Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/439

 The matter of school text-books is still in a chaotic condition. Some people think they should all be printed in the pure native character, while the more conservative, together with the government, opine that the mixed Chinese and Korean script should be used. In this mixed script the verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs are expressed by Chinese characters, and all connectives, whether grammatical, syntactic or logical, are in pure Korean. The result is something like the rebus in which words are interspersed with pictures. The system is a clumsy one, but it may prove a useful stepping-stone from the pure Chinese to the pure Korean. Not until the Chinese is entirely discarded will the broadest general education be possible. This is as true of Japan as it is of Korea. Meanwhile all sorts of text-books are being published, without regard to consistency, and simply by private and individual initiative. Some of the best work in this line is being done by missionaries, who are the pioneers of education here as everywhere else. It is a hopeful sign that a number of foreigners here, among whom the missionaries largely predominate, have formed an Educational Association, and the important preliminary work of evolving a uniform system of nomenclature for all the sciences has been taken in hand. This is a fundamental necessity, and the results can only be good.

As for industrial and technical schools, nothing has yet been done in Korea. There have been sporadic attempts at agricultural, mining and engineering schools, but they have all failed, largely because such education has not been based upon a previous mastery of the common elementary branches. Much less has anything been attempted in the line of professional schools, if we except the theological training classes carried on by the various missions. A few Koreans are studying medicine under the foreign physicians, and there is a small law school, but, with the exception of a single Korean lady physician who was educated in America, there are no qualified native physicians.