Current Issues in the Secondary Level History Curriculum Development and History Education Enhancement

The history curriculum is now being revised again. This time, ‘to enhance history education’, the government designated the Korean History as a curricular requirement for senior high schools and emphasized the importance of students’ cultural experience in learning history. The guideline for developing the history curricula for elementary and secondary level education was also suggested, of which two points were noticeable. First, the criteria of ‘sequence’ should be applied to differentiate contents taught at each school level. Second, the learning contents should be reduced in order to alleviate students’burden to cover unnecessary miscellanies. Nevertheless, the requirement of Korean history can hardly be an effective measure because Korean history and other history subjects still remain as one of the electives in the College Scholastic Ability Test(CSAT). To mark good scores, students have tended to select less burdensome subjects, avoiding history because of its diverse, complex, and detailed contents. If history subjects are required for, not selected in the CSAT, students have to learn history as a major subject, unnecessary of calculating the benefits of selecting ‘easy’ subjects. Reducing the learning contents can also have harmful effects. Past events cannot be arbitrarily divided into topics or categories for the convenience of easy learning. Imprudent reduction of some facts, events, and other historical elements may result in too abstract historical description, which rather hamper students’ understanding of history textbook contents. Overly rigid application of the sequence criteria should also be reconsidered. Until now attempts to differentiate contents for each school level by applying thematic or categorized approach, in the name of embodying the sequence criteria, turned out to be unsuccessful. We have no valid theoretical or empirical ground to repeat this trial and ‘error’.