upwardly mobile Koreans, who were provided very limited access to these institutions as well as positions of administration and teaching. Furthermore, with the introduction of the Educational Ordinance of 1938, Korean schools were to be identical to Japanese ones in organization and curriculum, which made education a highly militarized and regimented tool for forced assimilation and militarization. These last few years of Japanese rule pronounced the discontent of Koreans whose social and political climates had been deeply affected. Post-war years After Gwangbokjeol and the liberation from Japan, the Korean government began to study and discuss for a new philosophy of education. The new educational philosophy was created under the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) with a focus on democratic education. The new system attempted to make education available to all students equally and promote the educational administration to be more self-governing. It also emphasized a decentralized education which local and community control in order to maintain educational autonomy from authoritarian policies. Specific policies included: re-educating teachers, lowering functional illiteracy by educating adults, restoration of the Korean language for technical terminology, and expansion of various educational institutions. This system did not instigate radical change, however, to the extent that it maintained the centralized and authoritarian administration created by the Japanese with no meaningful changes. It did, however, abet in the Koreanization of South Korean education through the initiative of Korean leaders by promoting Hangeul, removing Japanese instruction practices, and emphasizing Korean history, geography, and literature. Aside from these developments, the most striking feature of the U.S. military occupation was the significant expansion of schooling and the student population. Following the Korean War, the government of Syngman Rhee reversed many of these reforms after 1948, when only primary schools remained in most cases coeducational and, because of a lack of resources, education was compulsory only up to the sixth grade. In 1948, the prevalent debate in South Korean education was whether to maintain an elitist multitrack path based on the prewar Japanese colonial model, or adopt an open American system that avoided early tracking and did not terminalize primary or secondary education. During the years when Rhee and Park Chung Hee were in power, the control of education was gradually taken out of the hands of local school boards and concentrated in a centralized Ministry of Education. In the late 1980s, the ministry was responsible for administration of schools,