No country is ever free from foreign influences in shaping its educational theory and practice. Admittedly, the Korean education since 1950 provides a notable example in this respect. Of the diverse routes of influences during that period of time, the activities of foreign educational missions to Korea are particularly important, in that their influences have been more systematic and directly geared to policy issues. They were entrusted with more or less specific missions, and they submitted formal reports incorporating their observations and recommendations. Therefore, a critical review of their reports would reveal the actual picture of Korean education as observed by the foreign specialists. The present study is an attempt to get at such picture with specific reference to curriculum and instruction. In this study, four such reports are analyzed. The first incidence of educational mis¬sion was UNESCO-UNKRA Educational Planning Mission to Korea in 1952-3. Their mission was to comprehensively assess the educational needs of the country right after the Korean War and to propose recommendations for making education more relevant to the Korean society. Of the four successive American Education Teams during a period of ten years from 1952, the third (1954-5) dealt with curriculum and instruction. The mission of the Team, as specified in their report, Curriculum Handbook for the Schools of Korea, was to introduce the “experience curriculum” to Korea and to provide general guidelines for its implementation. Professor B.S. Broudy, working as a curriculum specialist of the advisory group to the long-range educational planning initiated by the Korean government in 1969, submitted his “Comments and Recommendations for Curriculum and Instruction.” And finally in 1971, a research and development team from Florida State University was invited to Korea to propose an innovative instructional system for the Korean schools. One outstanding conclusion from the review of the above four reports is that they provided the Koreans with a language by means of which the Koreans could grasp their educational realities. The most important part of the language is that education should be relevant to everyday life and needs of the society. This language still has a strong hold on the way the Koreans look at and discuss the problems of education, possibly leading their eyes away from the intrinsic value that the school subjects might have. It seems natural that the foreign specialists had recourse to their own theories or preconceptions in their observations. This means that the language the Koreans are currently using to grasp their realities is largely borrowed from abroad. If it is important for the Koreans to have “their own eyes” to look at Korean education, as is increasingly emphasized recently, the above point is interpreted to raise a problem of defining the “Koreans’ Own eyes.” This problem needs to be clarified before the assertion for the “Korean theory of education” can have any substantial meaning.