SOUTH KOREA: South Korea has declared that beginning in 2017, its middle and high school students would be taught history only from government-issued textbooks, prompting criticism that President Park Geun-hye's conservative government was returning education to the country's authoritarian past.
Monday's administrative directive to wrest control over history textbooks from private publishers comes after months of heated public debate over how to teach children history. The controversy has focused largely on how to characterise 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.
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, 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 Centre 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 centre recently revealed documents that it said showed that the father of Kim Moo-sung, 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.
Some of the privately-published textbooks now in use in South Korean schools delve 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.
- THE NEW YORK TIMES
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