NEW SCHOOLS 205CONCLUSION
The importance ofYu's essay on education and recruitment, however, is not to
be measured solely by the content of his ideas on education and recruitment
or its influence on thought and policy in subsequent centuries, but by what it
tells us about contemporary society and the nature of his vision for an opti-
mum society, the best society that one could achieve in the imperfect world of
"the later age."
What kind of social transformation did he have in mind by his reformed sys-
tem of education and recruitment? His stated goal was a stratified society based
on excellence in moral behavior and talent rather than the present one domi-
nated by inherited status, but how disruptive would such a society be to the exist-
ing social order dominated by the semi hereditary yangban? When he told his
yangban readers to stay calm because the admission of commoners to his new
schools would neither stimulate disrespectful behavior by them nor rea\ly pro-
duce that many successful scholars from the commoner class, did he really mean
it, or was he trying to lu\l them into complacency? He meant it because he knew
that the regimen in his new schools would be so rigorous, the task of seeking
true moral perfection, not just mastery of textual knowledge, would be so ardu-
ous, and the weak social, economic, and environmental background of commoner
families so inferior that few would rea\ly have that much of a chance to make
inroads into yang ban hegemony.
Does this then ca\l into question his commitment to the masses, to educate
them a\l, and open the door of opportunity for them? I believe it does, because
his fixed quotas of students at each level of his proposed school system was geared
not to mass improvement but to ensuring better quality for a limited number of
officials. When he spoke of enlightening the masses, he only had in mind the
inculcation of moral standards in the peasantry by private grammar schools, but
that was the last, not the first of his priorities; he even postponed their imple-
mentation into the future. He could not have envisioned education for the peas-
ants continuing beyond the age of thirteen or fourteen at the most. Instead, he
thought of education as the means for creating a moral elite that would run a
paternalistic government that would act on behalf of the people.
Did he intend a leveling of the social order? Not so here because he made no
mention of the abolition of inherited slavery (although he did so elsewhere) and
excluded them from his schools but had them provide manual labor in his schools
and take floggings in place of their yangban student masters who were too lazy
to attend class.
Nor did he make any attempt to expand his schools to include the sons of arti-
sans and merchants, let alone shamans and the flotsam and jetsam of small-town
rural Korea he called the denizens of the wells and markets. Why should the arti-
sans and merchants, who were not excluded from the examinations in China from
the mid-Sung dynasty, have been excluded from the plans of a forward-minded