More than a fight over how books are printed

The notes read Park Byeong-seop’s 2016 paper, “The National History Textbook Debate and the Struggle over National Identity.” They open with a saying — a nation that forgets history has no future — and with a claim that history does more than record what a country once did. It explains the ground on which the state was built, offers legitimacy for present choices, and helps decide the direction ahead. That is why, they write, international distortions of history are taken so seriously, and why children who will bear the country need a sound history education. The textbook debate now under discussion, in this view, is more than a matter of compiling books.

The debate, they say, splits in two: the method of issue, and the writing of the contents. A state-authored system has the government take responsibility for deliberation, writing, and inclusion, so that one book, with a unified content, is taught nationwide. An authorised system has the education ministry set a minimum range of content, and publishers write their own books under a ministry notice, then submit them for certification. At the time of the paper, national history used the authorised system: eight kinds certified for high school, nine for middle school — figures the notes keep in that 2016 window, not as a later official total.

One book, or many views

One side, they write, wants a shift to a state-authored system, on the ground that a single people has a single history. The other wants to keep the authorised system, arguing that a uniform history education would make uniform the thinking of the students who will bear the country’s future. The quarrel, they add, is tangled with politics, and social agreement has become harder.

On the contents, discussion flared when a particular publisher’s history book, said to have beautified pro-Japanese or dictatorial episodes, was certified. Unlike the dynastic veritable records, written for a king or a ruling class, a people’s history has no single narrator, and the writing can shift with present power and with differing views. Korea, they write, begins its history with Gojoseon and calls itself a Han-ethnic state: the people who make up the country were, in that view, the Han people. Anderson and other historians, as the notes name them, have raised the fictional character of nationalism; and the country’s present, they add, is in fact already hard to speak of as a single Han people. In a multicultural situation, some have argued for a move from nationalist description toward a more statist one, and for a fresh discussion of the range of nation and state that a history book should take as its base.

A nationalist frame, and a writer who resists one official book

A feature of Korea’s history textbooks, the notes say, is that nationalist positions lead the writing, and that political interests are entangled in it. From liberation to the present, accounts of Korean history have often had the aim of raising national consciousness, and a nationalist view stands out. Lean too hard on that view, they write, and a textbook may find it hard to leave a state-centred or ethnic-centred gaze, and may take on an exclusive nationalist colour. Such a view may once have been an effective way to confirm a people’s origins and to stand against Japanese imperialism. In today’s international and social situation, the notes say, it can no longer be called effective in the same way.

Among the various debates, the writer of the notes cannot take a positive view of making history textbooks into state-authored books. Even if, in practice, students cannot be given textbooks of every position, they should be told that the account they are reading is only one view, that other views exist, and that a critical eye is therefore needed. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Park Byeong-seop’s 2016 paper on the history-textbook debate.

Last updated: 15 November 2026