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Proliferating universities are attended by nearly 200,000 students—including 50,000 coeds—almost a 2,000% increase since the end of World War II

The group of junior officers who brought Pak Chong-hui to power in 1961 had no political program other than to weed out corruption and accelerate economic modernization. They claimed they were only carrying through the unfinished business of the student revolution of the previous year to save Korean democracy from corrupt, inefficient, older-generation politicians. However, they felt the need for an ideology more attuned to the modern world by compatible with the Confucian heritage, with which Pak and most of his associates are still deeply imbued. They sought some systematic guide to action which would at least popularize their economic goals and help mobilize public support. Because of passions aroused by the Korean war, anticommunism was a cardinal tenet for the military—as it was for most older Koreans. Nevertheless, anticommunism had been so abusively exploited by President Rhee that it could no longer have the vigor of a fresh appeal and could not arouse the fervor that the colonels required in order to rally popular support.

Democracy as an ideology also had drawbacks for the military. Rhee had consistently abused presidential powers, and his successor, Chang Myon had been too indecisive and his supporters too beset by factionalism to win any wide support for his own hopeful democratic experiment. Nevertheless, Pak recognized the strong attachment to the democratic ideal of most articulate Koreans, as demonstrated by the students and intellectuals during the upheaval in 1960. He has professed his adherence to democratic principles but also has warned against a democracy "imported lock, stock, and barrel" from the United States, recommending instead a "Koreanized form of welfare democracy." Even today the Pak regime preserves the forms of constitutional democracy, however far it has departed from its spirit.

Because Korea has been subjected to such sweeping, kaleidoscopic changes in the space of just one generation, there are insistent demands for a new spiritual identity. Both the student revolution and the military coup were carried out by representatives of a younger, very different postwar generation. Its members had been more exposed to modern education and a variety of new influences and sources of information. They were the first generation to be broadly educated in the native script, Hangul, a truly more national means of self-expression than the Chinese writing system formerly prescribed. Thanks to the easier, popular script and the "educational explosion" of the postwar era, literacy has jumped from about 21% in 1945 to 88% in 1970. Literacy is no longer the privilege of a small, exclusive elite; its spread ended the elite's monopoly of power, weakened the authority of the family and of class distinctions, and brought rural areas into touch with the modern city and its life. Combined with the impact of the war-born urbanization, postwar educa 13