Considering the importance of vocabulary education, its status in Korean education is rather ambiguous. Especially in high school education, vocabulary education does not have its own share but is only belonged to other areas of Korean education. Researches on vocabulary education over focus on general theories and making list of vocabulary, while teaching methods focus on finding technical ideas. High school vocabulary education must be different from that of elementary or middle schools, in terms of nature and level. High school education should exceed beyond the basic vocabulary education about lexical meaning, grammatical functions, and contextual comprehension of words; it should teach advanced vocabulary about professional concepts and cultural meaning with broad vocabulary education including Sino-Korean words and foreign languages. This paper sets the objective of high school vocabulary education to be ‘approving lexical competence for advanced thinking, communication and cultural activity’, and evaluated the National Curriculum Standards of Year 2011 in terms of such objective. Furthermore, it questions how to systematize and improve methods of vocabulary education of which are optimized for high school education. Eventually, there will be deeper understanding on high school vocabulary education and effective teaching-learning methods could be found.