206 SOCIAL REFORMreformer in seventeenth-century Korea if it were not for the powerful hold of
habit and convention on Yu's mind?
In short, reform within the context ofYu's Confucian statecraft thought did
not signify the elimination of social status, just inherited status, and primarily
in the recruitment of government officials because it robbed the state of the ser-
vice of the most moral and capable men in society, men who had been ignored
by the examination system and left to wither in the countryside.
Within the schools he proposed a status hierarchy based on age and merit, the
latter defined primarily in terms of proper behavior, secondarily as excellence
in learning. But the rules of status were explicitly not to be extended to society
at large, where they would have come into conflict with traditional modes of
status discrimination, such as privilege for royal princes, rank order of legiti-
mate brothers, maltreatment of nothoi, and the prestige afforded to sons and heirs
of high officials and luminous scholars of the past.
One of the best clues to Yu's fundamental emotional commitment to the stan-
dards of his own time despite his use of the rhetoric of equal opportunity was
his assurance to the yangban class that the advantages of superior environment
would guarantee that their sons would not be hurt by a shift to equal treatment
within his school system. Since no more than a few commoners would make it
to the top anyway, what he really expected was that the goad of competition
would brighten up the scions of the yangban and stir them out of their self-com-
placent lethargy.
Even his apparently strict rules for dismissing students from school and
enrolling them for military service, dropping them down the status ladder from
privileged student to commoner, was modified if the person was of the yangban
class. They would be given special admonition and a probationary period, and
if they did drop out, they could be signed up for special elite guard units in the
capital in the manner of the early Choson dynasty.
He had accurately perceived that the foundation of the yangban class in his
own time had been achieved not mainly through any legal mandate of heredi-
tary right, but by the natural advantages accruing to high officials and wealthy
landlords that enabled them to hire tutors for their sons, marry with the right
families, and pull strings with high officials who were all part of a restricted
social network. He depicted his ideal society in the image of an infinite seg-
mented bamboo stalk, and even though the logic of his arguments implied greater
opportunity and mobility past the nodal points than existed in his own time, his
contradictory limitations betrayed a fundamental commitment to the privileges
of status and the legitimacy of social dividing lines.
Moving beyond the specific issue of the nature of social organization, Yu's
thought about education and recruitment was characterized by ambivalence or
contradiction with regard to a number of issues, produced not simply by inad-
equate logic or sloppy treatment of the issues, but by fundamental antinomies
within Yu's own mind. Certain statements that could be construed as favoring
freedom of thought, a shift toward instrumental or utilitarian knowledge over