International Education and Social Studies in Korea

International education in Korea is now in its infancy. It is only in the late 1980s that specialists in education perceived the emergent national need for international education at schools. How to educate young students who can adapt to a rapidly internationalizing society draws attention from the con temporary specialists in education, especially in Social Studies. A variety of definitions of international education in other countries implies that we Koreans need to develop our own perspective and contents suited to our new role in the world. However, development of our own perspective and contents involves the difficult and painful job of value judgement. What couples the problem of value judgement in international education at schools is the unsettled dispute about the nature of subjects and underlying principles of curriculum design in Social Studies. This is why I propose that Social Studies educators should work to penetrate an international perspecitve, where appropriate, into all of the Social Studies courses. Social Studies curricula need to be reevaluated for international content, goals, perspective and pedagogical strategies. Such evaluations should include not only courses on world history and world geography but also Korean geography, Korean history and moral education. . As a short-cut to initiate a curriculum movement toward international education in Social Studies in Korea, I suggest a geography s pivotal role in the curriculum movement by bringing geographic perspective into history and introducing value perspective into geography. I maintain that only with value perspective alive in geography, world geography per se can provide a synthetic viewpoint that will integrate other subjects into so-called Social Studies in terms of international education. In order to develop a synthetic perspective, geography needs to demonstrate its relationships with other disciplines, especially history and economics.