ABSTRACT
In South Korea, history education and the national curriculum have become sites of ideological struggle in recent years. The state’s national history curriculum was reformed in 2002 from teaching the history of the military regime and Rightist hegemonic groups to teaching the histories of various agents/agencies, including Leftist counterhegemonic voices. In the previous three decades (1974-2002), there had been no space for politically, culturally, and ideologically marginalized groups to make their voices heard in the national history curriculum. In 1974, President Chung-Hee Park and his military regime (1961-1979) initiated a policy that required all schools to teach history from one state-approved textbook. This one-textbook policy was maintained until 2002, when the liberal/ progressive groups in power (1998-2007) allowed multiple publishers, under the state’s authorization, to develop textbooks that convey oppositional perspectives on Korean history. Korean history education emerged as a contentious field, as many stakeholders actively participated in the national curriculum reform process, vying for their values and historical perspectives to be officially selected and transmitted to the schools. These struggles were at the center of the controversies as key stakeholders sought to achieve symbolic control over the national history curricular reforms by manipulating the popular media, official and academic texts and discourses, and sociocultural and political environments. In this way, the drive to produce the “right” history changed the (re)production and transmission of the national curriculum and knowledge in South Korea.
