敎育市場 開放에 관한 硏究

Abstract

In knowledge-based era of the 21st century, Korea has targeted openness, internalization, and globalization as strategic policies to survive the ever-stiff competition. The advent of knowledge-based society signifies that the quality of human life and the development of state depend on the amount and quality of the accumulated knowledge resources.

Nations in the world have focused on human resource development as core task to cope with and encounter the demands from the knowledge-based era. The educationally advanced countries have put efforts to enhance the quality of education to deal with the new trend of education and taken a leading role in the trade of education services by attracting large scale of students from the countries where education is underdeveloped. On the contrary, the educationally underdeveloped countries still practice the outdated education model from the industrial economy. Such countries are not capable of developing and providing necessary human resources to cope with the structural changes of industries, which resulted in a vicious cycle of rising unemployment among young job seekers and brain flight to other countries. Korea also has to face demand from the new era under the rapidly changing environment to follow such global trend. Korea has to upgrade human resources to an excellent level by reinforcing educational competitiveness so that the country continues to enjoy a sustainable growth and development in the 21st century as well. Although the education in Korea significantly contributed to accomplish the high economic growth, there has been a rising concern over the nation's education that it has not been advanced enough to ride the global changes. In the case of Korea, opening education service market is an optimal alternative to timely foster the human resources with a higher quality to meet the need from the knowledge-based economy that is in need for an urgent transfusion of manpower with an enhanced efficiency. Since the embarkation of GATS system, the concept of education service has newly emerged as goods and an investment object. Hence, the market opening of the education service becomes an alternative choice that cannot be neglected in the international relations. In this aspect, measures should be sought to minimize the expected potential negative effects while maximizing positive ones that could arise from the opening of the education service market. At the same time, there should be efforts to implement a landmark reform in the education system to include rearrangement of and addition to the existing educational system and curriculum, quality management of the education market, and even further to seek for the opportunities to export the domestically developed education services to the overseas markets so that the Korean education service industry can survive in the era of unlimited competition. This paper aims to seek for measures to institutionalize policies upon opening of the education service market and various methods to develop human resources of a high quality by reviewing the conceptual change on education and major points about the globalization of the education service industry that has been emerging via WTO/GATS, DDA, and FTAs and by studying the status of the domestic and overseas education service industry and major issues arising from opening of the industry. Accordingly, the paper reviewed and examined the underlying theoretical concept and principles of WTO/GATS and FTAs and the backgrounds in negotiations over education service sector, as well as the related issues to opening of the education service industry in WTO/GATS and FTAs. The paper also analyzed the global trend of education by analyzing the openness in various countries of the world and the status of educational globalization, while reviewed a variety of opinions on processes of the industry's opening in Korea and the market opening itself as to counteract such trend. In this regard, particular processes of international negotiations were reviewed and analyzed to include the processes of industry's opening before and after DDA, the concessions for the first and the second phases of opening in the education service industry, the related domestic laws, and disputes over opening of the education service market. Under the rapidly changing globalization, it is the reality that Korea can no longer postpone opening of the education service market. At this point, it can not be clearly predicted whether opening the market will bring benefits for the advancement of Korean society and education or cause ill effect. However, it is necessary to realize that the education industry is on the trend of globalization and opening with acknowledgement that fostering human resources is a major part of reinforcing social overhead capital. Hence, Korea needs to be appropriately prepared and take necessary actions to cope with the trend. In particular, the efforts to counteract the situation should be based on an analytical examination through profound thoughts rather than coming from general and emotional discussions. Instead of taking a negative stance that market opening is pressure from the outside world and should be only passively responded, it is to suggest that there needs to have an aggressive pondering and attitude to move up the conditions and quality of the domestic education to a higher level by taking the global trend of the industry's market opening as an opportunity.