• Journal of Korean Home Economics Education Association
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2024

The purpose of this study is to explore the direction of home economics education and provide specific implications to help adolescents develop relationship competency. For this purpose, the contents of Korea's character education and UK's relationships education curriculum were analyzed, and the results are as follows. Character education in Korea focused on character education values such as responsibility, respect, consideration, and communication throughout the public education system. These contents were largely consistent with the learning content elements for cultivating relationship-competency in home economics education. UK's relationships education at the primary and secondary levels were similar to that of home economics education in middle school in Korea in its goals and learning contents for understanding and maintaining healthy relationships. However, differences existed in areas of safe relationships, setting boundaries with others, comprehensiveness of sex education content, rights to refuse sex education, and education content based on equal rights. Based on these results, this study concludes that the concept of education on relationships needs to be defined, the composition of educational content should be systematically developed, and further research on the development of teaching and learning methods and learning programs that can elicit and internalize students' attitudes and changes is needed. In addition, insights were gained regarding additional educational contents and considerations to take into account.