Historiography is a way for a government to form the collective memory and textbooks are a means to disseminate ideology. This has been an effective way of ruling as history and textbooks are used to brainwash the public by deciding what they should and should not know, all so a government can build its legitimacy.
This can be seen in the steps the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government and the Japanese government are taking to change school curricula in their countries to support their rule.
The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has decided to revise teachers’ manuals for junior and senior-high schools to emphasize that the Takeshima Islands — known as Dokdo in Korean — and the Senkaku Islands — known as the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) in Taiwan and the Diaoyu Archipelago (釣魚群島) in China —“are part of Japanese territory.” It is also requiring that textbook publishers follow these rules.
The Study Guide Outline is a guide for textbook publishers and teachers, and the commentary accompanying these guidelines is generally amended once every 10 years. The next amendment was due in 2016, but the Japanese government has moved it forward, showing the urgency with which it wants to consolidate domestic public opinion and its stance internationally.
If this is an objective view of the Japanese government’s efforts, then the textbook changes proposed by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration are also politically motivated, intended to shape the public’s Greater China awareness as well as ingratiate the administration with China.
The new curriculum will change “China” to “mainland China” and “the era of Japanese rule” to “the Japanese colonial era,” changing more than one-third of the curriculum. These are clearly not minor adjustments as the Ministry of Education claims; they are major changes. As expected, the planned shift from a Taiwanese historical perspective to a Greater China outlook has drawn protests from historians.
Although the government’s motive for changing textbooks is very clear, things may not work out the way it wants. Textbooks must be factual and they must comply with reality and with public awareness and expectations. If the government tries to turn textbooks into a tool for its obscurantism, not only will the public be disappointed, but the historical awareness within the textbook framework and public trust in the government will also collapse.
Taiwanese learned this during the Martial Law era, during which education was based on the obscurantist policies of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). When Taiwanese traveled abroad, where they could obtain a wealth of information contradicting what they had learned in school, they became vehement opponents of the Chiangs.
The Japanese government’s decision that its students should be taught that Dokdo, which is governed by Seoul, and the Diaoyutais, which belong to Taiwan but are governed by Tokyo, all belong to Japan, is untenable legally and in the face of international realities.
Using textbooks to brainwash children will only add to the public’s frustration.
The historical outlook of the Ma administration, which ignores the Taiwanese awareness that has developed over the past two decades and is hoping that its textbook changes will restore the Chiang-era goal of “retaking the mainland” is unrealistic and out of step with public expectations.
Even if students are taught this outlook in class, they will hear and learn otherwise at home, in society at large and on the Internet. The problems created by such cognitive conflict will have a negative impact on the government.
In the end, the curriculum changes will be just another misstep by Ma the bumbler.
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