Moralised capital and the ethics of English learning in post-neoliberal Korea: from virtue to communication

This paper examines how English education in South Korea has become a site of moral negotiation and ideological contestation. Once associated with global mobility, English now signifies both aspiration and inequality. Adopting a post-qualitative approach that ‘thinks with theory’, the study brings Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital and Foucault’s notion of governmentality into dialogue with policy documents, media editorials, and academic debates. It introduces the concept of moralised capital to explain how linguistic competence is evaluated not only economically but also morally. The analysis shows how moral vocabularies formed during early globalisation continue to shape contemporary debates on fairness and educational virtue. Situating English education within the moral economy of post-neoliberal Korea, the paper argues that the ‘English question’ constitutes a form of moral politics. It concludes by proposing pedagogical rationality as a way to decouple proficiency from moral judgement and restore communicative agency.