Manual drive

“GOOD presidents make history. Bad ones make history textbooks.” This slogan from South Korea’s main opposition party is splashed across campuses and spread by teachers and pupils through social media. Yet Park Geun-hye, the country’s conservative leader, appears unruffled. She has reaffirmed support for a government plan, announced this month, for a state-authored history textbook to be used by all secondary schools by 2017. Liberals are distraught.

Ms Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, a general who seized power in a coup in 1961, imposed state-issued history manuals in 1974. A freely elected president first loosened the system 30 years later, allowing private publishers to print history books subject to state approval. Today schools choose from eight of them.

But in 2013, after Ms Park was elected, the education ministry asked publishers to correct “left-leaning” accounts, as it regarded those highlighting the nastiness of South Korea’s former dictators. The government approved a new manual written by scholars sympathetic to the South’s former strongmen. It was revised in parts after protests. But the public outcry was such that only one school adopted the book.

The government seems undeterred. Kim Dong-won, an assistant minister of education, says competing histories have caused “great confusion in the classroom”. He says pupils are “intellectually immature” and can be influenced by the North Korean slogans quoted in some books. Such fears appear odd in a thriving liberal democracy; but South Korea still punishes (with up to seven years in prison) those who praise the North.

Plenty support the government’s move. Lee Kyung-ja of the Parents’ Alliance for the Revival of Public Education, a lobby, laments that texts puff up Kim Il Sung, the North’s first dictator, by calling him an anti-Japanese resistance fighter (he was), and malign Ms Park’s father. “Our enemy teaches one idea, so why not teach our children one unified story to counter it?” she says.

But the Korean History Research Association, the country’s biggest forum for historians, has said it will not participate in the writing of the textbook if asked to do so. Scores have sent letters of protest to the government, noting a proud tradition in which chroniclers in the Joseon dynasty (1392-1897) pledged to record events with a “straight brush” that did not bend to power. At Yonsei University one protest poster was mockingly written in the style of a North Korean bulletin, with references to “Supreme Leader Comrade Park Geun-hye” and her “boundless visionary decision to worship His Excellency President Park Chung-hee”. Other critics accuse Ms Park of hypocrisy, given her rebuke of Japan’s historical revisionism.

South Korea is becoming ever more divided between right and left. Hwang Woo-yea, the minister of education, suggests that government-approved history may be a remedy. “A country in which the public remembers history differently has only division in its future,” he says. But one which binds the minds of its young surely has a bleaker one.