Textbooks Never Stopped: Inside Miraen's Museum of Korean Education History

A visit to Miraen's Sejong factory begins, unexpectedly, with a national treasure. Just inside the entrance to the Textbook Museum — housed to the left of the factory gate — stands a facsimile of "Worin Cheongang Jigok," National Treasure No. 320. The Buddhist hymn was composed by King Sejong shortly after he created the hangul alphabet, written to pray for the virtues of Queen Soheon and produced around 1447. The original, a single volume of 71 leaves, is owned by Miraen and is believed to be kept in Pangyo. Designated a treasure in 1963, it was elevated to national treasure status in 2017.

A company official said discussions are underway on whether the original could eventually be displayed at a museum to be built in Sejong. For a visitor who came to trace the history of textbooks, the journey begins, fittingly, with one of the earliest records of the hangul writing system itself.

A few steps further, a piece of handwriting stops visitors in their tracks. It is the handwritten resume of Ju Si-gyeong, the scholar who devoted his life to systematizing the Korean language. Peering through the glass case, the first thought that comes to mind is whether a human hand could really have produced it. Every character is identical in size and spacing, as precise as movable type fresh off a press — written in ink, yet indistinguishable from print. The penmanship itself seems to speak for the man's life's work.

Beyond that, notebooks and worn textbooks from the 1940s appear in sequence, alongside merit certificates awarded to students of the era. A faded pencil-written notebook inside one of the cases preserves a student's handwriting exactly as it was left. Moving into the 1950s, the mood of the exhibition shifts. Even in the middle of the Korean War, students opened their books. A notebook used by elementary school pupils during the war sits on display — its contents barely five or six pages long. That single object speaks more plainly than any caption about what school life was like when a single sheet of paper was precious.

War could not stop the presses. When the Korean War broke out, Daehan Textbook Co. — now Miraen — moved its printing equipment to Busan and produced four types of wartime teaching materials across 12 volumes. Even as bombs fell and families fled, someone was setting type and running the press to put books in students' hands.

Past the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition opens onto a scene familiar to older generations: a reconstructed classroom, complete with low wooden desks and chairs, a teacher's podium and a chalkboard, arranged exactly as they would have been at the time.

Walking through 1980s textbooks — "Proper Living," "Speaking and Listening" — and arriving at the section displaying more recent editions, even the colors change. The covers of "Korean Language," "Social Studies," "Science," "Ethics" and "Experiment and Observation" are vivid enough to recall picture books. In just a few dozen steps, more than 70 years of Korean education unfold before the visitor, from yellowed paper to full-color pages.

One corner of the museum holds an unexpected exhibit: North Korean textbooks. Among them is "Simnihakinitial 5" — an introductory psychology textbook published in 1997 for North Korean high school students — alongside titles in geography and basic electronics that North Korean students actually studied. The psychology title in particular tends to make visitors familiar with the South Korean curriculum do a double take at the cover.

Why does a textbook museum collect North Korean textbooks? A staff member explained: "When reunification comes someday, students from the North and South will need to understand what words the other side uses and what they were taught — otherwise they will not be able to communicate." The staff member added that with inter-Korean relations strained in recent years, obtaining North Korean textbooks has become increasingly difficult.

The final section of the museum is given over to the machines that made the books. Stepping into the printing equipment hall, the atmosphere changes instantly. Where the earlier galleries invited visitors to lean in close over small, thin volumes, here towering black iron machines loom overhead. Letterpress printers, manual thread-stitching binders and platemaking equipment — the machines that once kept textbook production running — stand in rows.

A letterpress printer from the 1950s and 1960s exposes its rusted gears and chains without apology. Beside it sits a manual thread-stitching binder, used when workers sewed printed sheets together by hand. Compared with today's automated lines, where paper goes in and a finished book comes out, the machines make plain just how many pairs of hands once went into a single volume.

The most striking piece is a German-made Klimsch camera — a massive black body fitted with a long rail and a pleated bellows. Used primarily for single-plate photography from the 1960s through the 1980s, it also handled four-color separation work on manuscripts before electronic color scanners arrived.

From the era of setting type one character at a time, through the age of photographing manuscripts with a giant camera, Miraen's Sejong factory now runs on computers managing production data and automated equipment printing textbooks at scale. The methods have changed completely. Yet the founding principle the company declared when it was established in 1948 reads more clearly after touring the museum than before.

"Produce and supply the finest textbooks at the lowest price in the shortest time." Those were the words founder Kim Gi-o set as the company's guiding principle, launching the enterprise under the banners of nation-building through education and service to the country through publishing. Seventy-eight years ago, workers ran letterpress machines; during the Korean War, the company moved to Busan to keep making textbooks. Since then it has moved through platemaking cameras and automatic presses to managing digital data today.

Miraen's founder, Kim Gi-o, born in 1900, was active during the Japanese colonial period in organizations including the Eonyang Youth Association and the Ulsan Journalists' Corps, working to educate local communities and resist Japanese rule. He also served in the Yangsan branch and the Seoul Gyeongdong chapter of the Singanhoe, a major independence movement organization. After liberation, in 1948, Kim and nine other publishers co-founded Daehan Textbook Co., the predecessor of today's Miraen. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups, in designating Miraen as its second "prestigious long-standing enterprise," introduced Kim as "independence activist Useok Kim Gi-o."