교육의 정치적 중립성의 헌법적 의미 회복을 위한 비판적 검토 ― 교육입법, 교육행정, 교육판례 분석을 중심으로 ―

Article 31 of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea guarantees the right to education as a fundamental rights. This right is the basic right to realize the ideology pursued by the Constitution of the Republic of Korea, and the essential right to be the basis of other fundamental rights. To realize the right to education, the Constitution mandates through article 31(4) to ensure the independence, professionalism and political neutrality of education by law. Among them, there is a problem that the interpretation and application of ‘political neutrality in education’ is limited to supporting the nation’s excessive regulations on education or justifying the comprehensive prohibit on political activities of primary and secondary school teachers. The political neutrality of education pursued by the Constitution should be interpreted as ‘party political neutrality’. This means that educational content and methods should not reveal party political partisanship, including religious sectarianism, on the basis that education should not be dominated or tooled by state power or specific political forces. The current legal system, which wholly prohibit teachers from engaging in political activities, needs to be reconsidered in terms of harmonizing the political neutrality of education with the fundamental political rights of teachers. Ensuring the political neutrality of education is also an important task for educational administration. The political neutrality of education should not be used as a basis for indiscriminately defending or supporting the position of the central educational administration. The interpretation of the court and the Constitutional Court, which vaguely estimate the correlation between guaranteeing the political neutrality of education and prohibiting teachers from political activities, should be improved. There are inherent limitations for the court to present objective criteria for judging whether violates political neutrality of education. The judiciary should actively perform its function of monitoring and checking whether other state agencies are undermining or reducing their constitutional meaning, away from a passive interpretation of the constitutional meaning of political neutrality of education. After all, social consensus of community members must be made through the educational field and political process in order to determine how and level of political neutrality of education is guaranteed. The constitutional meaning of the political neutrality of education should be understood in terms of ultimately realizing ‘neutrality of education’ to insure the right to receive education.