hankyoreh

It has been confirmed that the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology ordered Kumsung Publishing Co. to revise 33 points in its version of the high school history textbook “A Modern and Contemporary History of Korea.” Kumsung is just one of the five textbook companies to whom the ministry sent its “request” for revisions and at issue here is the question of just how far the ministry can go in demanding revisions in the face of objections from historians, the textbook publishers and the textbook writers themselves.

According to a document obtained by The Hankyoreh yesterday, the ministry ordered Kumsung to make revisions to 38 points in the text in a letter sent on October 30. The textbook writers replied they would revise 10 of the 38 points. The ministry then asked Kumsung to make revisions to 33 points in the text -- 28 points from the original request and 5 other points the ministry had found to be insufficient.

The demand for revisions has come largely from the conservative New Right group Textbook Forum. The ministry, responding to the group’s demands, asked that the following sentence on page 253 of the Kumsung textbook be revised: It became difficult for our people to build a new country in the way we wanted. The ministry asked that the sentence be revised to read: We failed to play a leading role in building a nation of unified people because we were unable to repulse Japan with our own strength.

The ministry has also called for revision of this sentence, which appears on page 261 of the text: As the first joint committee between the United States and the Soviet Union was suspended, Syngman Rhee soon called for the South to establish its own government. Citing concern for the possibility of a misunderstanding about who is responsible for the division of Korea, the ministry ordered Kumsung to delete the word “soon” and add this sentence: However, North Korea had already launched its own, de-facto government. Textbook writers, however, refused to make the change, saying that adding the sentence to this part of the text is out of context “because another part of the textbook shows that North Korea established its Temporary People’s Committee in 1946.”

Yun Jong-bae, president of the Association of Korean History Teachers, said, “It would be illogical if (the ministry’s) orders are not labelled as ‘compulsory revisions’ because the ministry pressured the publishing company to make revisions that employ specific language.”

The ministry has been also criticized for the revisions it is ordering. Responding to a demand for revision from the Ministry of Defense, the ministry had originally asked the textbook writers to add a “so-called” in front of the phrase “democratic reform” in the following sentence from page 265: In the name of ‘democratic reform,’ from February 1946, North Korea... The textbook writers again refused to make the change, saying that it would make the expression awkward because the single quotation marks around “democratic reform” have the meaning of “so-called.” According to the ministry document obtained by The Hankyoreh, the ministry ordered Kumsung to change the sentence in order to “help students better understand that the single quotation marks mean ‘so-called.’” However, the sentence looks strange when the ministry’s revision is applied, the writers say, because the phrase then reads “so-called so-called democratic reform.”

The ministry also ordered that the phrase “as a result” be deleted or revised from the following sentence on page 309: As a result, North Korea unilaterally suspended talks, citing the South Korean government’s exploitation of inter-Korean dialogue for political purposes. The ministry says the sentence “could prompt students to misunderstand that North Korea unilaterally halted inter-Korean dialogue because the South Korean government exploited it for political purposes.”

Kim Han-jong, a professor of history education at Korea National University of Education and the main author of the Kumsung textbook, said he was of the opinion that phrases such as “so-called” and “as a result” should remain unchanged because they don’t affect the overall meaning. He says that if the sentences containing these phrases are revised as the ministry wants, they will look awkward. He added, however, that because the ministry has already ordered the revisions, it will be more important for the ministry to ask for a higher number of revisions, regardless of the meaning of individual sentences.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]