November 2024
Dilemmas of raising a global child in rapidly transforming South Korea
Ahn, Junehui. 2024. Between Self and Community: Children’s Personhood in a Globalized South Korea. Rutgers NJ: Rutgers University Press.
The Rainbow Room in Somang Preschool (Seoul) looked like the classroom I previously studied at a midwestern U.S. preschool. Walls were decorated with children’s artwork and posters. The artworks included words such as I, myself, feelings, expression, self-confidence, creativity, diversity, etc. Children were encouraged to express and verbalize their own thoughts, ideas, and feelings and were eager to do so. Based on these observations, I tentatively concluded that contemporary Korean socialization practices and ideology are geared toward cultivating children’s self-expression, creativity, and individuality—the values believed by many contemporary Koreans to be prerequisite for success in emerging, globalized South Korea.
However, my conclusion changed when classroom teacher Ms. Choo approached me to share her frustrations: “Kids are just copying each other’s work and are only interested in what others are doing. No diversity and no creativity.” She specifically mentioned a girl named Nuri: “She’s too cocky. Kids think her drawings are the best … and envy her. But she doesn’t care for others’ feelings. She’s problematic.”
I was surprised. Somang children’s expressions seemed diverse and creative, even compared to those I observed in the U.S. preschool. Moreover, Nuri seemed an exemplary student who was good at articulating unique ideas, thoughts, and preferences. If the teacher’s goal was to cultivate creativity and diversity, why was Nuri’s behavior and attitude problematic? Why shouldn’t kids be interested in others’ work? What kind of cultural assumptions, imaginaries, and aspirations reside behind this teacher’s laments and frustrations?
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, my book Between Self and Community examines how children and teachers navigate, construct, and reconstruct multifaceted and conflicting models of “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social landscapes. It shows how implicit local socialization values, considered “old” and obsolete in current South Korean socialization discourses, greatly shape the contours of new personhood and demonstrate the roles of children and their peer culture in indigenizing processes.
Junehui Ahn is a professor of urban sociology at the University of Seoul. Her research area is the anthropology of childhood and socialization, with focus on development of self, emotion, and sociality in cultural context. Her research delves into the importance of children’s agency, the interactions of culture and psychology, and the cultural groundings of human sociality. Her work has appeared in American Ethnologist, Ethos, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Childhood, Children and Society, and Linguistics and Education.
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