South Korea’s ‘history war’ intensifies

South Korea on Tuesday pushed ahead with a highly controversial plan to introduce government-issued history textbooks in schools, despite angry protests by opposition parties and academics.

The policy has become a bitter ideological battleground between left and right in South Korea, with critics accusing President Park Geun-Hye’s administration of seeking to deliberately manipulate and distort the narrative of how the South Korean state was created.

Following an obligatory 20-day period to canvass public opinion, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-Ahn and Education Minister Hwang Woo-Yea confirmed that middle and high school students would each receive a single government-issued history textbook from 2017. “We cannot teach our children with biased history textbooks”, Hwang said in a televised statement.

Although the textbooks cover ancient history, it is the interpretation of the country’s turbulent recent past, which is most contested -- not least the autocratic rule and legacy of Park’s father, Park Chung-Hee.

It was Park Chung-Hee who introduced state-issued textbooks in 1973 -- a system that survived the country’s transition from military to democratic rule. In 2003, it was relaxed with the introduction of some privately published textbooks, which then became the norm from 2010 -- although they were still subject to state inspection.