Ordinary people and even educational researchers have a commonsense
belief that the teacher-student relationship is an unalloyed model of educational
relationship. However, such a common belief proves to be a misconception
when they find some conflicting phenomena of the teacher-student relationship
against the nature of seuseung-jeja23) relationship. This misconception comes
from at least three different sources: an idea that the boundary of schooling is
identical with the realm of education, a conviction that curriculum for school
system regulates the process of education, and a conception that instructions in
the classroom guarantee the quality of education, which reinforce one another,
only distorting or at best veiling an educational relationship rather than
revealing it.
The school agents should conform to the constitutional rules of school
system, taking roles as teacher and student, interacting in terms of what the
school dictates. Henceforth, the nature of the teacher-student relationship reveals
a sociological aspect in human life. The educational relationship is quite
different from it, in that education is depicted as a self-regulated realm with its
own structure and intrinsic rules to which seuseung-jeja should comply in order
to participate in it. The educational relationship could not be maintained
whenever the agents are forced to follow such extrinsic rules as shown in the
school setting. Rather, it would achieve its development only when it keeps on committing to the autonomy and congeniality of education through the
meta-education that is a particular built-in mechanism that education educates
itself. In addition to this condition, educational relationship would be developed
when it is in harmony with such other realms as politics, economy, social
system, culture, and religion which constitute its environments.