The Significance of Mourning in Peace Education

This study begins with the critical awareness that Korean society suppresses mourning—an inevitable element of human life—and the emotions that accompany it, thereby generating educationally significant problems throughout society. In a society where the expression and discourse of mourning are repressed, individuals are denied “the right to grieve fully,” and the community fails to build mental capacity through empathy and solidarity grounded in vulnerability. In this study, mourning is defined as “a human response to experienced vulnerability and loss in life, and the sociocultural modes of expressing such responses.” It explores the forms of violence that hinder adequate mourning on both personal and societal levels. On a personal level, mourning the loss of a 'you' (second-person relationship) is often obstructed by cultural forms of violence such as rigid gender norms, which prevent individuals from fully grieving and letting go. From a first-person perspective, mourning also includes grieving one’s own vulnerability or failure, and this study discusses how society produces socially withdrawn youth by denying grief. At the societal level, the study addresses how hate impedes mourning. Such hatred is rooted in fear of mourning itself and in hierarchical perspectives on whose lives are deemed worthy of grief. In response, the study proposes a model of peace education aimed at enabling a “livable life” for all beings. It advocates for education in “proactive nonviolence,” pedagogical environments that foster affirmative engagement with emotions, and the cultivation of peace competencies as sources of “life-sustaining strength.”