대학 교양교육으로서의 인권 교육 －문학을 통한 인권 교육의 가능성

Abstract

Education and specialized vocational education have been strengthened over the years. For one, market logic has been strongly applied to these fields. Also, the voices calling for the strengthening of liberal arts education are getting louder. Finally, people are becoming more critical of the seemingly distorted value of a college education and its role in society. Against this backdrop, citizen education, which plays an important role in liberal arts education, has also been emphasized. Furthermore, the heightened awareness of human rights which is one of the elements composing mature civic consciousness, along with the value and necessity of educating society about these rights has also been emerging. However, most of the current human rights education at universities is limited in that it is conducted only in the form of law and order. In order to overcome this limitation, we need an education system allowing for students to learn about human rights culturally, as well as from a purely legal perspective. The main point of this study is to show that literature can accomplish this task. For literature can pinpoint various problems that the law can’t adequately deal with, and it is the best way to heighten people’s awareness and sensitivity to individual human rights. It does so by making readers find the problems by themselves, and then to engage in rational thinking and choice-making, unlike the methods used in the more legal approaches to the study of human rights, which often seem dehumanized thanks to the forced and unnatural jargon that they employ.