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“I have these Korean clothes,but I don’t know how to explain them”:
The Precarious Balance of the National and the Internationalat the Korean Minjok Leadership AcademyAn Essay Presented byAbraham Joseph Ross RiesmantoThe Committee on Degrees in Social Studiesin partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor a degree with honorsof Bachelor of ArtsHarvard CollegeMarch 2008
 
Table of Contents
Introductionp. 3Chapter One: “A Battlefield Without Borders”p. 10Chapter Two: “Traditional Learning” and Its Discontentsp. 55Chapter Three: International Sources of National Feelingp. 78Conclusions: Globalization and National Identity on Trialp. 107Appendix I: Notes on Methodologyp. 117Appendix II: Relevant Photographsp. 121Works Consultedp. 126
 
Introduction
On November 30
th
, 2007, the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy had acoming-out party, of sorts, and it happened on the pages of the
Wall Street Journal 
,in an article auspiciously titled “How to Get Into Harvard.” The paper hadconducted a study of the freshman classes at eight “top colleges” in the UnitedStates and compiled a list of the students’ high school alma maters. From that data,they ranked the schools that were sending the highest percentages of their graduating classes to those “top colleges.”
1
 They listed 40 high schools, all of which were located in the US—except for two. Both of these exceptions werelocated halfway around the world from Harvard, in South Korea. About a monthlater, the
 Journal 
ran a correction, saying their data had been “incomplete,” and intheir “re-calculated” list, only one Korean school remained, sticking outconspicuously amidst all the American prep schools—the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy.
2
The article had almost no qualitative information about the institution:“School in South Korea’s Gangwon-do province requires students to speak onlyEnglish for many classes” was all the writers had to say about it.
3
There was no
1
Ellen Gamerman, et. al. “How to Get Into Harvard,”
Wall Street Journal 
30 November 2007, Weekend Section, p. W1.
2
Ellen Gamerman, et. al. “How the Schools Stack Up: Revised,”
Wall Street  Journal Online
28 December, 2007.http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html(accessed 11 January 2008).
3
“How to Get Into Harvard”. For the sake of honest quoting, we have opted toreplicate the spelling from the article, which is in the Revised Romanization formof transliteration from Korean to the Latin alphabet. However, in all futuretransliterations that are not quotations from existing printed work, we will be usingthe McCune-Reischauer form. For example, if we had written this
 Journal 
article,3
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