Cultivating borrowed futures: the politics of neoliberal loanwords in South Korean cross-national policy borrowing

This paper examines the politics of policy-borrowing in Korean education. I use the term ‘loanwords’ as a metaphor for the practice in some Korean educational sectors of using borrowed English-origin educational rhetoric to create actual policy reform. I argue that discourses of choice and diversity, as loanwords, are initially bifurcated into progressivist and neoliberal policies; recently, they have been used to highlight particular aspects of market-based policies that are advantageous to particular social groups. I also demonstrate that the upper-class tends to make use of the terms choice and diversity in ways aligned with neoliberal perspectives in order to validate the pursuit of privileged opportunities, such as the right to choose to attend an elite high school.