Korean studies Education in South Korea

Student activism[edit]
Student activism has a long and honorable history in Korea. Students in Joseon-era secondary schools often became involved in the intense factional struggles of the scholar-official class. Students played a major role in Korea's independence movement, particularly on March 1, 1919, which was a protest based on students' growing resentment towards restrictive, discriminatory, and hostile Japanese occupation and instruction practices. Students were also heavily involved in repeated national efforts and demonstrations against Japanese policies, with instances like the Gwangju Student Movement in 1929 and the June 10, 1926 funeral line protest.
Students protested against the regimes of Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Observers noted that while student activists in the past generally embraced liberal and democratic values, the new generation of militants in the 1980s were far more radical. Most participants adopted some version of the minjung(민정) ideology but were also animated by strong feelings of popular nationalism and xenophobia.
One of the most extreme and landmark movements was the Gwangju Massacre in 1980, where students were driven by a strong will to rebel through Marxist influences against the martial law government. This radicalism was paralleled by the communist sympathizing and radicalism of students in the 1940s and 50s as a result of American occupation.
The most militant university students, perhaps about 5 percent of the total enrollment at Seoul National University and comparable figures at other institutions in the capital during the late 1980s, were organized into small circles or cells rarely containing more than fifty members. Police estimated that there were 72 such organizations of varying orientation, having the change of curriculum and education system of South Korea people have been enriched in an imaginary way that makes them propel in all their studies.