hankyoreh

Members of civic groups call for the revocation of state-authored middle and high school history textbooks

The Park Geun-hye administration finally pushed through the release of “examination versions” of state-authored middle and high school history textbooks on Nov. 28, despite a majority of South Koreans being opposed to it. The Ministry of Education will be collecting opinions through Dec. 23 as it considers either mixed use of state-authored and authorized textbooks or a pilot run.

As has been pointed out since the beginning, a state-authored textbook system in itself is an obviously retrograde policy - the kind of thing you only see today in a tiny few unenlightened totalitarian states. The ministry is simply making a mockery of the people by going on about “mixed use” while still clinging to textbooks that have lost any credibility with the public. Not only will the textbooks lack any continuity when they‘re being pushed by a President who has essentially been impeached by the public from which her power derives, but objections from metropolitan and provincial education superintendents, and from the teachers and students themselves, mean they will be difficult to distribute to schools. All it will do is create needless chaos, responsibility for which belongs to Park herself, Minister of Education Lee Joon-sik, and education officials.

As expected, the examination version focuses on whitewashing the administration of Park’s father Park Chung-hee (in power 1961-79), rationalizing his dictatorial rule and downplaying his collaboration with the Japanese colonial administration. The high school “South Korean History” textbook devotes no fewer than nine pages to explaining about the elder Park’s administration, playing up the successes of his five-year plans for economic development while offering only a brief comment about how “civil rights were restricted by the President’s emergency measures” in the way of criticism for the Yushin regime. A sidebar goes into great detail about the six “revolutionary pledges” of the forces behind Park‘s May 16, 1961 coup d’etat; there‘s even a detailed account of how archival materials from the Saemaul (New Village) Movement were registered with the UNESCO Memory of the World. The term “collaborationist” is softened into “pro-Japanese figures,” and accounts of collaborationist activities in general have been severely cut - a fact that certainly bears some connection with Park Chung-hee’s own such activities. The same kind of whitewashing of Park can be found in the middle school textbooks “History 1” and “History 2.”

in front of the Central Government Complex in Seoul on Nov. 28. (by Shin So-young

After hammering away at her goal of getting the textbooks distributed during her term, Park‘s insistence on concealing the identities of the writers has paid off what amounts to “family textbooks” dedicated to her father.

Now that the writers have been belatedly revealed, we can see how heavily biased and blinkered they are. When we have most of the accounts of modern and contemporary history being written by people with the New Right perspective that the Japanese occupation “boosted modernization,” it’s clear what kind of textbooks we‘ll end up with.

The spirit behind the millions of candles that have flooded South Korea’s streets these past weeks is evolving now into a demand to clear away the ills left behind by a corruption anti-national, anti-democratic establishment that subsisted like parasites off of collaboration and dictatorship. If we don’t break with that establishment structure, our history could once again end up being reversed. The fact that we are now seeing textbooks whitewashing Park Chung-hee forty years later shows these concerns are not unfounded.

Metropolitan and provincial education superintendents all over South Korea have said they will not cooperate with the state-authored textbooks. Teachers, students, and parents are gearing up for a disobedience campaign. The textbooks will also have trouble finding any more traction once the impeachment motion against the President is voted on shortly in the National Assembly. The Ministry of Education needs to give up on its ploys and abandon its Park Chung-hee-glorifying textbooks at once.

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