다문화사회 및 다문화교육에 대한 논의와 그 적용의 적절성 고찰

A Critical Investigation on Relevance of Discussion and Its Application about Multi-cultural Society and Multi-cultural Education

This study aims to focus on the matter of “Multi-culture” which has been a critical issue in recent society in Korea, to discuss various concepts and policies that are being applied in different researches or educational fields, and to investigate if the nature of those concepts are appropriate in deed. The discussion on multi-cultural society and multi-cultural education in Korea suffers the lack of process of any serious discussion socially or professionally regarding its nature and direction, rather creating a regulation on multi-cultural policy just so that our society can adopt to changes and to overcome issues that resulted from changes in the population structure due to increasing number of immigrants. This phenomena, therefore, causes various contradictions through the lack of consistency on directions and systematic coherence created by absence of discussion and agreements between theorists and activists on multi-cultural education that is suitable for our society and what really is true multi-cultural education. A precise examine and analysis is a prerequisite of understanding the reality and education on multi-cultural society. Compared to the Americas and Europe where multi-cultural society has been developed for quite some time, Korea has been focused on only size of the immigrants, despite the fact that the process of forming a multi-cultural society is very different in many aspects. As a result, the concept “multi-culture” has been used in combination with the word “family”, contradicting the original meaning of the “multi-culture”, and the level of multi-cultural education has been remained under the limit of teaching Korean language and assisting culture adaption for few immigrants. A proper understanding and adaptation of multi-cultural society and multi-culturalism is required in order to implement proper and appropriate multi-cultural education. A synthetic and concrete/specific version of multi-cultural education should be proposed, not simply based on charity or welfare policy, rather based on deep understanding, caring and respect of race, region, class or religion of others and create social integration and balance of cultural dissolution.