Korean Editorial: Teaching a Proper View of History
As he presided over the first meeting of a presidential committee planning for the country’s future, President Lee Myung-bak said Korean society was wasting too many resources fighting with its past, and that this was costing us the future of our country. Chung Ok-ja, the head of the National Institute of Korean History, said the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations viewed Korea’s history in a disparaging way from a leftwing perspective. She added that we can move on to the future by taking a more sophisticated view of history that is both positive and encompassing.
Just 60 years after its founding, the Republic of Korea emerged from the ruins of the Korean War and being the poorest country in the world to the world’s 13th largest economy, and it achieved democracy in the process as well. This is something that our children can be proud of. But over the last 10 years, the government has rejected this history of accomplishment and was intent on erasing it. In Kim Dae-jung’s theory of new nation building, there is the premise that the founding of the Republic of Korea was based on a wrong set of ideals. It is this principle that prompted ex-president Roh Moo-hyun to make denigrating comments about Korean history, saying it was marked by the defeat of justice and the triumph of opportunism.
A modern Korean history text used by half of all high school students portrays the Republic of Korea in a negative light and the communist North in a positive one. Public broadcasters aired dramas disparaging the founders of the republic while embellishing the acts of socialists. In 2004, 34 percent of new cadets entering the Korea Military Academy said our main enemy was the United States, while only 36 percent of them said democracy was superior to communism. It is this distorted view of history that is to blame.
Education has the most important role in rectifying this twisted view and instilling a positive and encompassing sense of our past. It is only natural, then, that Education Minister Kim Doh-yeon on Wednesday announced the government’s decision to revise left-leaning history textbooks. But even if we fix existing texts, there are limits since the changes must be made within the standards and criteria used in their compilation in 2002. That means we have to devise new standards and criteria that will be used in the next compilation of history texts in 2010. Belittling our history is not confined to the field of education. Leftwing texts literally dominate bookstores even today. We must publish good history books that can compete with them.
Read entire article at Editorial in english.chosun.com
Just 60 years after its founding, the Republic of Korea emerged from the ruins of the Korean War and being the poorest country in the world to the world’s 13th largest economy, and it achieved democracy in the process as well. This is something that our children can be proud of. But over the last 10 years, the government has rejected this history of accomplishment and was intent on erasing it. In Kim Dae-jung’s theory of new nation building, there is the premise that the founding of the Republic of Korea was based on a wrong set of ideals. It is this principle that prompted ex-president Roh Moo-hyun to make denigrating comments about Korean history, saying it was marked by the defeat of justice and the triumph of opportunism.
A modern Korean history text used by half of all high school students portrays the Republic of Korea in a negative light and the communist North in a positive one. Public broadcasters aired dramas disparaging the founders of the republic while embellishing the acts of socialists. In 2004, 34 percent of new cadets entering the Korea Military Academy said our main enemy was the United States, while only 36 percent of them said democracy was superior to communism. It is this distorted view of history that is to blame.
Education has the most important role in rectifying this twisted view and instilling a positive and encompassing sense of our past. It is only natural, then, that Education Minister Kim Doh-yeon on Wednesday announced the government’s decision to revise left-leaning history textbooks. But even if we fix existing texts, there are limits since the changes must be made within the standards and criteria used in their compilation in 2002. That means we have to devise new standards and criteria that will be used in the next compilation of history texts in 2010. Belittling our history is not confined to the field of education. Leftwing texts literally dominate bookstores even today. We must publish good history books that can compete with them.