148 SOCIAL REFORM
retreats to which scholars could assemble for study, discussion, and reflection,
an attempt to escape from the demeaning effects of public service and politics
to pursue the purer goal of moral self-cultivation. There were around a hundred
of them by the mid-seventeenth century, and the biggest spurt in their growth
occurred just about the time that Yu was writing his Pan 'gye surok.^99 By Yu's
time the ideal purposes of the private academies had already been sullied by
partisanship, hereditary factionalism, and conversion of their purpose toward
training for the examinations. He therefore concluded that the private acade-
mies were an evil consequence of the examination system, not an escape or solu-
tion to their distortion of the true purpose of education. For this reason he tended
to see official schools as the solution to the examination system, not the private
academies as some of the leading scholars of the Sung dynasty had. He thought
this even though the official schools had failed of their purpose by the late fif-
teenth century.
By the mid-nineteenth century the private academies had been thoroughly
politicized and became semiautonomous entities that challenged district mag-
istrates and central authority. Although Yu's animosity toward the private acad-
emies appears less severe than the Taewongun's in the 1860s, by contributing
to the critical literature on the academies, he may have laid the groundwork for
the Taewongun's radical reduction of the academies in 18 71. 100
Abolition a Necessity
In searching for a solution to the evils produced by what he understood as an.
hereditary aristocracy Yu focused on the examination system as the key vari-
able in both explaining and perpetuating its existence. This situation should not
have been true because the inherited status of the yangban that was carried over
from the Koryo dynasty should have been weakened considerably by the exten-
sion of the examination system in the early Choson period.
For a time most Western historians of China believed that the examination
system had succeeded in destroying aristocracy, but recently the prevalent view
is that the examination system by itself did not eliminate hereditary aristocracy
since it lasted at least three or possibly five hundred years after its adoption in
the Sui in 606. In the T'ang dynasty the aristocracy did modify its behavior
because its members began to participate in the civil service examinations, and
by this adaptation succeeded in dominating the examinations rather than allow-
ing the examinations to destroy it as a class. [01 In Korea as well, the adoption
of the examination system had not eliminated the yangban any more than it had
the aristocracy of the T'ang dynasty. Contrary to its purported intent, to create
an objective and impersonal standard of recruitment irrespective of all commoners
save Buddhist monks, slaves, merchants, artisans, and outcaste persons, the
Korean yangban were able to circumvent the leveling proclivities of the exam-
ination system by educating their sons in preparation for the examinations.
Yu learned from his survey of the extensive critique of the examination sys-