ABSTRACT
History textbooks for high school students are considered an effective medium for providing “correct” knowledge about the national and global past, contributing to the internalization of these “truths” about what has happened, and influencing what is remembered. From the content of textbooks, one can more or less grasp the core values or ideology of the state/regime in power, as it is the state apparatus that has the power to educate the young about the past and promote its vision of the future (Curaming, 2005; Floendo, 2005; Manickam, 2005; Chen, 2005). Needless to say, the degree to which the state is able to control the past and shape the future through education is largely dependent on the extent to which it controls the education system and curricular content. Under authoritarianism, centralized education systems and state production and distribution of textbooks are the norm and, in these types of societies, therefore, identifying state ideologies through the reading and analysis of history textbooks, in a way, can be quite straightforward. In a democracy, producing history textbooks can potentially be much more complex, as there may be wider or more diverse political and public involvement in determining what should or should not be included in textbooks, although this is by no means always or everywhere the case. When such debates arise, they may occur between different political camps, between the state and academic historians, or among different schools of thought in professional history or education circles. The controversies themselves, however, tend to center on the same core issue, namely, how to look back at history and interpret it with the “proper” or “correct” perspective, and-in the case of history as a school subject-what ultimate pedagogical or political objectives the subject should serve. In these cases, determining what is proper or correct thus becomes the focus of the problem.
