[Editorial] Forced Opening of the Steel Mill School is an Administrative Tyranny of the State… We Will Hold Them Accountable Through a Constitutional Challenge

The state promised to guarantee housing and education to the workers who boiled molten iron to build the backbone of the national economy. The fruits of their arduous dedication and the foundation of social consensus are precisely what the Steel Mill School represents. However, under the hollow slogan of "fairness," the education authorities have butchered the preferential admission process for the employees of the steel mill and pushed through a forced opening. This measure, which usurps the educational foundation built through the blood and sweat of companies and workers over decades using the blade of government control, is not merely a policy failure. It is a clear "administrative crime" that violates constitutional values and breaks the trust established by the state.
The education authorities have stigmatized the living conditions of workers' children in industrial cities with a distorted frame of "preferential treatment." However, through the 2015 Chungnam Samsung High School case (Decision 2014Hun-Ma145), the Constitutional Court clearly declared that the preferential selection of children of employees in corporate-style schools—based on the background of the school's establishment, the living conditions of industrial sites, and the necessity of proximity to school—is a legitimate system with reasonable grounds and does not violate the right to equality. To recklessly seize quotas while ignoring even the established judgment of the judiciary is nothing more than violence that arbitrarily distorts constitutional interpretation and abuses public power.
This forced opening disposition fundamentally denies the autonomy and professionalism of education, as well as the freedom to operate private schools, as guaranteed by Article 31 of the Constitution. The reason companies invested astronomical resources to build facilities and secure faculty was to support the settlement of workers' families and the competitiveness of national industries. While the state takes no financial responsibility, it has retroactively seized and manipulated the purpose of an already successfully established private school as if nationalizing it. This is an unjust infringement on property rights and a fatal destruction of the system that will prevent any private entity from trusting public interest educational investments in the future.
Above all, this measure is an infringement of fundamental rights that destroys the lives of workers' families. Employment, housing, and children's education are critical life conditions designed over a lifetime. For families who trusted the permanence of the system and moved to industrial cities filled with dust and heat, giving up the comfort of the metropolitan area, the forced change in the admission structure is like a bolt from the blue. This is an act that directly violates the "principle of protection of legitimate expectations" which must be protected under the Constitution, and it is an act of trampling on parents' right to educate their children and the family's right to pursue happiness through the arbitrary use of public power. We cannot help but question whether this measure violates the principle of proportionality, as it was taken without even serious consideration of the principle of least restrictive means or alternative methods.
Education bureaucrats, who have neither the ability to improve the quality of public education nor the responsibility to boldly invest budgets into regional schools, are seizing others' schools and distributing them like spoils of war for easy political credit. Unjustly taking someone's share and handing it to another is neither equality nor justice. It is nothing more than predatory administration characterized by incompetence and expediency.
Further patience and silence will only serve to grant immunity to this criminal administration. We solemnly declare that we will immediately file a "Constitutional Complaint for Unconstitutionality" with the Constitutional Court against the illegal and unconstitutional disposition of the education authorities, which insulted the purpose of the Steel Mill School's establishment and deprived workers' families of their constitutional rights.
The tyranny of bureaucrats who have destroyed the rule of law while wearing the armband of "fairness" must be condemned as unconstitutional on the strict judgment seat of the Constitution. To ensure that the blood and sweat of workers and the classrooms of children are not left as prey for state power, we will mobilize all legal means permitted by the Constitution to hold them accountable to the end.