South Korea yesterday pushed ahead with a highly controversial plan to introduce government-
issued history textbooks in schools, despite angry protests by opposition parties and academics.
The policy has become a bitter ideological battleground between left and right in South Korea, with critics accusing South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s administration of seeking to deliberately manipulate and distort the narrative of how the South Korean state was created.
Photo: AP
Following an obligatory 20-day period to canvass public opinion, South Korean Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn and South Korean Minister of Education Hwang Woo-yea confirmed that middle and high-school students would each receive a single government-issued history textbook from 2017.
“We cannot teach our children with biased history textbooks,” Hwang said in a televised statement.
Although the textbooks cover ancient history, it is the interpretation of the country’s turbulent recent past which is most contested — not least the autocratic rule and legacy of Park’s military strongman father, former South Korean president Park Chung-hee.
It was Park Chung-hee who introduced state-issued textbooks in 1973 — a system that survived the country’s transition from military to democratic rule.
In 2003, it was relaxed with the introduction of some privately published textbooks, which then became the norm from 2010 — although they were still subject to state inspection.
Park Geun-hye’s conservative administration said that the books had taken on an increasingly liberal, left-wing bias, which some even labeled as “pro-North Korean.”
Arguments have focused on issues like who bears most responsibility for the outbreak of the 1950-1953 Korean War, and how the textbooks should reference North Korea’s official juche ideology.
Deeply sensitive issues like collaboration during Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule are also strongly contested, along with the violence that accompanied the move to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s.
Hwang dismissed “groundless” concerns that state-issued textbooks would glorify the authoritarian, military rule of the past.
“This society is too mature to allow ... such an attempt to distort history,” he said.
However, a vocal coalition of liberal politicians, academics, students and civic groups disagree, and there have been large street demonstrations against the new policy.
The main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD) launched a sit-in protest at the National Assembly overnight, ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.
NPAD chief Moon Jae-in said the government had turned a deaf ear to the mounting public opposition.
“This is no less than outright dictatorship,” he said. “No free democracy in the world has state-issued history textbooks.”
An opinion poll published last week by Gallup Korea showed that 49 percent of South Korean adults were against the policy, with 36 percent in favor.
The state-issued history textbooks will be written by a government-appointed panel of teachers and academics.
Park Geun-hye has said that the most critical role of historical education is to “instill our future generation with pride in their country.”
Her critics accuse her of hypocrisy in the light of her own condemnation of Japanese historical “revisionism” regarding the colonial period.
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