The COVID-19 pandemic has left a deep scar on society by exposing the most vulnerable parts of Korean society. Meanwhile, the economic crisis that continued before COVID-19 made the labor market more unstable and had a harsher effect on the socially d...
The COVID-19 pandemic has left a deep scar on society by exposing the most vulnerable parts of Korean society. Meanwhile, the economic crisis that continued before COVID-19 made the labor market more unstable and had a harsher effect on the socially disadvantaged. When the labor market becomes unstable, the job prospects for vocational high school students become more bleak.
Most of the graduates of vocational high schools are highly likely to live as non-regular workers and platform workers due to the flexibility of the labor market in a Korean society where contempt for labor is rampant, and they are likely to inherit poverty. In addition, on the road to the 4th industrial revolution, artificial intelligence (AI) robots are expected to almost replace the middle-skilled jobs currently available to vocational high school students after graduation.
The development of AI technology is reducing the number of jobs that require manual labor, resulting in job polarization. Although the demand for high-skilled and low-skilled skills is increasing due to AI or digital technology, jobs for middle-skilled skills are on the decline. Therefore, it is time to think about the change of the existing vocational high school policy, which has been aimed at nurturing middle-skilled industrial manpower.
The purpose of this study is to find out what kind of content, and how labor human rights education is being conducted in vocational high schools in the Seoul area through case studies of each one specialized high school, Meister high school, and vocational consignment school in Seoul area. In addition, previous research and literature analysis related to labor human rights education, education plan of the relevant school, and labor human rights education plan document were analyzed. In particular, the actual status of labor human rights education in vocational high schools was confirmed through documents and statistics by analyzing the parts related to labor human rights education in vocational high schools among the data of the 『Seoul Student Labor Human Rights Survey』 conducted in 2018 by the Seoul Office of Education and a qualitative analysis was also conducted through in-depth interviews with various people related to labor rights education. On the other hand, I have tried to find out what the various viewpoints on vocational high schools are, and to find the direction for improvement of labor human rights education by deriving the problems of labor human rights education conducted in vocational high schools.
Through this study, this researcher confirmed the following facts.
First, vocational high school students are internally in a sense of defeat and externally live in the shadow of everyday prejudice and ignorance. Field trainees at vocational high schools are high school students who are far from the university entrance exams that the whole nation is watching with interest. That’s why their existence, their lives, became a class of interest, even for a moment, only when they were victims of occupational accident.
Second, labor human rights education in vocational high schools in Seoul needs improvement in terms of education content and education method.
The following are the ways to overcome the problems of labor human rights education and to improve the negative views faced by vocational high schools.
First, it is necessary to shift from education focused on imparting knowledge on labor laws and legal rights to education for improving labor sensitivity.
Second, for substantial labor rights education, it is necessary to reorganize the curriculum so that teachers can directly provide labor rights education with standard textbooks during regular class hours.
Of course, there are social tasks that are difficult to solve the problem of vocational high school graduates only by improving labor rights education, which are as follows.
First, it is necessary to create jobs that can make use of the professionalism of vocational high school graduates.
Second, practical efforts are required to remove the barriers to social inequality, such as reducing the wage gap according to educational background.
Third, the employment-priority policy of vocational high schools needs to be shifted toward nurturing potential learning capabilities that can adapt to a lifelong learning society.
Although it takes a long breath to improve social awareness of vocational high schools because it is linked with the national education and labor policies, substantial vocational high school labor human rights education is possible only with the will of the Ministry of Education, so I would like to suggest the following.
First, it is necessary to organize the labor human rights curriculum in the curriculum of vocational high school teacher training colleges, various job training and qualification training courses.
Second, it is necessary to support vocational high school teachers to provide labor rights education that transcends the limitations of their class position by providing them with opportunities to enter relevant graduate schools such as labor graduate schools.