Pressure points of textbook standoff

"Our students are studying the juche ideology of Kim Il-sung (in history classes),” read one of the placards distributed across South Korea by ruling Saenuri Party this week. Juche, or self-reliance, is the backbone of the North Korean dictatorship.

Saenuri and the government have recently pushed ahead with their plan to revive state-authored textbooks for secondary education, alleging that the current privately-published textbooks are biased in favor of the leftists and even the Pyongyang government which Seoul does not recognize as a legitimate state.

At the center of the dispute are six of eight local publishers of high school Korean history textbooks -- Kumsung Publishing, Doosan Dong-A, Mirae-N, Visang, Jihak Publishing and Chunjae Education -- that are embroiled in a legal dispute with the Education Ministry over the contents since 2013.

Earlier this month, the ministry criticized the publishers for filing lawsuits instead of complying with its order to revise the books, saying that the textbooks carry descriptions of the juche idea without criticism and look like “North Korean textbooks.”

For example, the textbook by Kumsung explains that juche is a “worldview based on the individual, and a revolutionary idea to realize independence of the people.”

Kumsung and Visang were ordered to revise a section which describe that after Korea’s liberation in 1945, North Korean committee distributed land it had seized from pro-Japanese and Japanese citizens to the people for free, as the ministry said the description excluded the negative aspects of the land reform policy. The textbook also says that economic development under former President Park Chung-hee had many side effects. It claims that foreign capital that was invested during the Park regime was one of the causes of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, which the ministry said was baseless.

Doosan Dong-A and Jihak Publishing failed to point out that North Korea was responsible for the 2010 sinking of South Korean war corvette Cheonan and shelling of Yeonpeyong, a frontline island in the West Sea. They are also accused of neglecting negative aspects of the North’s Chollima Movement for economic development launched in the late 1950s.

Mirae-N was ordered to revise parts of its textbook about the 1950-53 Korean War. It mentions carnage on civilians by both Koreas in the war, and only gives the example of a massacre carried out by the South Korean Army.

Kyohak Publishing, the only publisher accused of being biased toward conservatives and not the liberals, was ordered to revise sections about the comfort women and overall description on Japan’s colonialism of Korea. According to the textbook, “Korean comfort women were often seen following the Japanese soldiers wherever they went,” as opposed to them being coerced into sexual slavery by Japanese military.

But the opposition lawmakers who analyzed the textbooks said that points made by the ministry were not true.

For instance, Education Vice Minister Kim Jae-choon accused that generally the privately-published textbooks are overly critical of the South Korean government and lenient toward the North, saying that the word “dictatorship” was used 24 times in relation to Seoul and only twice for Pyongyang.

But Rep. Yoo Ki-hong of the New Politics Alliance for Democracy said other negative terminology was used to describe Pyongyang, including hereditary system, idolization, worshipping of the individual, monopolization of power, and one-man governance, for a total of 119 times.

Rep. Jeong Jin-hoo of minor Justice Party accused Saenuri and the Education Ministry of lying about the textbooks leaving out negative characteristics of Pyongyang’s land reform. The ministry said that the textbooks failed to mention that the people were given limited ownership of the land, but that all the textbooks mentioned that people were banned from selling, mortgaging or tenant farming.

The Jihak textbook for example says, “What the people got were limited ownership, North Korea took 25 percent of the crops in tax. Because of this, the actual income of the farmers saw little improvement.”

In addition, all seven of the supposedly left-leaning textbooks mention that juche ideology ultimately led to the idolization of North Korean founder Kim Il-sung and is used as a tool to control the citizens and purge the opposition.

“Juche became the ideological foundation of Kim Il-sung’s dictatorship. In the late 1960s, the juche idea was established as the North’s governing philosophy. Idolization of Kim Il-sung was reinforced, forming a one-man governance by Kim,” the textbook published by Visang notes.



By Yoon Min-sik

(minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)