Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

Jews. Accounts of wartime Japanese suffering are thus juxtaposed with tales of
Japanese heroism.
An overwhelming focus on the mingled suffering and heroism of the national
subject is a feature of officially-sanctioned historical narratives in China
and Korea as well. As emphasis in Chinese curricula on Marxist teleology and
class struggle has been diluted in the post-Mao era, so elements of socialist
internationalism have been displaced by an increasingly chauvinist nationalism.
This is reflected not least in shifting depictions of the Communists’ Civil War
antagonists, the Kuomintang (KMT), who until the 1980s were reviled as ‘class
enemies’ under whose rule China had languished in a ‘semi-colonial, semifeudal’
state. More recently, however, depictions of the iniquity of the KMT and
China’s traditional ruling elites have been decisively toned down, with former
class enemies admitted into the pantheon of ‘national heroes’ (minzu yingxiong)
(Jones, 2005). This has left foreign imperialists — epitomised by the brutal
Japanese military — singled out as agents of Chinese victimhood in a historical
narrative cast in overwhelmingly nationalist terms.
Accounts of Japanese imperialism, invasion and occupation have been accorded
prominence in textbook narratives of modern Chinese history since the 1980s. As
Rose shows with respect to high school texts, the extent of coverage has shifted
over time, with an apparent reduction in the early 2000s (Rose, 2013). However,
that involved stripping out contextual analysis or explanatory nuance, if anything
rendering the stark details of Japanese atrocities even more inexplicable
and outrageous. The theme of China’s climactic struggle against Japan (and
foreign imperialism more generally) is highlighted in other areas of the school
curriculum, too, including texts for ‘Morals and Politics’ (Vickers, 2009) and for
Chinese language. Primary school Chinese language texts, for example, regale
students with the story of a heroic Chinese child sacrificing himself to save
his village from Japanese ‘devils’ (Vickers and Zeng, 2017, p. 139). As in many
other formerly occupied societies, morally or politically complex aspects of
the wartime experience, such as the fraught issue of collaboration, are largely
neglected (Vickers, 2017a). And reinforcing the vision of recent history as a
struggle of Chinese against foreigners, light against dark, is the absence of
any significant discussion in school textbooks (or museums or the mainstream
media) of instances of domestically-authored Chinese suffering (see Dikotter,
2013; Yang, 2013).
In Korea, too, the focus on national victimhood has been overwhelming,
complicated by the looming shadow of the unresolved Civil War with the North.
Korean curricula have tended to cope with the North-South split by largely
ignoring it (though the picture at school level may be different — see next
section). The same was true, until the 1980s, of the colonial period, which the
military dictator Park Chung Hee preferred to sweep under the national carpet
due to his own ‘collaborationist’ past. Nationalism was promoted instead by
cultivating memories of an earlier anti-Japanese resistance struggle: that of
Rethinking Schooling for the 21 st Century:
The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia
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