ABSTRACT
In the historical narrative account in the previous chapter, I discussed the various ways in which the teachers’ movement asserted that they were not just a labour movement with a narrow range of industrial reforms on their agenda. Their objectives were more like those of new international social movements like Poland’s Solidarity, with a concern for political and social reforms outside but implicit to their industrial agenda. These interests also were shaped by the way in which Chunkyojo connected itself to particular historical and cultural traditions. The Chunkyojo movement constructed a sense of alliance and continuity between the teachers’ movement and a tradition of dissent active in Korean social and cultural history since the last decades of the Yi Dynasty in the late 19th century. Significant features of these ‘bloodlines of activism’ (Abelmann 1996, 35) were shared by Chunkyojo with many of the other anti-government, pro-democracy movements that arose in Korea during the 1980s (Wells ed. 1995). As Nash (1979, 7; quoted in Abelmann 1996, 21) commented, ‘mythic and memorised history shapes the view of current events and gives people the rationale for action in their own life’. While this genealogical consciousness was not the essential reason for the teachers reform movement, it served to shape and strengthen the identity of the movement such that members of the Chunkyojo movement developed collective action frames for identity and mobilisation from past historical events, and interpreted those events in ways that helped to make sense of the concerns and straggles of the present. The following discussion will describe and analyse key elements in these historical frames, beginning with some examples of how such ‘invented traditions’ to use Hobsbawm’s (1983) phrase were manifest in Chunkyojo discourse.
