The profitable adventure of threatened middle-class families: an ethnographic study on homeschooling in South Korea |
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Authors: | Deok-Hee Seo |
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Institution: | (1) College of Education, Chosun University, 375 Seosuk-dong, Dong-gu, Gwangju, 501-759, Korea |
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Abstract: | South Korean society in the late 1990s was confronted with socio-economic setbacks and discursive turbulence concerning the
quality of education being provided. It was at such a particular historical juncture of South Korean society that I conducted
ethnographic research on homeschooling families. Based on field data collected from four homeschooling families, this article
examines how lower middle-class families at first manifested their education fever in an unprecedented adoption of homeschooling,
and then returned their children to school within the same socio-cultural context. Central to this article’s analysis is what
members of these middle-class families, especially children, experienced during the homeschooling period, and how parents
negotiated their rationale for homeschooling and returning their children to school within contesting discourses (e.g., deschooling
and neo-liberalism). As will be shown, despite experiencing difficulties in pursuing a self-fashioned education in a school-centered
society, the families benefited from homeschooling in terms of acquiring “neo-liberal” mentalities for survival without risking
their established socio-cultural status. As such, this article reconfirms the ambivalent characteristics of the alternative
education movement in South Korea and its inevitable connection with the middle-class habitus embedded in the South Korean socio-cultural context.
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Keywords: | Ethnography Homeschooling Education fever Deschooling Neoliberalism Middle-class habitus |
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