Essay Contest Result

As an Italian student who majored in Korean studies I have experienced first-hand a lot of Korea's efforts to teach about its culture and improve its image abroad. After moving to Korea to pursue an MA I have been the recipient of even more cultural promotion. In Italy I could not help but notice that Korea was not very well known. People have certainly heard of K-pop, but they hardly know anything else about the country. When I left Italy to study in a British university, most people in Italy knew virtually nothing about South Korea; the word "Korea" mostly evoked images of North Korea from the news, and even then no one knew which one was the "good Korea". In the UK I found that the Korean Studies major was referred to as "K-pop studies" because people knew little more about Korea than K-pop. Those people I met who knew about South Korea and had an interest in it had come in contact with it through Korean pop music, but those who had no interest in K-pop never learned much about Korea. The Korean Wave seems to have a target audience and struggle to spread Korean culture outside of that audience.

The Korean wave that is sweeping the world has brought South Korea to cultural prominence around the planet. Its products are varied, from film to cosmetics to even Korean literature receiving more attention. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the third and current wave, which has truly globalized Korean culture and brought it out of its Asian comfort zone, has been led by K-pop (Hwang and Epstein, 2016). However, efficient as the spread of K-pop may be, it has some blind spots. As recently as 2016 Yun Mi Hwang and Stephen Epstein's "The Korean Wave: A Sourcebook" claimed that Korean content in Europe and North America is simply not widespread enough to be able to say that there is a "Korean Wave" at all. (Hwang and Epstein, 2016). K-pop, the leading tool for Korea's self-promotion, remains a niche interest in Europe and therefore reaches a comparatively limited audience. Italy happens to be one of the European markets where K-pop products struggle compared to others. This poses the problem of how to reach more people, including ones who do not have an interest in K-pop.

The most efficient way to reach as many people as possible is through the public education system, which in Italy as in most European countries is accessed by the majority of the population. One of the reasons Korean culture is not well known in the region is that the education system does not cover Korea, and the country is too far removed from people's daily lives for them to learn by themselves. A quick look through some Italian history and geography textbooks shows that Korea is not covered at all; in the best of cases, it is mentioned once as having been freed from Japan with the Treaty of San Francisco, with no other information given. Korea, if mentioned at all, is effectively treated as a chapter of Japanese history, a step in Japan's rise to power in the early 1900s and in its eventual defeat. It is not treated as a country with its own history. Geography textbooks rarely consider Korea either. In Luciano Marisaldi's "Colonne D'Ercole" (2014), a textbook of history and geography, an observant student may learn that Korea is indeed a democracy or that it has a high urbanization rate from some thematic world maps, but even then Korea is mostly overlooked. A prime example of this is one map of religions in the world (Marisaldi, 2014: pp 153). according to which Koreans, both in the North and the South, practice "Chinese religions" (probably an allusion to Confucianism, but still not true considering that in the South Christianity is the most practiced religion and the irreligious are even more numerous).

Some, like the second edition of "Manuale Di Storia: Il Novecento e il Nuovo Millennio" (Cattaneo et al. 2016) and "Storia, Concetti e Connessioni: il Novecento e il Mondo Contemporaneo" (Fossati et al., 2016) do cover the Korean war, but in reality Italian history teachers rarely ever cover history after 1945 in any depth. This brings us to the main problem with attempting to fix textbooks. In Italy the Ministry of Education only provides general guidelines, with schoolboards and teachers themselves deciding part of the curriculum, textbooks, teaching methods. In other words, if individual teachers do not wish to teach anything about Korea, no one can make them. This is why a top-down approach of trying to correct textbooks or change the curriculum will not work in countries like Italy where teachers have great freedom to choose what they teach and how. What would work better is a bottom-up approach of promoting and teaching about Korean culture based on cooperation with individual schools.

Teachers in systems with very broad freedom of teaching are expected to take large responsibility for their work, and the most motivated are often looking for projects to involve their students in. What is colloquially referred to as a school "project" is any kind of learning activity organized by the school or the individual teacher within school hours or occasionally after school. It is akin to an extra-curricular activity, although with some key differences. School "projects" are usually outsourced, meaning that they are organized by people outside of the school system, who then offer teachers to participate with their students. These outside organizations can pitch their project to schoolboards listing learning objectives, the content of the project and when it is to be implemented, and finally offering schools the resources to carry out the project. They may be contained within on day or stretch over a series of different events through a few days, weeks or even months. Beyond the individual teacher a school board, local authorities or the ministry itself may choose to promote such projects.

Their topic and scope tend to change. I remember being taken to lectures about the European Community meant to foster a sense of belonging to the Union in primary school, modern productions of ancient Greek plays in Sicilian amphitheaters in high school in an effort to and Chinese language lessons meant to help us communicate with foreign classmates. Teachers and schoolboards saw these educational projects as opportunities to enrich their teaching in ways that went outside their curriculum, textbooks and traditional teaching methods. If one intends to introduce anything new into the Italian school system, they need to use this avenue.

It is effective, well established, and does not require complex efforts with the Ministry of Education or attempts to modify textbooks; all it takes is a willing Korean organization and an open-minded school board. Any self-respecting history teacher would jump at the opportunity to take their students to a lecture about the colonial period in Korea. Music schools would want to teach the basics of Korean instruments and language schools would see the addition of Korean classes as a way to boost their intake by leveraging K-pop's popularity. K-pop allows a glimpse into some aspects of Korean culture to few people outside of its target audience; through schools all aspects of the culture, including underrepresented ones, can gain an extremely wide audience, including people who would never give K-pop a second of their time.

Organizing and funding such projects would have many benefits.
Firstly, it gives organizations looking to promote Korea access to a large section of the population. Public school students are the vast majority of the school population; in addition, teachers and parents would most likely be involved. Korean language courses in Korea, scholarships for foreign students, tourist destinations can be promoted to this audience.

Secondly, it is very flexible. Projects to be coordinated with local schoolboards can be anything from language classes to taekwondo lessons, so they have the potential to promote any aspect of Korean culture depending on availability of resources and Korea's promotional objectives. This creates an opportunity to use what resources the local community already has. As an example, a school project to provide taekwondo lessons in local schools does not need to dispatch its own instructors; it can simply be coordinated with a local taekwondo academy (a list of these can be found on the Italian Taekwondo Federation's website).

Thirdly, school projects can be used as an opportunity not only for one-way instruction but for meaningful exchange. A growing number of Korean students study Italian in Korean universities. They may be involved in these initiatives, offering an opportunity for funding to travel to Italy to teach aspects of their language and culture as part of longer school projects. There are Korean communities in Italy, especially in bigger cities like Milan, some of whose members may be happy to participate as well.

Finally, this system can easily applied (with some adjustments) outside of Italy, in other contexts where a similar approach may be needed.

Korea's popular culture has managed to bring Korea to the world's attention. But Korean popular culture, K-pop in particular, has two limitations. The first is that interest in Korean popular culture does not always translate in interest in other aspects of Korean culture. The second is that because K-pop and K-drama's appeal is wide but not universal (especially in Europe). So long as Korea's promotion relies heavily on Hallyu, interest in Korean culture will struggle to spread outside of its target audience. This constitutes an even bigger problem as this target audience is more limited in Western countries compared to Asia, Hallyu's largest market. Through cooperation with the school system Korean culture has the opportunity to introduce a wider range of cultural aspects to a significantly larger audience.