hankyoreh

Jan. 7. Also at the press conference were families of victims of the April 3

By Eum Sung-won, staff reporter

A decade-long battle by right wingers over history textbooks is being thwarted by sensible citizens, with a less than 1% selection rate for a Korean history textbook developed by conservative scholars and published by Kyohak.

The so-called “textbook wars” are shaping into a miserable defeat for conservatives. The battle started in 2003 when the publishing company Kumsung’s contemporary Korean history textbook was labeled “leftist”.

On Jan. 7, opposition lawmakers with the National Assembly’s Education, Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee released figures from sixteen metropolitan and provincial offices of education on Korean history textbook selection rates. A total of 2,370 high schools nationwide were surveyed. Outside the Seoul area, where final figures were not yet available, the only school in the country found to have selected the Kyohak textbook was Cheongsong Girls’ High School in North Gyeongsang Province. The numbers suggest that the book, the subject of controversy over numerous errors and what critics have called the whitewashing of Japanese collaboration and military dictatorship, is failing to find schools willing to select it.

In the Seoul area, ten high schools have not yet reported their selection, but are not expected to choose the Kyohak book, which has been selected by 0.042% of schools nationwide.

The Kyohak textbook was initially touted by conservative historians as the “fruit” of a ten-year history war. After the controversy of 2003 when the Kumsung book was criticized for “left-wing bias,” members of the Textbook Forum, a “New Right” group, came out in 2008 with their “Alternative Textbook: Modern and Contemporary Korean History,” which was itself criticized for whitewashing collaboration and dictatorships.

In Nov. 2011, then-Minister of Education Lee Ju-ho touched off a firestorm when he issued an order to change references to “democracy” in textbooks to read “liberal democracy.”

The Lee Myung-bak administration also eliminated an item from its textbook writing standards reading, “The Republic of Korea worked after Liberation to address the issue of collaborators.” Many at the time expressed concerns about the possibility of “conservative” texts like “Alternative Textbook” that painted a rosy picture of collaborators and dictators.

In last autumn’s edition of the quarterly “History Criticism” (Vol. 105), Ji Su-geol, a professor of history education at Kongju National University, wrote that the Textbook Forum “revealed its ambitions of bequeathing to the next generation a textbook reflecting their own historical views in the ‘Publication Notes’ for ‘Alternative Textbook’ in 2008, and the Kyohak textbook of Korean history represents the fruit of those labors.”

The Kyohak text has its supporters in the ruling Saenuri Party (NFP). Saenuri lawmaker Kim Moo-sung was one of the main proponents, organizing a “modern and contemporary history class” association in Sept. 2013 with one of the writers, Kongju National University professor Lee Myung-hee, as a lecturer. Conservative groups developed announcements and advertisements to encourage local principals to select the textbook.

Despite the efforts, citizens have rejected the text. Indeed, some schools selected it, only to change their minds in the face of objections from students and their parents. As of Jan. 7, a total of fourteen schools had gone through that experience.

One notable feature of the changes is that citizens initiated them. The case of Dongwoo Girls’ High School in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, is illustrative. There, a student put up a poster reading “A nation that forgets history has no future,” only to have it taken down by school staff ten minutes later. The message still resonated, and ended up setting off a chain reaction. A history teacher issued a “declaration of conscience,” claiming that they had been pressured into selecting the text by the principal, and alumni staged their own poster protests.

On Jan. 7, Sangsan High School in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province announced after a long battle that it was dropping the Kyohak textbook. That same day, Hanmin High School in Paju decided to “reexamine” its selection. Hanmin will open its doors in March as a school for the children of people in the military.

The schools’ decisions are especially significant in that they came despite heavy pressure to keep the status quo from the Ministry of Education, which carried out its own “special surveys.”

“In Japan, the selection rate for the so-called ‘Fusosha textbook’ was just 0.039% when the controversy erupted over its distorted accounts of history,” said Ha Il-sik, a professor of ancient Korean history at Yonsei University. “In other words, this textbook that whitewashed Japan‘s history of colonialism and painted its invasions of other countries in positive terms had a less than 1% selection rate even in Japan.”

“It was astonishing to hear the selection rate could reach 1% for a textbook that whitewashes collaboration in a country like South Korea that actually suffered those invasions and colonial rule,” Ha said.

Ha lauded students, their parents, teachers, and civil society for their “rational judgments,” but added, “It’s worrying that administrators at even fifteen schools adopted the book even after academics pointed out how poor and error-ridden it is.”

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