A Study on World Peace through Global Citizenship Education in a Multicultural Society

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to suggest that global citizenship education can be an important alternative in a multicultural society. Human history is a series of conflicts and wars, and these conflicts are the biggest enemies of human happiness. However, education plays a key role in changing people's perceptions of conflict or prejudices. This study compares citizenship education, multicultural education, and global citizenship education First, citizenship education traditionally emphasized citizenship in a country and reduces conflict with others only within the territory. Second, multicultural education has a weakness to distinguish the majority from the minority and to unintentionally make prejudice and conflict based on the classification. Third, global citizenship education moves just from international understanding education and emphasizes universal values or virtues in the global society such as human rights, peace, equality, and tolerance and contributes to solving global problems. In this regard, this study discusses on the progress from citizenship education to multicultural education and finally to global citizenship education.