비판적 법담론과 프레이밍 분석을 통한 통일교육의 재구성 논의

The purpose of this study is to critically elucidate the colonial power structures and developmentalist logic embedded in South Korea’s unification-education discourse by analyzing the normative linkages connecting the Constitution, the Unification Education Support Act, its Enforcement Decree, and the 2022 revised national curriculum. The study addresses three research questions: First, how are the Constitution’s and statutes’ key value terms reconstructed within the curriculum’s achievement standards? Second, in this process, how do postcolonial codes—power hierarchies, the silencing/suppression of hybridity, and developmentalism—operate? Third, how does this discursive configuration normalize particular forms of citizenship and knowledge while constraining the possibilities for alternative discourses of unification? Employing an integrated approach that combines critical legal discourse analysis, the Toulmin model of argumentation, and framing theory, and applying a postcolonial codebook, the study analyzes the connectivity and hierarchical structures among the Constitution, legal instruments, and the curriculum. The analysis finds that value-laden terms such as “liberal democracy,” “peaceful unification,” and “nation (minjok)” are re-contextualized into administrative, performance-oriented language as they flow into lower-level norms (the Enforcement Decree and guidelines), thereby refining centralized control and evaluation apparatuses. In the 2022 revised social studies and ethics curricula, these higher-order norms are translated into categories such as “unification sensibility,” “national homogeneity,” and “future national territory (balanced development),” which organize learning objectives and achievement standards in ways that position students as “agents of unification practice” and legitimize prescriptive inculcation. Consequently, the overall normative chain consolidates a state-over-citizen power hierarchy, structurally silences North Korean voices and alternative/hybrid models of unification, and recursively reproduces a frame that reduces unification to a modernization- and economic-benefit-centered developmental project. By mapping an empirically grounded linkage structure between law and education, this study offers a critical analysis that shows current unification education is skewed toward unilateral and colonial developmentalism, thereby underscoring the need for a more inclusive and pluralistic redesign of the curriculum.