“GOOD presidents make history. Bad ones make history textbooks.” This slogan from South Korea’s main opposition party is splashed across campuses and spread by teachers and pupils through social media. Yet Park Geun-hye, the country’s conservative leader, appears unruffled. She has reaffirmed support for a government plan, announced this month, for a state-authored history textbook to be used by all secondary schools by 2017. Liberals are distraught.
Ms Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, a general who seized power in a coup in 1961, imposed state-issued history manuals in 1974. A freely elected president first loosened the system 30 years later, allowing private publishers to print history books subject to state approval. Today schools choose from eight of them.
But in 2013, after Ms Park was elected, the education ministry asked publishers to correct “left-leaning” accounts, as it regarded those highlighting the nastiness of South Korea’s former dictators. The government approved a new manual written by scholars sympathetic to the South’s former strongmen. It was revised in parts after protests. But the public outcry was such...Continue reading
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