Fostering Masculinity in Primary Education

 When I began shaping the classroom project that I later called Dochang Republic, I was not simply looking for a playful teaching device or a decorative name for class management. I was trying to answer a deeper question that had been troubling me for a long time. I had increasingly felt that something important in the moral and emotional formation of children was being weakened, not only in Korea but in education more broadly. In many places, traits associated with masculinity are treated with suspicion from the beginning. Bravery becomes aggression before it has even matured. Competitiveness becomes selfishness before it has been guided. Physical energy becomes a problem before it has been directed toward discipline. Boldness becomes something to apologize for rather than something to refine. Under such conditions, boys in particular may grow up feeling that some central part of their instinctive energy is unwelcome in the classroom. Yet I never believed that masculinity itself is bad. I believed instead that it must be disciplined, elevated, and given honorable work to do. A classroom that merely suppresses it will not necessarily become peaceful or humane. It may become timid, resentful, passive, or spiritually thin. For that reason I wanted to create a different kind of educational environment, one in which strength could be shaped into public virtue.

This conviction became one of the foundations of Dochang Republic. I was teaching at Dochang Elementary School, a small school with only six classes in total. I was the homeroom teacher of a single sixth-grade classroom, and that smallness gave me unusual freedom. A larger institution often resists bold pedagogical experiments because too many systems must be synchronized and too many eyes are watching. But in a small school, one classroom can become a laboratory of social imagination. Within that room, I wanted to build not merely a class but a polity. I wanted the students to experience themselves not simply as children receiving instructions, but as citizens, officeholders, decision-makers, advocates, jurors, and participants in a living civic order. I wanted the room to feel less like a waiting room before adulthood and more like a miniature republic in which public life was practiced directly.

The result was Dochang Republic. At one level, it was comparable to Ok Hyojin teacher’s well-known model, Taxpaying Children. That project showed the educational power of simulating economic and civic structures within a classroom. I respected the spirit of that approach. It recognized that children can understand surprisingly complex social realities if they are given an intelligible system in which to act. But I did not merely imitate it. I reorganized my classroom in my own way, closer to the image of a real state than of a simple school economy. My concern was not primarily taxation. In fact, unlike Taxpaying Children, I did not collect tax from my students. My attention was focused elsewhere. I wanted to govern my country, Dochang Republic, and through that governance awaken in the children a sense of role, order, honor, civic identity, struggle, humor, and public responsibility.

One of the details that made the republic feel real to the students was currency. I created money for the classroom-state and named it Seokhee-coin, after my own name, Seokhee Park. The name itself had a comic flavor, almost like the coinage of some ancient ruler or a Roman emperor stamping his authority into daily exchange. The students loved that absurdity. It made the republic feel alive, intimate, and memorable. A classroom economy becomes much more vivid when it has its own money rather than mere points or stars. Once the children could hold, trade, accumulate, or imagine the value of Seokhee-coin, the symbolic order of the republic thickened. It no longer felt like a teacher’s abstract management device. It became a small world with its own material texture. Later, I even gave some Seokhee-coin to the students as a graduation gift. That mattered to me because it meant the republic did not disappear entirely when the school year ended. A piece of its symbolic life could go with them, half as souvenir, half as evidence that they had belonged to this strange and vivid little country.

The humor embedded in the republic was important. I often called myself the Dochang Commander or the Dochang Generalissimo. The titles sounded deliberately excessive, and that was part of the point. There was obviously a comic echo in them, something faintly reminiscent of strongman figures in modern Asian political history, of military commanders standing above institutions, larger than constitutions, embodying a state through personality and command. I was well aware of the irony. My classroom, after all, had its own president and vice-president, whom I also thought of as a prime minister. Formally speaking, the republic already had its institutional leaders. So my role as commander and generalissimo stood partly outside and above that structure. It was my own humor code, a theatrical exaggeration layered over the constitutional system of the classroom. But the joke worked because it expressed a truth. I was both founder and final authority of the republic. The children understood the theatricality, yet they also felt the seriousness behind it. Humor, in that sense, strengthened rather than weakened authority. It made the republic lovable without making it empty.

This mixture of seriousness and comedy was one of the secrets of Dochang Republic. Children respond deeply to symbolic worlds, but only when those worlds do not feel dry or bureaucratic. A republic made only of procedures and moral lectures would not have lived in their imagination. But a republic with Seokhee-coin, with a commander called the Dochang Generalissimo, with its own president and prime minister, with trials, juries, lawyers, prosecutors, parliamentarians, law codes, and constitutional debate—such a world could be inhabited. It had enough structure to demand seriousness and enough humor to feel exciting.

So I gave my students positions and duties modeled after the branches of government. Each child had an individual place. There was a parliament. There was a jury. There was an administration composed of only two students: a president and a vice-president, whom I also thought of as a prime minister. Students were not merely assigned decorative titles. They had real work to do within the moral universe of the classroom. In addition, they were given opportunities to run their own businesses. This mattered because a republic without initiative becomes lifeless. If children were only assigned offices in a fixed structure, they might learn obedience but not enterprise. By allowing them to try business as well, I made room for risk, ownership, competition, and invention. The existence of Seokhee-coin gave these activities even more force. A republic with offices but no currency might feel symbolic; a republic with currency begins to feel operational.

Yet even this description does not fully explain the heart of the project. The structure of Dochang Republic was institutional, but its emotional force came from somewhere more elemental. I did not imagine myself merely as a neutral administrator keeping systems balanced from above. I was, in my own imagination, the commander, the generalissimo of that country. That phrase was not a joke to me, even if I handled it with humor. It captured something essential in my teaching posture. I wanted the class to feel animated by command, by mission, by seriousness, by momentum. I wanted the children to feel that they were living not in a flat world of routine compliance but in a society that asked something of them. A republic needs law and process, yes, but it also needs spirit. So I emphasized military value, bravery, civil devotion, republicanism, and the willingness to challenge difficulty like a front-line soldier. That was one of the key differences between Dochang Republic and other school economic simulations. My project was not only about the exchange of rewards. It was about the formation of character through the language of public struggle.

Some may hear such language and feel uneasy. They may wonder whether a classroom should speak in terms so close to command, battle, and military virtue. But that question only proves how distant modern education has often become from the language of courage. We are comfortable speaking of emotional safety, inclusion, self-expression, and respect. All of those things matter. But children also need another vocabulary. They need words like endurance, duty, honor, sacrifice, fortitude, daring, and loyalty. Without those words, education risks becoming psychologically soft and civically empty. It may teach children how to avoid harm, but not how to bear responsibility. It may teach them to express feelings, but not how to master fear. It may teach coexistence, but not leadership.

That is why I believed that Dochang Republic could revitalize something that had been downplayed in students, something I would call masculinity in its educable form. I do not mean crude domination, bullying, or egoistic swagger. I mean the positive energy traditionally connected with courage, readiness, physical vigor, competitiveness directed toward worthy aims, willingness to face danger or difficulty, and eagerness to prove oneself through action. Those qualities have often been associated with boys, but I never believed they belonged only to boys. In fact, one of the most interesting outcomes of my project was that girl students also responded to this atmosphere. They too could rise into public duty, challenge, and bravery. They too could enjoy strength, seriousness, and high expectation. This confirmed my suspicion that what I was really cultivating was not a narrow gender caricature but a broader human nobility carried through forms often linked to masculinity.

Still, I do think boys especially need such an environment. Many school settings, whether intentionally or not, are structured in ways that reward quiet compliance, verbal neatness, emotional self-containment, and passive order. Boys who are energetic, physically intense, competitive, or drawn toward hierarchy and challenge can quickly be made to feel like problems to be managed. Some of that management is necessary. Undisciplined force is not virtue. But if the school only restrains and never ennobles, it produces frustration without growth. The task of education should not be to erase strong impulses, but to educate them into service. A spirited boy should not merely be told to sit still. He should be shown what courage is for. He should be invited into responsibility. He should be given real burdens to carry. He should encounter discipline not as humiliation but as preparation for honorable action.

This is one reason physical education became so important in my classroom. My class had more P.E. lessons than most Korean classrooms. That was not accidental. It arose from my view that bodily formation is inseparable from moral formation. A child who never tests his body often cannot fully test his will. Physical exertion teaches limits, recovery, effort, and the difference between excuse and endurance. Team activity teaches coordination, rivalry, respect, and momentum. Movement gives students, especially energetic ones, a field in which force can become rhythm rather than disruption. In a time when children spend so much of life seated, staring, and being verbally managed, physical education takes on even greater significance. It is not a break from serious education. It is part of serious education.

I believed this intensely because I had begun to think that the suppression of masculinity in classrooms can itself become toxic. If every strong impulse is pathologized early, the result is not gentleness but distortion. Boys may become apathetic, sullen, or performatively unserious. Some may retreat into private fantasy worlds where strength returns in unhealthy forms. Others may lash out because they have never been given a dignified way to direct their energy. Even girls may suffer in such a classroom, because when spiritedness as such is devalued, they too are invited into passivity. A class full of children trained only to avoid risk and follow emotional safety scripts will not become a republic. It will become a waiting room.

Dochang Republic was my refusal of that waiting room. I wanted a class that felt alive with rank, duty, initiative, civic theater, and constitutional life. I wanted students to wake up into a room where public affairs were happening. A parliament is not merely a collection of seats; it is a place where one must speak, decide, and persuade. A jury is not merely a symbolic title; it is an invitation into judgment, fairness, and seriousness. An administration with a president and vice-president is not just decorative hierarchy; it creates visible responsibility. A business run by a child is not just a game; it teaches ownership, failure, negotiation, and ingenuity. A republic with Seokhee-coin feels even more concrete, because value circulates visibly. Each role said to the student: you are not merely being managed. You are participating.

One of the richest dimensions of the project emerged through law and trial. Dochang Republic had its own court, and sometimes we held actual trials under my direction. These were not empty skits. We selected student lawyers and prosecutors for each case, and some of the children displayed astonishing dramatic and intellectual ability in those roles. At times they seemed to transform in front of us. A child who might have looked ordinary in routine classroom life suddenly revealed rhetorical skill, emotional control, strategic thinking, or theatrical force when acting as counsel. Some gave performances so vivid that they resembled scenes from legal drama. What moved me most was not only the entertainment value. It was the sense that I was pulling hidden potential out of my students. The courtroom gave them a form within which latent strengths could emerge.

The juries also mattered. Students serving as jurors were not passive spectators. They had to think about the meaning of the trial, weigh arguments, consider fairness, and decide what justice required. In ordinary school life, children are often told that fairness matters, but they are rarely given a structured arena in which they must actually judge. A jury system changes that. It turns fairness from an abstract slogan into a burden. The jurors had to listen, compare, deliberate, and live with the consequences of judgment. That is moral education in a serious form.

The parliament, too, became a stage for genuine civic seriousness. The students debated what laws should be made, and they did so with far more gravity than many adults might expect from children. We developed our own law code and constitution. That fact alone changed the atmosphere of the room. A classroom with rules feels normal; a republic with a constitution feels elevated. Students were no longer merely complying with teacher instructions. They were living under a public order that could be debated, interpreted, revised, and defended. The parliamentarians did not only chatter. They wrestled with what kind of laws their society needed. Through that effort they learned something important: law is not just restriction; it is the deliberate shaping of common life.

This judicial and legislative dimension gave Dochang Republic a depth that many classroom simulations never reach. It was not simply a behavioral economy or reward structure. It was a polity with its own constitutional imagination. The existence of a court, trials, legal advocates, juries, parliamentary deliberation, and a law code created real internal texture. Students could experience that a republic contains conflict but also institutions for handling conflict. They could see that justice requires both argument and restraint. They could feel that laws are not natural facts but human creations requiring wisdom.

To me, that was especially important because children often complain about school because they feel that rules descend on them from a distant adult world. They receive discipline but do not share in governance. They are told about citizenship abstractly while living in institutions that rarely let them practice it. In Dochang Republic, I wanted them to feel the burden and excitement of public order from the inside. The republic was not an essay topic. It was the classroom itself. Students could see that order required labor. Roles required attention. Institutions required cooperation. Leadership required credibility. Judgment required fairness. Legislation required debate. Once children begin to feel these things concretely, civic education ceases to be empty language.

At the same time, I did not want this republic to be soft or bureaucratic. There are many simulations of democracy that flatten everything into procedure and forget the element of heroism. But republics do not survive through paperwork alone. They survive because citizens care enough to act courageously when needed. So I emphasized civil devotion and challenge spirit. I wanted students to see themselves not as consumers of the republic but as its guardians. The republic had to be worthy of loyalty. It had to call forth effort. It had to contain occasions for proof. This is where the military imagery mattered. A republic defended by no one is only a slogan. Likewise, a classroom community in which no one feels duty to the whole will quickly decay into private convenience.

I think children understand this more naturally than adults sometimes expect. They are drawn to worlds of rank, mission, and noble contest. They enjoy stories of leaders, defenders, adventurers, and founders. Modern pedagogy sometimes tries to scrub those themes away in favor of neutral management language, but the result can feel bloodless. A child wants to feel that what he does matters. He wants to belong to something greater than himself. He wants to test whether he can stand upright when called. If education does not provide such experiences in civilized form, the desire for them does not disappear. It merely seeks other outlets.

That is another reason I did not apologize for being the commander of Dochang Republic. The teacher’s role in such a system cannot be purely facilitative. There must be a center of authority capable of dramatizing the seriousness of the whole. Children often trust authority more readily when it is visible, coherent, and purposeful. A weak adult presence does not liberate them; it confuses them. In my case, I wanted my authority to carry martial seriousness, though always tempered by wit. A commander is not only one who gives orders. He is one who bears the burden of the collective and asks others to rise to standard. I wanted the students to feel that the republic had an animating will and that I, as its founding authority, would not allow it to dissolve into laziness.

This does not mean the classroom became rigid or joyless. On the contrary, strong structure often creates more joy because it gives form to energy. The students could laugh, compete, invent, govern, legislate, prosecute, defend, judge, and strive precisely because the republic provided an arena. Freedom without form often produces boredom. Children drift, quarrel, or disengage. But within a strong symbolic order, even ordinary classroom routines gain dramatic meaning. A decision is no longer just a teacher’s arbitrary choice. It is part of the republic’s life. A role is no longer just classroom housekeeping. It is an office held in public trust. A trial is no longer just discipline; it is an occasion for justice. A parliamentary debate is no longer idle chatter; it is legislation. A physical challenge is no longer just exercise. It is training in vigor and courage.

There was also something deeply educational in the contrast between individual ambition and common obligation. By giving students chances to run businesses while also holding civic offices, I allowed them to experience both private initiative and public responsibility. A healthy republic needs both. It needs citizens willing to create, compete, and build. But it also needs structures that remind them they belong to something larger than their own profit. Many adults do not learn that balance well. They either become narrowly self-interested or dissolve their individuality into passive dependency. In a small classroom republic, children can begin encountering the tension early. A business may reward cleverness, but a jury demands fairness. A president may enjoy prestige, but administration is work. Parliament requires argument, but argument must serve order. A prosecutor must pursue a case, but not without justice. A lawyer must defend, but not without reason. Through such roles, the child starts to sense that society is not a simple opposition between freedom and authority. It is a living negotiation that demands character.

I also think Dochang Republic answered a problem specific to contemporary children: the absence of meaningful initiation. In many traditional societies, growing up involved rituals, thresholds, challenges, and symbols that marked a transition toward responsibility. Modern childhood often lacks those forms. Children are supervised for years, entertained constantly, and measured academically, but they are rarely initiated into public seriousness. They are not asked to bear the symbolic weight of offices, duties, or civic expectations. Yet the hunger for initiation remains. Children want to know whether they can become more than dependents. They want to feel themselves entering a larger world.

A classroom republic can provide a fragment of that initiation. It tells the student: you are no longer merely being carried. You are expected to help carry. You are entrusted with a piece of the whole. You are answerable. You may fail, but you must return and try again. This is especially important at the sixth-grade level, where children stand near the threshold of adolescence. Their energies are changing. Their sense of self is sharpening. Their need for dignity intensifies. A classroom that continues treating them as mere recipients of instruction may lose them inwardly. But a republic can call them forward.

My sense that masculinity had been downplayed in schooling sharpened this concern. I had seen enough classrooms and educational discourse to feel that courage and force were too often discussed only as threats. There was much talk of prevention, moderation, emotional regulation, and inclusiveness, but less talk of valor, initiative, and uprightness. The result, in my view, was not neutral. It shaped the moral atmosphere. It quietly suggested that the ideal child is one who causes minimal disruption, adapts smoothly, and remains harmless. But harmlessness is not the highest good. A good citizen should be capable of more than harmlessness. He should be capable of defense, endurance, sacrifice, and decisive action for the common good. These capacities do not emerge automatically. They require educational space.

By foregrounding military value, bravery, and challenge spirit, I was trying to give students such a space. I wanted them to feel that boldness could be honorable. I wanted them to see that to stand firm, to volunteer, to take responsibility, to compete fairly, to move the body vigorously, to accept rank and discipline, to protect the weak, and to persevere under pressure were not embarrassments from a primitive past. They were elements of a healthy civic character. And again, I did not reserve this for boys alone. I was delighted when girl students also entered this ethos. It showed that the virtues I emphasized could become human goods rather than gender cages. The atmosphere of spirited republican life enlarged them too.

In that sense, Dochang Republic was not a project of crude masculinization. It was a project of revaluing spiritedness. If society had become too suspicious of masculine-coded virtue, then one task of education was to recover it in civilized form and offer it to all children. Bravery need not belong to males only. Physical confidence need not belong to males only. Leadership, loyalty, public courage, and readiness for challenge need not belong to males only. Yet because boys are often the first to suffer when these traits are pathologized, a project like mine could be especially healing for them. It told them that their energy need not be hidden in shame. It could be trained for the republic.

There was something else I wanted the students to feel: that a republic is not sustained by comfort alone. Modern life easily teaches children to think first in terms of convenience. What do I want? What am I given? What is easy? But civic life begins when one asks another question: what am I responsible for? Dochang Republic created many opportunities for that question. Offices had duties. Businesses required effort. Physical culture required exertion. Public roles carried expectations. Trials demanded thought. Laws demanded interpretation. Even the symbolic imagination of belonging to a republic rather than to a loose classroom altered the student’s relation to self. The child began to think not only as a private individual, but as one node in a common order.

To me, that was already a kind of victory. Education is too often discussed as if its aim were only academic performance. Academic learning matters deeply, of course. But the deeper issue is what kind of person a child is becoming while learning. Is he becoming weak-willed or resilient? Self-absorbed or publicly minded? Passive or enterprising? Embarrassed by strength or capable of using it honorably? Without answering such questions, education remains incomplete.

I believed that Dochang Republic moved in the right direction because it gave children a stage on which these questions could become lived experience. A boy who might otherwise have been corrected constantly for restlessness could discover himself valuable in a public role. A girl who might otherwise have accepted a quiet supporting identity could discover enjoyment in leadership and courage. A child who had never thought about law or fairness could feel the weight of serving on a jury. Another who had never imagined himself entrepreneurial could attempt business. Another might discover, through being a lawyer in court, that he could speak persuasively under pressure. Another, through parliament, might discover a gift for debate and legislation. The classroom became a place where hidden dimensions of personality could surface under meaningful pressure.

Of course, not every moment would have been glorious. Real republics contain friction, mistakes, disappointments, vanity, and confusion. A classroom republic would be no different. But that too is educational. A child who experiences the difficulty of governance learns more than one who receives idealized speeches about democracy. A child who tries and fails in business learns more than one who only reads about the market. A child who holds office and disappoints others may learn more about leadership than one who simply envies leaders from below. A child who argues poorly in parliament may later learn how much preparation matters. A child who serves on a jury may learn that judgment is harder than it appears. The republic teaches through strain as well as success.

Looking back, I think one of the most important achievements of Dochang Republic was that it treated children with seriousness. That may sound simple, but it is rare. Many educational settings either sentimentalize children or standardize them. They are either treated as fragile beings who must never be burdened, or as units moving through curriculum. Seriousness offers another path. It says that children are not yet adults, but they are already moral beings capable of loyalty, pride, courage, judgment, wit, and public effort. They can be addressed in language higher than mere behavior control. They can be called upward.

That upward call shaped the atmosphere of my class. I did not want them merely to complete tasks. I wanted them to become citizens of a worthy little country. I wanted them to feel the beauty of order, the dignity of office, the thrill of challenge, and the honor of service. I wanted them to sweat more, move more, govern more, argue more, judge more, dare more. I wanted them to understand that freedom is not laziness, that authority is not always oppression, that discipline is not the enemy of joy, and that a republic lives only when its citizens care enough to sustain it.

Some educational philosophies are built on suspicion of hierarchy and command, believing that equality requires flattening all visible authority. But a republic does not require the disappearance of leadership. It requires leadership ordered toward the common good. In Dochang Republic, I embodied that principle as commander and founder, while students inhabited differentiated offices within the constitutional framework of the classroom. The result was not lawless individualism, nor passive obedience, but a layered civic structure. This, too, taught an important lesson: equality of dignity does not mean sameness of role. A healthy society contains ranks, responsibilities, and differentiated burdens. Children can understand this when it is lived concretely.

I also suspect that the project mattered because it restored drama to education. Children do not live by procedure alone. They need symbols, stories, images, and emotionally charged forms. The very name Dochang Republic carried imaginative power. A president and prime minister are more stirring than generic helpers. Lawyers, prosecutors, and juries are more vivid than ordinary disciplinary conversations. A parliament is more exciting than a simple discussion group. A commander is more memorable than a facilitator. Seokhee-coin is more alive than classroom points. Businesses, courts, laws, and expanded P.E. all contributed to a classroom that felt like a world. When children inhabit a world rather than a mere schedule, motivation changes. The ordinary becomes charged with meaning.

In the end, what I tried to do through Dochang Republic was to rescue a certain kind of human energy from suppression and convert it into educational value. If masculinity, or more broadly spirited strength, had become something viewed negatively in many educational spaces, then my response was not denial of problems but transformation. Raw force had to become bravery. Impulsiveness had to become challenge spirit. Aggression had to become disciplined vigor. Competitiveness had to become public initiative. Pride had to become civic devotion. The love of drama had to become constitutional life. This is what education should do at its best. It should not merely silence energies. It should civilize them into virtue.

That is why I remain convinced that the project mattered. It was not a perfect system and it was not meant as a universal formula for every classroom. But it represented a serious attempt to answer a real problem. It asked whether a classroom could become a republic, whether children could bear civic roles, whether physical and spirited formation could stand nearer the center of education, whether constitutional life could be made vivid for the young, and whether the downplayed strengths associated with masculinity could be reintroduced in a form beneficial to all students. I believe the answer, at least in my little experiment, was yes.

Dochang Republic was my country, my classroom, my civic drama, my humor, and my educational argument. In that room I was not merely teaching lessons. I was trying to found a small order of courage, duty, enterprise, law, and public spirit. I wanted children to leave not only with memories of assignments, but with some deeper impression of what it feels like to belong to a republic, to hold office, to handle money stamped with the absurd grandeur of Seokhee-coin, to act bravely, to move the body with vigor, to argue in parliament, to stand in court, to judge with seriousness, and to discover that strength need not be hidden or apologized for when it is joined to virtue.

If education has indeed grown too suspicious of strength, then perhaps projects like Dochang Republic remind us of what has been neglected. Children do not need only softness. They need form. They need challenge. They need law. They need theater. They need moral seriousness. They need spaces where courage is admired, effort is expected, and public life feels real. They need to know that to be energetic is not necessarily to be defective, that to be bold is not necessarily to be dangerous, and that the work of becoming civilized does not require becoming tame in spirit.

I wanted my students to feel that they belonged to something larger and nobler than themselves. I wanted them to stand a little straighter, move a little harder, govern a little more seriously, debate a little more earnestly, judge a little more carefully, and imagine themselves not as passive children waiting for adulthood, but as young citizens already practicing it. That was the heart of Dochang Republic. And that is why I still think of it not merely as a classroom project, but as one of the clearest expressions of what I believe education can be when it dares to call children upward instead of merely keeping them quiet.