중학교 역사 교과서의 통일교육 관련 내용 분석

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the contents of unification education in the middle school history education textbooks and to suggest some strategies for developing contents of unification education for middle school students in South Korea. More specifically, the study focuses on the contents of unification education in the 9 sample history education textbooks. According to the results from the analysis of history education textbooks, 3 critical aspects of dealing with unification related issues can be pointed out as follows. First, they tend to describe a series of related things and historical events in a compact and brief way, so that their important historic meaning are not dealt with in detail. Second, they depict particular things and events at a certain period time between North and South Korea such as division into North and South Korea after Korean war 1953 and North-South tension in the 1960s. But it is shown that they don’t treat the issues from the perspective of unification education. Third, they focuse on South Korean government’s policy or North and South cooperative work regarding unification not including North Korean government’s perspective, which make students difficult to understand unification issues in a broad and comprehensive way. From this point of view, this study suggests that the contents of history education textbooks need to be reconstructed to improve their current shortcomings as presented above. In addition to that, some contents like ‘North Korea and unification’ should be dealt with more specifically in order for students to understand North Korea in a systematic way. Lastly, the contents of unification education need to focuse on the issues like how we progress and achieve unification between North and South Korea in order for students to approach unification issues more specifically.