Instructors furious over scaling down of gugak in music teacher education

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

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Sat, September 23, 2023 | 20:49

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Instructors furious over scaling down of gugak in music teacher education

Posted : 2022-08-16 14:31

Updated : 2022-08-17 15:19

Singer Song Ga-in, right, stands with members of the country's gugak instructors' association at a restaurant in Jongno District, Seoul, Monday, urging the Ministry of Education not to reduce or omit gugak from the new curricula for teachers' colleges and colleges of education in the country. Yonhap

By Ko Dong-hwan

Instructors of "gugak," traditional Korean music, are up in arms against the country's education ministry, arguing that the authority is letting the music genre perish by prioritizing Western music in the country's official teaching materials for music instructor aspirants.

An association of gugak teachers on Monday held a press conference at a restaurant in Seoul's central district of Jongno. Song Ga-in, a popular trot singer who had majored in gugak before rising to stardom locally, also joined the event to advocate for the group.

The group said that the teaching of gugak has been put under serious threat as the music programs in teachers' colleges and colleges of education in the country are currently on course to reduce or eliminate gugak from their new curricula by giving more weight to Western music. The ministry, following the ongoing second phase of restructuring the programs, will announce the final version by the end of this coming December.

The group said Monday that all four members of the pro-gugak group who have been part of the 14-member committee leading the ministry's second phase of the music program restructuring process have decided to quit. They said that their collective resignation expresses the group's dissatisfaction with the ministry's negligence in controlling Western music experts' continuous attempts to reduce gugak's presence during the restructuring of the program.

The instructors had previously appealed to the education ministry in April of this year over what it called "unfairness and seriousness" in the authority's moves to reduce or eliminate gugak from the new curricula for the country's teachers' education programs for the coming years. The ministry accepted the protesters' opinions later that month, announcing that they would maintain gugak's previous weight in the new curricula in a draft from the first phase of the program restructuring process.

Song So-hee, a singer of pansori, a type of gugak, performs at M Academy in Sinsa-dong in Seoul's Gangnam District, 2015. Korea Times file

But the ministry, according to the group, diverged from its statement during the editing of the draft in the second phase. The group pointed to the fact that the performance evaluation standards for students and musical elements and concepts chart had been revised in the second phase as evidence.

"The reduction or eradication of gugak in state educational discourse will certainly affect not just future textbook content for students but also the standards for the country to select music teachers from now on, which will certainly jeopardize teaching gugak properly in schools," said the group on Monday.

The group said that the director of the second phase restructuring of the curricula, a female professor at Gwangju National University of Education in South Jeolla Province according to reports, has publicly endorsed observers' opinions that gugak doesn't need to be taught at teachers' colleges and colleges of education but instead "can be privately learned as a hobby." The instructors said that this opinion shows how far the country's music educators have come in "damaging the deep-rooted reputation of gugak, the traditional music of their own country."

"The education ministry and music program researchers have been supporting studies that unfairly ignore and try to get rid of gugak," said the instructors. "Despite our repeated attempts to give them wake-up calls, they have continued their anti-gugak movement. As of early this month, we concluded that fair research on the field of music for the country is no longer possible. We thus have decided to resign from taking part in this year's program restructuring process."

Song, one of the most popular female trot solo artists in Korea, also pleaded in the conference that the ministry should protect gugak education. "It hurts to hear that the ministry first seemed to have opened their hearts to gugak and then it turned out otherwise based on what's going on in the second phase of the program restructuring process," said Song, among the other panelists. "I sincerely ask schools to support gugak's preservation."

aoshima11@koreatimes.co.kr