The Status and Issues of Peace Education: Focussing on Its Interactions with Unification Education

To lay the groundwork to explore the accessibility of peace education and unification education in an era of peace cooperation on the Korean Peninsula, this study takes a look at the history of peace education and the current situation and issues of both peace education and unification education. Against the backdrop of the division on the Korean Peninsula, unification education and peace education have been established as educational sectors of conflict resolution between the North and the South and of means of mediation for violence caused by the division. The two sectors have developed commonalities along the way. The origin of peace education and unification education is rooted on the division of the Korean Peninsula and the subsequent unification issues.

In the current educational practices, there are different characteristics and emphasis in terms of the direction, contents, and subject of education between peace education and unification education. Efforts of creating “peace·unification education” are recently being made which focuses more on issues of peace than existing unification education. Peace education and unification education exhibit differences when it comes to the relationship between peace and unification in realizing a peaceful Korean Peninsula, whether unification is justified as an ultimate goal, how issues of ‘positive peace’ and security are handled, and how much initiatives the learners have.

This study asserts that the issues between peace education and unification education should be clarified and that the two sectors should expand the overlapping areas under the principal of dealing with unification issues on the basis of value of peace.