일제강점기 중등 실업학교의 민족 공학제 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to analyze the ethnic discrimination of the coeducation system operated at secondary vocational schools in Korea during the Japanese occupation period 1910-1945. Unlike general schools, secondary vocational schools in the Japanese colonial era adopted the ethnic coeducation system which allowed Korean and Japanese students to attend the same school. The aim of ethnic coeducation system was to remove the factors that caused blatant ethnic discrimination, claiming to ‘Fusion of Korea and Japan’ policy. Mixed ethnic groups were organized in a classroom for the same curriculum and a dormitory was also organized with mixed ethnic groups so they could also live in the same space. Furthermore, meticulous attention was paid to the maintenance of ethnic balance when selecting a student representative. However, the ethnic coeducation system operated at vocational schools had highly discriminative features to Korean students. Since the ratio of ethnic group for the admission was fixed, the different admission rate applied to Korean and Japanese. The principle of selecting the same number of candidates from different ethnic groups, neglecting the size of the entire number of applicants, made the system unfair to Korean, causing an intense admission competition. Moreover, even though Korean students successfully entered the school, they had to experience discriminative customs happening in the same classroom everyday. Especially Korean students highly complained about the calculation of school records, because they got comparatively low scores on items in which the subjectivity of an evaluator was involved, such as practice and conduct points, compared to Japanese students. The ethnic discriminative system of vocational schools applied to not even admission and school life but graduation and employment. Employment of students at vocational school at that moment was performed by a recommendation system. When administrative agencies or ordinary companies asked school for a recommendation of school graduates, school selected students suitable for each organization and asked the relevant organization for their employment. However, there were ethnic discriminative elements structurally hidden in such recommendation system. Organization that asked for a recommendation specified the conditions of desired ethnic group for such recommendation and school also selected and recommended students with a discriminative standard for each ethnic group. Consequently, Korean students could not be recommended for a desired job or failed to get a job, being pushed back by Japanese students having lower scores. As described above, the coeducation system at vocational schools having strong ethnic discriminative nature, but it was propagated as if it was a symbol of ‘assimilative education’ by the Japanese colonial authorities. However, Korean students of vocational schools who had experienced discriminative customs everyday under the ethnic coeducation system and developed their ethnic awareness and took collective actions to oppose the coeducation policy. Such collective resistance of vocational school students was about raising a fundamental question about the effectiveness of the assimilation policy of the imperialism of Japan that attempted to expand the ethnic coeducation system even to other general schools.