Peace education is thought to be a kind of powerful mechanism that we can actively cope with the whole crisis of human history and be the needs of the times to secure our human life of the present and guarantee even the rights of future generations. B...
Peace education is thought to be a kind of powerful mechanism that we can actively cope with the whole crisis of human history and be the needs of the times to secure our human life of the present and guarantee even the rights of future generations. But peace education is never such an easier problem than we expected. The greatest difficulty of peace education is that the present world we live is so anti-peaceful that we lack consciousness of participation by being insensible to this anti-peaceful reality and having no interest in peace problem.
Only when peace education includes the important contents of anti-war peace, security of human rights, unification of the divided peninsular, or education of reconciliation and cooperation, these important elements also can be the core contents in history education. Considering the relation between two educations, it is very important to think over how peace education can be taught and what its methods are in the present history education. If the contents and methods of peace education are secured in history education, the concrete and practical peace education can be possible in history education of all the schools.
History teachers in Korea are keeping making efforts to achieve inter-Korean reconciliation, cooperation, unification and construction of peaceful order. Especially, the main contents they teach with interest are as follows.
1. project for understanding real circumstances about the dispatch of Korean troops to Vietnam and cooperating with it
2. Knowing hidden truths about U.S. soldiers' crimes and massacre of Korean civilians by U.S. armed forces and teaching them to students
3. Development of anti-war peace classes about U.S. invasion upon Iraq
4. investigating and teaching the infringements upon human rights by state authorities such as Uprising April 3 in Jeju, Uprising in Yeosu and Suncheon and massacre of civilians during Korean War.
A movement in the historical community of East Asia is remarkably appearing, which is for protesting against the hegemonism exposed to China's “Northeastern Project” and Japanese history textbook distortion and groping peace in East Asia. Especially, the historical exchanges and joint researches among Korea, China and Japan are necessary for constructing peace not only in East Asia but in the world.
Like this, the problems about unification of the divided peninsula, war and massacre of civilians, history distortion and peace of East Asia being in priority highlighted in the modern Korean history, peace education will be recognized as an important task in history education. After all, history education has to aim to give clues to secure peace, human rights and democracy and contribute to making the world peaceful.