Clothing education of domestic and foreign specialized high schools

This study proposes an educational direction to be followed by the clothing departments of Korea's specialized high schools in order to help achieve high levels of job placements and to strengthen their students' competitiveness. A comparison was made of the curricula in Korea's specialized high schools and in several fashion schools in other countries including the United States, Italy, France, Taiwan, and Japan. To this end, publicly available educational records were retrieved from domestic school documentation, vocational high school portals, and domestic/overseas school web sites, and were then reviewed. The archival data extracted from these sources shows that the curricula of the three chosen domestic schools uniformly focus on foundational courses such as general computer skills, general design, accounting principles, design principles, and drawing, as well as practical courses such as the design of western clothing, fashion design, fashion CAD, management of clothing material, design of Korean clothing, and knitting. Unlike these standardized courses, it was found that overseas fashion schools provide a more technically-advanced and design-focused education based on the interests of the individual student. Moreover, their education system nurtures the students' creativity through adequate field experience and history/language education. The findings of this study suggest that Korean specialized high schools should find a way to accommodate their students' interests and to provide them with personalized fashion education by adopting a more flexible curriculum. An educational line that considers the individual student's aptitudes and career path will help foster creativity and novel ideas, which, in turn, will contribute to the development of the fashion industry.

국내외 의상 관련 고등학교의 교과교육 비교