ABSTRACT
South Korea has been one of the leading nations in championing and delivering global citizenship education (GCE) in recent years. While GCE began to receive a great deal of attention in the 1990s, it was especially since the 2012 Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) that the state-led model of GCE has been promoted in South Korea’s educational landscape, with an aim to position the nation to be a leader in the global community. In this regard, GCE in the Korean context has been subject to much academic criticism—particularly due to its top-down and neoliberal approach—as it lacks many features that recent scholarship has posited to be central to GCE. This study argues that this local manifestation of GCE in South Korea is an inevitable corollary of its historical legacies and ongoing confrontation with its complicated neighbor in the North. Ultimately, the case of South Korea challenges a conventional understanding of citizenship education as decisively national or global rendered visible by its fraught national history and casts a doubt over any universal approach to GCE in the current historical moment when the global standard is synonymous with the Western standard.
