In the 1920s and 30s, scientific marxism appealed to the colonized due to its promise that socialism can reach the status of science. However, historians of science have paid scant attention to the intellectual history of marxism during this period. The same was true for the Korean scholars in literary studies that examined class literature.
This paper focuses on the literature targeting proletarian children during the 1920s and 30s. Modern proletarian children’s literature has exhibited a strong purpose to nurture the children into protagonists of class construction in the independent nation state. One of the main content of the progressive education was “science.” Within popular children’s magazines, scientific and social knowledge were interconnected, forming hybrid fusions. All knowledge becomes tools of Marxist socialist science.
This paper shows that the propagation of scientific literacy was influential in the process of reconfiguring modern “children” into “young mass.” Toward this goal, I will examine the world view provided by the scientific education through analyzing its iconic representations.