The article examines the flow of the discourse on private tutoring(DPT) in Korea since
1950s, and discusses the implications for schooling and the future policy discourse. The focus is
on the dramatic historical reverse of the schooling conception implied in DPT. Early in DPT,
schools were supposed to repel the after-school practices of private tutoring which were
burgeoning at the time. Schools now, however, are encouraged to actively engage in private
tutoring business. They are required to be highly competitive in the private tutoring market.
DPT has mainly dealt with policy issues. As a consequence, its concern has been not on
problem setting but problem solving. It has taken ‘the problem’ of private tutoring for granted.
It has focused only on devising means to suppress the rising trend of private tutoring.
Schooling has just been one of the means for the given task in DPT. This way of conceiving
the problem in DPT has made the distortion of the meaning of schooling unnoticed. The
meaning and practices of schooling have come to be contingent upon the current private
tutoring issues. As it turns out, the supposed role of schooling in dealing with the problem has
changed in the direction of reversing the one assumed in the beginning.
The article suggests that discourses should be attentive to the process of problematization,
not to the measures for solving problems. It would be only with the shift of the focus that the
discourse can be of value in leading education policy in line with authentic schooling.