Kyunggi High School
Choe's family was part of the Gwangju Choe "bon-gwan". He was born in Ulsan, then part of Gyeongsangnam-do in the southern half of the Korean peninsula (later South Korea). He did his secondary education at Gyeongseong High School (경성고등보통학교, in modern-day Seoul; now Kyunggi High School), and in 1910 entered the Korean Language Academy (조선어강습원에서), where he studied under Ju Sigyeong. He graduated from the Hiroshima Higher Normal School (廣島高等師範学學校, now Hiroshima University) in Hiroshima, Japan in 1919. In 1920, he began teaching at the private Dongnae High School (), but in 1922 returned to the Hiroshima Higher Normal School for further studies, and then entered the philosophy department of Kyoto Imperial University, graduating in 1925. He began teaching at the Yonhui Technical School (the predecessor of Yonsei University) in 1926, but in 1938 was removed from the service due to his involvement in a 1938 incident at the Heung-eop Club ().