This article investigates the educational philosophy of the 16th-century Korean Neo-Confucian scholar Yi Yulgok (1536-1584), evaluates its contemporary relevance through an analysis of his seminal text, Gyeongmong yogyeol (The Secret to Banishing Ignorance), and concludes with an autoethnographic reflection by the author. This argument is grounded in a methodology that combines textual analysis of Yulgok’s primary writings with biographical-historical contextualization, complemented by autoethnographic reflection on fifteen years of teaching this philosophy to a global student body. The analysis traces this holistic perspective to the foundational influence of Yulgok’s mother, Sin Saimdang, whose progressive pedagogical methods—emphasizing empirical observation and self-directed inquiry—cultivated the pragmatic, interdisciplinary mindset that allowed him to integrate Confucian principles of benevolence (in 仁) and virtue (deok 德) with the practical challenges of statecraft and social ethics. Ultimately, Yulgok's holistic educational model, which inextricably links internal moral cultivation with external public service, offers a potent corrective to the compartmentalization prevalent in modern higher education, advocating for the cultivation of an ethically integrated public intellectual.

The early 20th century was a time of rapid change in Confucianism. As East Asian intellectuals actively learned from the West in the process of modernization, Confucian classical education lost its dominant position. Western learning changed the education system in East Asia, and textbooks on self-cultivation replaced traditional Confucian literature such as the Four Books and Five Classics, the children’s textbooks and the family rules, and became the textbooks for the moral education curriculum in the new academic system. Although these textbooks are still referred to as books for self-cultivation, the knowledge has been reconstructed in the Western educational framework, and their contents are not limited to moral education. This article analyzes the transformation of Confucian knowledge in Korea under the influence of Western learning based on the theoretical explanations and the school textbooks in the Korean Enlightenment Textbook Series. It reveals that Korean intellectuals established a curriculum for moral, intellectual, and physical education, as well as a curriculum for health education, which brought the Chinese and Western cultures together from conflict to coexistence at the beginning of the twentieth century.