South Korea’s Ministry of Unification will hold its first Peace Wind Week starting Sept. 11, 2026, an 11-day series of public events, including a DMZ peace walk and academic forums, organized under the slogan “The peace I want, toward a peace wind for the Korean Peninsula.” The ministry has said it wants to gather peace-related events that individual agencies and regions previously held separately into a single period, raising public interest and spreading a shared sense of support for peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Peace is a good word. No one prefers war to peace, and coexistence is better than confrontation, dialogue better than military tension. Creating space for the public, especially young people, to talk about the future of inter-Korean relations has real value. That is exactly why more caution is needed. A pleasant-sounding word can become the most convenient way to paper over an uncomfortable reality.
This year’s government roadmap, the 2026 Basic Direction for Peace, Unification and Democratic Citizenship Education, shifted the paradigm of unification education toward “peace, unification and democratic citizenship.” It named cultivating peace awareness and democratic citizenship as core goals, declared that “the starting point of unification is peace,” and pledged to build an environment that draws out students’ critical thinking and reasoned debate. The direction itself has merit, moving away from one-directional lessons on the necessity of unification and toward students thinking and arguing for themselves.
But that shift raises a question that cannot be avoided: can critical thinking be taught without accurately showing today’s North Korea?
North Korea is already rewriting the language it uses to describe its relationship with the South. This year’s revised constitution deleted long-standing phrases such as “the northern half,” “unification of the fatherland” and “independent, peaceful unification and great national unity.” A new territorial clause describes South Korea as a separate state sharing a border with the North. The constitution stops short of the blunter language Kim Jong Un has used elsewhere, such as calling the South the “principal hostile state,” but North Korea has clearly moved a considerable distance from the ethnic-nation, unification-centered framing it once used to describe inter-Korean relations.
If North Korea is erasing the language of unification while South Korea’s unification education simply repeats the word peace more loudly, students will naturally ask why they are still being taught to pursue unification with a North Korea that no longer talks about it. Unification education should not fear that question. It should start there. The moment education avoids a question, it loses its persuasive power. Teaching peace without acknowledging North Korea’s changes, and teaching unification while dwelling only on North Korea’s threat, both show just half the picture. If a peace wind is going to blow, it needs to blow over reality, not around it.
Unification education must follow reality’s hardest questions
Teach the North Korea that exists, not the one people wish for
The danger in unification education is not limited to teaching false facts. Selectively presenting only the reality one prefers is equally risky. The emphasis of South Korean unification education has swung considerably depending on the administration and the moment: security and threat at some points, reconciliation and cooperation at others, exchange and community when inter-Korean relations improved, and North Korea’s threat again when relations soured.
North Korea, however, does not change according to South Korea’s election cycle. What students need to learn is not a North Korea edited to fit one political lens, but the North Korea that exists right now. It is both a country strengthening its nuclear arsenal and redefining its relationship with South Korea, and a system that restricts its people’s access to information and constrains their freedom and rights. It is also, at the same time, people scraping together a living in North Korea’s informal markets, families enduring each day to feed themselves and young North Koreans hoping for a better future.
Choosing only one of these realities turns education into messaging. Teaching North Korea honestly means treating it as neither an enemy to demonize nor a subject whose problems get papered over in the name of understanding. It means separating the North Korean regime from the North Korean people, holding military threats and ordinary life in view at the same time, and showing both Pyongyang’s official claims and the principles South Korea itself is committed to upholding.
North Korean human rights cannot be left out of that picture. Talking about peace without talking about the freedom and living conditions of the North Korean people invites an obvious question: whose peace is it? The absence of gunfire across the border does not mean every problem on the Korean Peninsula is solved. Peace that prevents military clashes and the question of whether North Korean people can live with dignity are not competing priorities, and there is no need to choose between them. Holding both at once is what makes unification education realistic rather than aspirational.
Emphasizing peace does not require pushing North Korean human rights aside, and raising North Korean human rights does not mean abandoning inter-Korean dialogue. If unification education is serious about doubling as democratic citizenship education, it needs to handle uncomfortable realities with more precision, not less.
Have young people turned away from unification, or has no one explained it to them?
A deeper problem is that public attitudes toward unification itself are shifting. In the Korea Institute for National Unification’s 2025 unification perception survey, KINU, a state-funded think tank that has tracked South Korean attitudes toward unification annually since 2014, found that only 49.0% of respondents said unification was necessary, the lowest figure since the survey began and the first time support has fallen below half. The same survey found 63.2% preferred peaceful coexistence, the highest share on record, while indifference toward North Korea climbed from 50.8% in 2015 to 68.1% in 2025.
The generational gap is even starker. Agreement that unification is necessary stood at 62.1% among the wartime generation and 54.9% among the industrialization generation, but only 38.0% among millennials. It would be easy to conclude that younger South Koreans have simply grown indifferent to unification. But a harder question needs asking from an educator’s standpoint: have young people turned their backs on unification, or has no one explained a version of unification that makes sense to them?
Telling today’s students that unification should happen “because we are the same people” is no longer enough. They ask how unification would change their own lives, who would bear the cost, why South Korea should still pursue unification when North Korea insists on two separate states, and whether peaceful coexistence without unification might simply be fine. They ask how North Korean people’s freedom and human rights connect to unification, and how the constitutional goal of peaceful unification built on a liberal democratic order can be realized against today’s North Korean reality. None of these questions has an easy answer, which is exactly why they belong at the center of unification education rather than at its margins.
If the goal of unification education is to manufacture support for unification, these questions are uncomfortable. But if the goal is to raise citizens capable of judging the Korean Peninsula’s future for themselves, the questions cannot be avoided. Views opposing unification should be voiced in the classroom, arguments for long-term peaceful coexistence should be open to debate, and claims that unification would be too costly should be weighed against the counterargument that maintaining division carries its own costs.
If students reach a conclusion in favor of unification after that kind of debate, it becomes their own conclusion rather than one handed down to them. Article 4 of South Korea’s constitution requires the state to establish and pursue a peaceful unification policy grounded in a liberal democratic basic order. Teaching that clause is straightforward, but making students memorize it and helping them understand what it actually means are two very different tasks.
Why does South Korea still hold peaceful unification as a national goal even as North Korea moves in a different direction? How should that principle be carried out in practice? Is peaceful coexistence a substitute for unification, or a possible path toward it? These questions need airing too. Education that can withstand hard questions is stronger than education that simply repeats approved answers, and that kind of strength is what unification education needs now.
The government should build space for questions, not hand out model answers
What, concretely, needs to change?
First, North Korea’s changes should be treated as a central question for unification education, not a footnote about “recent developments.” Simply noting in a textbook that unification-related language was deleted from North Korea’s constitution is not enough. Lessons need to explore why North Korea made that choice, what it means for inter-Korean relations, whether South Korea should accept North Korea’s two-state framing, and if not, what South Korea’s own vision of peaceful unification should look like going forward. Adding facts to a textbook and reshaping the questions education asks are not the same task.
Second, teaching materials need more depth and range. Rather than relying only on North Korea’s official documents, materials should combine analysis from domestic and international research institutions, data from international organizations, and objective accounts of daily life inside North Korea. Testimony from North Korean defectors has real value here, since firsthand experience of life in North Korea is something no document can fully replace. But a single defector’s story should not be generalized into a portrait of the entire country: experience varies sharply by whether someone lived in Pyongyang or the provinces, by class, generation and gender, and by when they left. That is precisely why multiple voices need to appear side by side, cross-referencing defector testimony against statistics and research so students learn to separate individual experience from structural patterns.
Third, classroom debate needs more room to breathe. This year’s government roadmap emphasized critical thinking and reasoned discussion, and that principle deserves an actual test in practice. Questions such as whether unification is truly necessary, whether the two Koreas can coexist long term as separate states, whether raising North Korean human rights issues hurts inter-Korean relations, how to distinguish the North Korean regime from the North Korean people, and whether peaceful coexistence is a path toward unification or simply a way of stably managing division should all be open for discussion in real classrooms.
What government needs to supply is not a model answer, but material for judgment and room for questions. Without that, even a new label like “democratic citizenship education” risks becoming just another layer of packaging around the same old approach.
In that light, Peace Wind Week itself should not stop at promoting the idea of peace. The ministry describes its purpose as building public consensus around peace on the Korean Peninsula, which is a reasonable goal. But if the campaign asks people what peace they want, it should also raise harder questions alongside it: how peace is possible while North Korea insists on two states, how North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and peaceful coexistence can be reconciled, whether North Korean human rights and peace can be discussed together, and what vision of the Korean Peninsula South Korea wants after peaceful coexistence is achieved.
Experiencing peace and understanding the conditions that make peace possible are not the same thing. For Peace Wind Week to mean more than a slogan, it needs to move past resonating with a pleasant word and toward discussing these harder questions with the public directly.
Unification education that ignores reality will be ignored by the generation living it
Unification education has shifted its emphasis with every era. Anti-communism and security came first, followed by an emphasis on ethnic community and the necessity of unification. Now a new language of peace and coexistence is coming to the fore. Education should change as the times change, but one principle should not: education must not settle on its conclusion before reality does.
Discussing North Korea’s nuclear weapons and military threat does not mean opposing peace. Raising North Korean people’s human rights does not mean refusing inter-Korean dialogue. And emphasizing peace and dialogue does not mean giving up on security. The moment these are treated as opposites, unification education gets trapped again in the language of politics. It should instead show the complicated reality that sits between them.
Support for unification has fallen below half of the public, and it falls further with each younger generation. Indifference toward North Korea keeps growing. At the same time, North Korea is redefining its relationship with the South in language very different from the past. Given all this, unification education’s task is not to shout “we must unify” more loudly. It is to re-explain what unification means against a changed North Korea and changed public attitudes, and let people reach their own judgment.
Young people should not be blamed too quickly for their indifference to unification. Before blaming them, educators should ask themselves whether they have shown today’s North Korea accurately, explained its uncomfortable realities, taught peace and security together, distinguished the North Korean regime from the North Korean people, and weighed the cost of maintaining division alongside the cost of unification. Above all, have students been allowed to freely ask whether unification is even necessary at all? If not, the problem may not be young people’s indifference. Unification education itself may simply be older than the questions they are asking.
A peace wind should blow, but it must not cover up reality in the process. South Korea should talk about peace while also talking honestly about North Korea’s reality, and should explain the value of unification while still allowing doubts about it to be voiced. Now that North Korea is erasing the word unification from its own vocabulary, South Korea’s task is not to write that word in bigger letters. It is to explain, more rigorously than before, why the country still talks about unification at all. Unification education that avoids that explanation will not last long, no matter what new name it is given. Education that ignores reality will, in the end, be ignored by the generation that has to live in it.
September 17, 2026 at 04:00PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)