According to Korean custom and tradition, any man who knows Chinese fairly well can become a teacher. There is no such thing as a science of teaching, and the general average of instruction is wretchedly poor. The teacher gets only his deserts, which are extremely small. The traditional Korean school-teacher, while receiving some small degree of social consideration because of his knowledge of the Chinese characters, is looked upon as more or less of a mendicant. Only the poorest will engage in this work, and they do it on a pittance which just keeps them above the starvation line. It has been ingrained in the Korean character to reckon the profession of pedagogy as a mere makeshift which is only better than actual beggary. If you examine the pay-list even of the Government schools, you will find that the ordinary wage is about thirty Korean dollars. This means about fifteen _yen_ a month, and is almost precisely the amount that an ordinary coolie receives. This wretchedly low estimate of the value of a teacher’s services debauches the whole system. The men who hold these positions are doing so because nothing better has turned up, and they get their revenge for the inadequacy of the salary by shirking their work as much as possible. It would seem from this account that the contemplated reforms of the educational system, which had been inaugurated ten years before, when the old-fashioned civil-service examinations were abolished, had remained, as is customary with all reforms in Korea if not enforced from without, merely matters of so much paper. Another writer[72] about midway in this decade gives a somewhat better account of Korean educational affairs after the Chino-Japan war. The “present favorable aspect of education” at that time this writer attributes to the influence of the war. It is to be noted, however, that the “favorable aspect” covers, for the most part, only the special schools established in Seoul and does not regard the unimproved and still deplorable state of the public education in the country at large. Stricter attention to the extent of this alleged improvement, even within the city of Seoul, shows how limited it really was. Besides well-deserved praise bestowed upon the few missionary schools, only the governmental so-called “Normal School,” in which 30 scholars were enrolled, and which was presided over by Mr. Homer B. Hulbert, and a school for teaching English to the sons of nobles, numbering 35 pupils, are given as examples. Inasmuch as the latter school had the same teacher, and he was justly complaining that his obligation to teach the young Yang-bans interfered with his legitimate work, the cause of the _public_ education could not have made any considerable advances at this time. The same report speaks of a Japanese school maintained in Seoul by the Foreign Education Society of Japan,