By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said Monday that it will ``straighten the facts'' in history textbooks that allegedly promote the left-of-center viewpoint championed by the liberal government of the past 10 years.
The move comes on the heels of 3,732 requests from 19 government departments and conservative organizations to revise the content of the textbooks.
The National Institute of Korean History will be reviewing the requests in October and will use some of them in a new textbook to be used next year, a ministry spokesman said.
``We plan to reflect their requests in new textbooks. We will come up with our proposals by late October and ask publishing firms to use them,'' a ministry official said.
The Ministry of National Defense has asked for the ``Jeju Uprising'' to be renamed the ``Jeju Riot'' and a sentence describing the Syngman Rhee administration as having ``abused the separation of Koreas to maintain his dictatorship,'' will be changed to ``has done its best to resist communism intruding into the southern part of Korean Peninsula.''
It is also seeking to give a more positive appraisal of two controversial Presidents ― Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, emphasizing their economic achievements.
The ministry said the new history textbook will aim to give more pride to students rather than focus on criticism.
The Ministry of Unification urged the textbooks to rename the ``Sunshine Policy'' of former President Kim Dae-jung as ``reconciliation cooperation policy,'' saying the former was more of a nickname for the latter and students need to know the official name.
Some conservative groups support the revision ― a group of private school managers will hold a series of seminars to promote the ``New Side of Modern Korean History'' from October and invite so-called rightist scholars as speakers.
The largest opposition Democratic Party (DP) defined the revision attempt as devious.
``The conservative party and administration are trying to beautify previous dictatorships, a winner-takes-all economy and pro-colonial traitors,'' DP spokesman Choi Jae-sung said. ``The textbook revision is an attempt to cover up their past misdeeds and brainwash the next generation with the wrong information,''