Historical research on Legal, Realistic Environment and Challenges of Multicultural Education in Korea (2011- 2018)

The term “multi-culture” was coined with the aim of overcoming multiple types of issues created by the conflicts between mainstream culture and subculture, or among many subcultures, under the context of intimate relation among various cultures. Multicultural education can be understood under the same context as well. In other words, it is just a matter of course that more frequent encounters and contacts among cultures bring about not only positive effects but as also conflicting discords and problems, and consequently the needs of multicultural education have arisen to overcome such conflicts and problems. An American educator James A. Banks saw multicultural education as a reform movement mainly based on reconstituting curriculum and educational system with the aim of ensuring equal educational opportunities for members of diverse gender, language, social class, and ethnic groups. The U.S. educational encyclopedia defines multicultural education to put emphasis on various contributions made by cultural and ethnical social groups to the society, and to select and implement relevant educational curriculum. Therefore, multicultural education is to instill knowledge, attitude, and value to appreciate the cultures of other groups on equal terms, while at the same time eradicate prejudice against cultures different from ours and place much value on mutual understanding and equal relation with peoples of diverse cultural groups. Given such definition, the target and content of multicultural education should include the natives who should lead their lives along with the students from multicultural or immigrated families. This paper examines legal grounds for Korean multicultural education and investigates realistic issues in learning of children from multicultural families.