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South Korea to Issue State History Textbooks, Rejecting Private Publishers

Students at a high school in Seoul, South Korea, last year. By 2017, the country's schools must stop teaching from privately published history books, a practice in place since 2010.Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

South Korea said on Monday that beginning in 2017, its middle and high school students would be taught history from government-issued textbooks, prompting criticism that President Park Geun-hye’s conservative government was returning education to the country’s authoritarian past.

The administrative directive to wrest control over history textbooks from private publishers came after months of heated public debate over how to teach children history. The controversy has focused largely on how to characterize the history of modern Korea, including Japan’s colonial rule in the early 20th century and South Korea’s tumultuous, often bloody march toward democracy.

For years, conservative critics have charged that left-leaning authors poisoned the current textbooks and students’ minds with their “ideological biases.” The critics were especially upset with the way the textbooks described North Korea and the military dictators who once ruled South Korea, including Ms. Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a 1961 coup and remained in control using torture and martial law until 1979.

But opponents of Ms. Park, including some civic groups and regional education leaders, vowed to protest the government’s move, which they said would embarrass the country globally by creating a textbook system similar to the one in North Korea.

The main opposition party said it would work on a bill to ban the government from writing textbooks. But Ms. Park’s party, which dominates the National Assembly, supports government-issued textbooks.

“The house is not just leaking or requires small repairs here and there, but its very foundation and design are wrong,” the vice prime minister and education minister, Hwang Woo-yea, said during a nationally televised news conference on Monday, explaining why textbooks written by the government should replace the current books.

Ms. Park’s critics said the idea smacked of her father’s dictatorship, during which the government wrote history textbooks and used them to glorify his coup as a “revolution” and to justify his prolonged rule. These critics fear that Ms. Park’s government will use the new textbooks to stifle opinion and whitewash the legacy of the old conservative elites, including her father, who served as an officer in Japan’s colonial military before overseeing South Korea’s rapid economic growth.

“The father staged a military coup, and now the daughter is engineering a coup in history education,” said Park Han-yong, a chief researcher at the Center for Historical Truth and Justice, based in Seoul. “This is a history coup that supporters of pro-Japanese collaboration and the past dictatorship have been preparing for 10 years.”

The center recently revealed documents that it said showed that the father of Kim Moo-sung, the leader of the president’s party, was a rich businessman and pro-Japanese collaborator who once urged Koreans to make donations to finance warplanes for Japan’s World War II military.

Reflecting a prevailing conservative view here, Mr. Hwang said on Monday that textbooks should focus on teaching “the proud history of South Korea, which has achieved both democratization and industrialization in the shortest time in the world history.” His deputy, Kim Jae-choon, said current textbooks uncritically cited North Korean propaganda and failed to make it clear that the Korean War was started by the North.

“One textbook, for example, used the term ‘dictatorial’ only twice when writing about North Korea but as many as 28 times about South Korea” under its military rulers, Mr. Kim said.

Under Park Chung-hee, South Korea required schools to use a single government-issued history textbook. But since 2010, schools have been free to choose among several privately published textbooks, although the Education Ministry still has to approve the books.

Some of the books delved into long-hidden aspects of the recent past: collaboration with Japanese colonialists, mass killings of civilians during the Korean War and the abuse of political dissidents under the dictators. 

Conservatives criticized what they called “masochistic historical views” in the books and accused the authors of inculcating youngsters with “left-leaning nationalism” that they said emphasized ethnic affinity with North Korea while casting an unfavorable eye on the role of the United States in modern Korean history.

Last year, Ms. Park warned against “ideological prejudices” in the current textbooks. The Education Ministry has since asked the publishers to make many changes in the texts, but their authors filed lawsuits against the interference.

The political opposition said the government’s decision deviated from the standard practice in advanced countries. They called on Mr. Hwang to step down.

On Monday, Mr. Hwang said his ministry would soon invite a panel of historians to write new textbooks, as well as a broad range of people to review them, to ensure that the books would be “objective and balanced.”