"Entering the labour market: a new center of Korean meritocracy?" and "Didactological study of school knowledge on the Tonghak peasant revolution"

Second session of the seminar Education, Childhood and Society in East Asia.
couvertures de manuels coréens
Des manuels d’histoire publiés en Corée du Sud en 2025 © MBC&iMBC‎

With:

Antoine Blein (doctoral student, EHESS, CRC)

"Entering the labor market: the new center of Korean meritocracy?"

In South Korea, university entrance exams have long been at the center of the school system. However, since the 1990s, against a backdrop of massification of higher education and economic slowdown, preparation for corporate recruitment processes has become increasingly important. Korean students preparing for employment must now accumulate certificates, prepare for corporate exams and pass numerous job interviews. These highly selective processes have given rise to a new industry of private institutes and coaching companies specializing in job search preparation. In these conditions, corporate exams now appear as a new central stage of Korean meritocracy, sometimes to the detriment of traditional educational institutions.
 

Jiye Seo (PhD student, Inalco, IFRAE)

"Étude didactologique des savoirs scolaires sur la Révolution paysanne de Tonghak 동학농민혁명/東學農民革命 (1894-1895) : Historical consciousness 역사의식/歷史意識 in history teaching in South Korea from 1945 to the present"

How is the plurality of historical knowledge addressed in teaching-learning situations in South Korea? The intensification of conflicts around the naming of the Tonghak Peasant Revolution (TPR, Tonghak nongmin hyŏngmyŏng 동학농민혁명, 1894-1895) over the past two decades highlights a reduction in the diversity of knowledge within the framework of school knowledge. However, this framework is not limited to a simple political or ideological dimension. Through a textual analysis of descriptions of RPT in textbooks published from 1945 to the present day, this paper explores, using a didactological approach (Galisson, 2022), how meta-didactic and metahistorical discourses contribute to the construction of the concept of "historical consciousness (yŏksaŭisik 역사의식)". This concept, now a primary focus of history teaching in South Korea, could also act as a metadiscourse simplifying the complexity of historical knowledge.

Organizers: Christian Galan, Marine Déplechin