South Korean historian lauded by newspaper for denouncing left-wing history textbooks
In an interview with the Chosun Ilbo, Prof. Lee Tae-jin of Seoul National University, who is retiring from the Department of Korean History, said the account of modern and contemporary history in school texts by Kumsung Publishing went beyond the boundaries of school texts. Revising the words is not enough, he added: Korea’s history texts need to be rewritten. Some historians ended up supporting the left-leaning history text in statements protesting against the government’s calls to revise them, and that damaged the credibility of the academic community, he said. He added the reluctance of historians to point out left-leaning bias in the history text was tantamount to evading responsibility.
It requires a lot of courage for Prof. Lee to make that point. As the chairman of the Korean History Department at SNU and the dean of the College of Humanities, Lee was at the center of the community of historians, serving as the head of the country’s largest scholarly group in that field. That is why his diagnosis of our history text and the reality facing the field transcends his personal opinions and can be viewed as expressing the views of sound historians, who have been quiet so far due to fear of being ideologically typecast.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology went about revising the problematic history texts, but those efforts merely involved the altering of a few phrases here and there, changing the word “armed partisans” to “left-wing armed partisans” for instance. But the basic anti-imperialist and revolutionary stance of the texts, undermining the legitimacy of the Republic of Korea and praising the North Korean regime, has been left intact. The ministry feels it has completed its task, but Lee thinks they need to be completely rewritten.
One comment by Lee that stands out is when he pointed out the responsibility of historians. Social scientists rather than historians spearheaded efforts to build a consensus over the need to revise the biased history texts. And these social scientists pursued the drive to make the revisions. Yet when the ministry announced its decision last October to revise the texts, 21 history-related scholarly groups, including the Association for Korean Historical Studies, were swayed by left-leaning scholars and put on an embarrassing show by issuing anachronistic statements criticizing the revision as a “serious challenge” to the freedom of history education and demanded that historians be left to teach history. Lee said education “is not swayed by a convergence of opinions among scholarly groups, but should represent the stance of the country and the public and remain within the boundaries of common sense.”
Lee said he regretted graduating pupils who left with their left-leaning biases against Korean history unchanged. There are still many academics with leftwing, revolutionary views, who went to university and graduate school in the 1980s and are teaching at universities and serving in key positions in scholarly groups. He said the biggest mistake these people made was to politicize the study of history. As a result, he said, there is a tendency to highlight only the popular uprisings in our contemporary history, while ignoring the Korean Empire period and the period of enlightenment for Korea....