Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

Admiral Yi against the invasion of Hideyoshi Toyotomi in 1592 (Han, 2013, pp.
112-3). Following Park’s 1979 assassination, his military successors shifted the
curricular focus, with high school history texts from 1987 dedicating over a quarter
of their content to the Japanese colonial period. However, while emphasising
stalwart Korean resistance to Japanese oppression, these texts were ambiguous
regarding the colonial legacy, crediting it with bringing inevitable and ultimately
desirable ‘modernisation’, albeit with the unpalatable accompaniment of foreign
domination (Han, 2013, pp. 113-4).
Following democratisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Korean politics has
tended to be sharply polarised between conservatives defensive of aspects of
the legacies of dictatorship and colonialism, and leftists vehemently critical of
both. For the rightists, success in promoting economic development constituted
the main standard for judging the performance of colonial, military or indeed
democratic regimes (Kang, 2016, p. 44). For the leftists, the developmental
achievements of both the Japanese and military regimes were seen as
fundamentally tainted by colonialist and capitalist ‘exploitation’. Textbook
‘wars’ ensued once the system of monopolistic, state-authored textbooks was
dismantled from 2002, with more right-leaning Kyohaksa texts for modern
history pitched against those produced by the left-leaning Keumsung publishing
house (Kang, 2016).
Victimhood and nationalism are intertwined for both left and right, but with
rather different emphases and political implications. Leftists have tended to
appeal to a profoundly essentialist vision of the Han minjuk (Korean race-nation),
seen as requiring emancipation from both malevolent foreigners — especially
Americans and Japanese — and their Korean fellow-travellers. For those on the
left, globalization and the exploitative operations of transnational capital are
but the latest instance of foreign oppression, in which home-grown rightists
are complicit. National salvation is therefore to be sought through restoring
sovereignty and ridding the peninsula of malign foreign influences. In 2003, the
Keumsung texts, purveying a narrative along these lines, were adopted by 53 per
cent of schools (Kang, 2016, p. 50).
Those on the political right, while sharing a similarly essentialist vision of the
Korean minjuk and an emphasis on the legacy of foreign oppression, have
remained overwhelmingly preoccupied by the threat of Communism, in the shape
of North Korea. In the rightist narrative, economic modernisation, engagement
with globalization and loyalty to the American alliance remain crucial to national
strength and the capacity to resist the threat from the North. This has implied a
rather different emphasis in rightist accounts of the national past. Following the
2008 election of the conservative President Lee Myung-bak, the bureaucratic
power of the state was deployed to pressure both the leftist Keumsung
publishing house to revise its textbook, and schools to desist from adopting
it; adoption rates fell to 32 per cent (Kang, 2016, p. 50). Lee’s successor from
2013, Park Geun-hye, then attempted to restore the system of state-prescribed
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Chapter 3: East Asia