해방이전 여학생 교육에서 남녀별학과 그 성격

Abstract

This article examines the ambivalent nature of girls' education during the early modern period in Korea between the 1880s and 1945. In Korea, like Japan, coeducation as a principle of organizing schools at all levels was introduced as late as 1945 when the school system underwent a fundamental change under the American Military Government. The first modern schools for girls in Korea which began to establish since the 1880s were single-sex schools and coeducation was practiced as an anomaly until 1945. The underlying rationales for the single-sex schools had much to do with the gender norms and the uneven development of traditional education between men and women up to the 1880s, where no formal schooling was provided to women. While, in principle, single-sex schools were considered a norm, where the society upheld the assumption on 'good wives and wise mothers,' coeducation had been practiced alongside the regular patterns of schooling in the forms of providing admission to girls in all-boys institute or sharing school buildings. Besides the reluctant forms, more positive remarks were made by intellectuals and the liberals in the 1920s and 30s, both in Korea and Japan, although the reality remained intact. This paper looks into the practices of schooling for girls focusing on two major institutes that represent public and private education of the time. The graduates of the two institutes were mostly channeled through the "women's sphere," and when they sought for an occupation it was mostly for the teaching profession in girls' schools. One the one hand, the single-sex school was a distinctive mark of discrimination where the women's institutes were treated inferior to the men's; on the other, it provided an opportunity for women at least to 'work for woman,' in the manner that coeducation, under free competition, might not have provided any space for women at the time when the civil rights were extremely limited for women. This ambivalence continues to-day, although in different forms, where the issues in gender equity are still debated over coeducation and single-sex institutes, in terms of their raison d'être in the society where the issue of social inequality gets ever complicated.