, downgrading Korean to the ``Joseon language.’’ At the same time, it changed the name of Korea from Imperial Korea to Joseon.
By discarding the title ‘Imperial Korea,’ Japan rejected the notion of the Korean empire, and Joseon, when used by the Japanese, carried degrading connotations. Hanseong, the capital of Korea, became Gyeongseong.
In October 1916, Terauchi was promoted to prime minister of Japan, and General Hasegawa succeeded in his position as governor-general. Hasegawa was a former commander of the Japanese troops in Korea and an even more rigid militarist; thus the repressive regime handed down by Terauchi persisted without softening, and the Koreans’ sufferings continued. Japanese themselves called this period of the colonial rule, 1910-1919, ``control by military force.’’
In order to expedite Koreans’ integration, Japan targeted the colony’s education and succeeded in establishing a strictly centralized educational system. As in all the other areas of Korean administration, the governor-general was the top office of Korean education and held the ultimate authority in the colony’s educational matters.
The governor-general established two separate educational systems for Koreans and for Japanese settlers. The schools for Koreans were called common, higher common, vocational, and professional, and those for Japanese primary, middle, vocational, and professional. In brief, upon completing the educational systems designed by the Japanese government, a Korean male student received a total of twelve years of schooling while his Japanese counterpart received 15 or 17 years.
Japan placed the common-school education at the core of its colonial education and intended it to be the concluding education for Koreans. Japan’s educational policy for Koreans also centered on vocational instruction that offered simple manual skills. The government was mainly concerned about producing lower-level workers, officials and clerks capable of carrying out menial tasks in support of Japanese bureaucrats.
Japan’s further ``dumbing down’’ of education for Koreans was manifested in its restrictions on higher education. Before the annexation, there had been higher-education institutions in Korea, such as the Sungsil Union Christian College and the college department of Ewha, both established by United States missionaries. The college program at Sungsil was approved by the Imperial Korean government in 1907, and Ewha’s college department in September 1910, but these approvals were nullified by the 1911 ordinance for Joseon’s education. Instead, in accordance with the professional school regulations promulgated in March 1915, professional schools were established at the highest educational institutions.
As the ultimate goal of Japanese educational policy in Korea was to assimilate Koreans, emphasis was given on Japanese language education, and the positions of other foreign languages, including the English language, significantly weakened.
In government-controlled secondary schools, English maintained its feeble existence, remaining as an optional subject in the higher common-school curriculum. One notable difference from the previous higher common-school curriculum was that in the revised one, the choice of foreign language was limited to English only in comparison to the choice of English, French, German, and Chinese in the 1909 curriculum, thereby restricting the scope of foreign language education.
This also suggests that English sustained its popularity even under Japanese authority. In the Gyeongseong Higher Common School, English language instruction was provided only to business-major students two hours a week from the second year. This lack of English language education posed a great barrier when a graduate opted to continue his academic pursuit at a higher-level school. To illustrate, Yi Gyu-tae, a graduate of the higher common school and world-renown chemist, recollects that all he knew about English was the letters of the alphabet from A to I when he was given the entrance exam for the Hiroshima High Normal School and that even that recognition was made possible thanks to the symbols he used in his algebra and geometry classes!
In place of the abolished Government Hanseong Normal School, Japan set up temporary three-month teacher training programs in the higher common schools. Foreign languages including English were not included in any of the teacher training programs. The limited teacher education that Japan offered in Korea was geared toward common-school teacher training only.
Instead, the majority of teachers at government or public secondary schools were trained in normal schools in Japan. Along with Japanese teachers, Koreans who were educated in Japan came to exert important influence on modern education in Korea during its formation period. This phenomenon was true of the field of English language education and has left significant effects to the present-day.
English or foreign language education was not part of the curricula for any of the three types of vocational schools, i.e., agricultural, commercial, and industrial.
Kim Eun-gyong is an associate professor of applied linguistics and Associate Dean of the Center for International Affairs, Information and Communications University (ICU) in Daejeon. She can be reached at egkimrivera@icu.ac.kr.
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