Education means a myriad of things to many people; however I would like to depict it as the influential catalyst of two contrasting cycles, one vicious, and the other virtuous. It seems apt to describe the former as education for the purposes of indoctrination. The school oftentimes becomes a mechanical factory in which so-called model students are replicated on a conveyor belt of control and compliance. Children rapidly become commodities and are taught to accept existing frameworks mindlessly, in the absence of diversity, curiosity and creativity. Students become docile, disengaged, and are systematically drained of their creative juices by those dominant power structures in society. These forgotten children are assigned predestined roles, and forced to operate under the guise of an authoritarian system that stresses a policy of no-questions-asked.
If education possesses the ability to transfer social norms and expectations, then it can be described as a volatile breeding ground for violent conflict at various levels. Within the structures of this war torn no man’s land, the system aims to perpetuate the status quo rather than transcending the current reality in the hope of a better tomorrow. As Galtung (2008) points out, more often than not, “the school system is centralized under one ministry of education with almost dictatorial powers over the curricula”. The relics of the past haunt educational policy and as Harber (2008) warns us, “schooling can also be an obstacle to the development of peaceful individuals and society”. He describes this process as the end product of human capital theory, or a world in which students are considered utilizable pawns within national economic prosperity initiatives. Imaginative sparks are held captive in a destructive reproductive prison in which the rich receive the best quality of education, whilst minorities exist on the periphery, or on the outside looking in. Void of critical consciousness, the student is now dormant. He or she is tested to the brink of sanity, enmeshed in a fierce web of competition, and exposed to environments conducive to the prosperity of different types of violence, from racial segregation, to sexual discrimination and of course bullying. If we view the problem as a critical juncture, then the possibility of further decline is combined with the prospect of genuine improvement by way of reform. The matter is highly sensitive and as Adler (2014) advises, we must strive to intertwine the old with the new because: “tradition and invention are the two factors which constitute every living culture: without invention, a culture dies, without tradition, a culture cannot begin to live”. The great paradox of education in South Korea is thus: tangible social and cultural change requires educational reform, but at the same time, it remains difficult to implement a brand of reform that deviates away from the current national ethos itself. To devise modes of transcendence, one must first gain an appreciation for educations more peaceful virtuous cycle.