http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.co.at/2014/05/korea-v-china-natural-experiment.html " Until the 15th century, Koreans wrote using Chinese characters. During that century, they invented an alphabet, Hangul, which a linguist of my acquaintance used to describe as the best alphabet ever created. Learning to read and write in Chinese characters took a very lengthy education. Learning to read Hangul, for someone who knew Korean, should have taken only a few days, long enough to memorize the sounds of the letters. So the introduction of Hangul should have converted Korea from a society where only the elite were literate to a society where almost everyone was.
China retained the traditional writing system. So the history of the two countries ought to provide information on the effect of widespread literacy. In what ways in which the societies were similar before Hangul did they diverge thereafter?
I don't have an answer, but it occurred to me that someone much more expert in the history of both countries might."
Er, the natural experiment didn't work out because the upper class in Korea effectively denigrated Hangul so much that most people didn't use it...
Hangul came into widespread use only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The first weekly (or rather 10thly, published every 10 days) in Korea was published in 1883 and it was all in classical Chinese. It was in the second weekly paper starting in 1886 that began using Hangul. Ironically this started with Japanese, specifically Fukuzawa Yukichi's, help.
Here's a paper by Inaba Tsuguo at Tsukuba University (but it's in Japanese). http://www.tulips.tsukuba.ac.jp/limedio/dlam/M17/M171781/7.pdf
Here's also an interesting data point that I found. Kimura Mitsuhiko "Spread of Primary Education in Korea 1911-1955" pg 7 of the pdf, pg 79 of the text has a box that summarizes the survey of the colonial government in 1930.
According to this data, the % that CANNOT read Hangul in 1930 are
ages 15-19 Male 50.1% Female 83.5%
ages 20-24 M 44.2% F 85.8%
ages 25-39 M 46.3% F 89.9%
ages 40-59 M 54.5% F 93.5%
ages 60+ M 62.1% F 95.3%
total M 50.1% F 89.8%
So in 1886 (44 years before 1930) we should look at age group 60+. Of this age group 37.9% of the men could read Hangul. Not too shabby. But only 4.7% of the women could read Hangul, and that's pretty awful.
Interestingly Kimura also notes that education was more widespread in the north than in the south.
Illiteracy rates in South Korea after independence plummets: 1945: 77.8%, 1948: 41.3%, 1953 26%, 1955 12%. (pg 12 of pdf, pg 84 in text) So despite all the bad things Syngman Rhee did, it looks like he did manage to get the education system going and provide education for the girls of South Korea.