무엇을 위한 역사교육이어야 하는가? ―국가교육과정, 정부의 역사교육 정책, ‘국가주의’ 비판 담론에 대한 분석

Abstract

This paper firstly examines the supposed purpose of the current national history curriculum of South Korea. The curriculum puts emphasis on developing learners’ awareness of being part of the national community. But that sense of community is shaped by rather limited spatial and temporal extent of historical facts, thus not dealt with comprehensively. This paper also reviews the direction the government is taking recently. The government presented a plan for reinforcing history education, which is mainly about making Korean history compulsory in various exams or tightening the mandatory education. Under the name of ‘promoting pride on our history and righteous historical awareness’, it tightened its control of teaching materials and methods by adjusting related authorities, organizing new bodies and using its supporters of its historical view. Moreover, the government shut its ears to all the criticisms, suggestions and questions from various historians and history teachers. In response to this, some historians, history education researchers, history teachers criticized its ‘statist’ policy, control on educational contents and underlying ‘statist’ view of the history. The idea that the government-designated history textbook forces one view of history to learners and impairs diversity of interpretations is prevalent in the critical discourses on the government’s policy. But it has own weakness: the same logic can be used by the government and ‘New Right’ to support Kyohaksa’s Korean History textbook. Criticisms on justifications of pro-Japanese activities during Japanese colonial era and dictatorship became popular as making up for this weakness. These arguments suggest what should not be the history education is about. But this is not a satisfactory answer to what is teaching history for. Recently, the idea of ‘history education as cultivation of democratic society’ was proposed. It has its own significance as an attempt to overcome the weakness of the current trend. But it is still limited in its outlook, which mainly focuses on the existing constitutional values of South Korea or ‘participatory democracy’ as a complement to modern liberal democracy. This point of view can lead to failure to assess historical events on global scale that went beyond the scope of constitution of one county and the framework of liberalism. But it has a potential to be an alternative to the idea that civic education is exclusive property of social studies or accusations that civic-education-oriented approach uses education as political strategy.