hankyoreh

at the Korea Press Center in central Seoul

By Eum Sung-won and Kim Ji-hoon, staff reporters

Historians are accusing the administration and ruling Saenuri Party (NFP) of a “return to the past” with the recent calls from some members to adopt a state designation system for history textbooks in place of the current authorization system, whereby schools may use a range of different textbooks.

Sixteen veteran historians assembled at the Korea Press Center in central Seoul on the morning of Nov. 12 for a press conference to denounce the attempts as “regressive.” Their claim is that the state designation system is traveling down the path to obsolescence amid criticisms of its use in the past as a way for the state to enforce a uniform education on the public.

A conservative voice for state designation　

That same day, Kwon Hee-young, an author of a conservative textbook published by Kyohok and professor at the Academy of Korean Studies, was voicing a very different message at an Association for Contemporary Korean History seminar at the Korea Press Center in central Seoul.

“I do think the authorization system is better than state designation, but in a climate like this one where authorizations are only granted to textbooks that represents a particular ideology, I think we should be adopting a designation system,” Kwon said.

Kwon’s argument is similar to the one given by members of the administration and the ruling Saenuri Party. Speaking at a parliamentary audit of his ministry on Oct. 14, Education Minister Seo Nam-soo said, “With many problems emerging in textbook authorization, it makes sense that some would argue for a designation system. We need to bring the issue into public debate and make a policy decision accordingly.”

At a Nov. 5 meeting of the National Assembly Budget and Accounts Committee, Prime Minister Chung Hong-won said, “For the sake of proper history education, we need standardized Korean history textbooks.” And on Nov. 6, Saenuri lawmaker Kim Moo-sung said, “We need an active debate on the argument that a designation system should be adopted for Korean language and history textbooks.”

“A return to the Yushin Era”　

Critics are calling the arguments disingenuous, presenting the calls for a designation system as though they actually stemmed from fundamental problems with the authorization system. The controversy started with a Korean history textbook by Kyohak that was found to include favorable portrayals of Japanese collaborators and dictatorships, as well as numerous errors.

“For those of us who have studied and taught Korean history for years, it is very worrying to see textbooks going back to the kind of state designation they had during the Yushin era [between 1972 and 1981],” said former Sookmyung Women’s University professor of Korean history and National Institute of Korean History chief Lee Man-yeol at the press conference. “We cannot sit idly by and watch this happen.”

The reason for the veteran historians’ concerns is the danger that a state designation system could lead to history education being used as a PR tool for the administration, as it was during the Yushin era.

In February 1974, the Park Chung-hee administration replaced an authorization system with 11 different middle and high school Korean history textbooks with a single state designated textbook in order to “establish an subjective perspective on the Korean people’s history.” The textbook was then used to underscore the legitimacy of the authoritarian government.

Park Hyeon-seo, a former Korean history professor at Hanyang University, recalled an experience writing a middle school textbook under the Park Chung-hee administration.

“We were pressured to describe the May 16 coup d’etat [that put Park in power in 1961] as a ‘revolution,’” he remembered. “A state designated textbook controls the people’s ideology.”

Suh Joong-suk, a former Korean history professor at Sungkyunkwan University, said government authorities “basically controlled” history education before the 1987 democratization movement.

“They also used history as a way of promoting the administration, particularly by reducing contemporary history to anti-communist education,” he said.

Former Korea University professor Cho Kwang said the ultimate goal of state designation is “to make the state ideology universal.”

“The circulation of state textbooks was something possible only in totalitarian countries or totalitarian eras,” Cho said. “To suggest that South Korea adopt state-designated textbooks is akin to saying our goal as a society should be totalitarianism.”

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