ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief overview of Korean education from earliest times to the present. The history is important not only to complete the picture of educational change but also to understand fully contemporary educational problems and issues. The religious, cultural, and ideological influences of ancient Korea are dominated by the cosmology of shamanism, present since ancient times, and the introduction through interactions with China of Buddhism and Confucianism. Shamanism, its mythology and rituals, appears to have given little attention to life hereafter or to previous life, but rather concentrated on the needs and interests of the ongoing life of the people. The struggle between the traditionalists and the modernizers was reflected in the mix of "western" and "eastern" educational philosophies and institutions which competed for attention well into the 20th century. Confucianism interpreted education as a process of preparing privileged males through study of the approved classics in order to serve an aristocratic society.
