Korean ‘facts’ are all fiction in textbooks

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Korean ‘facts’ are all fiction in textbooks

Many school textbooks being used in foreign countries carry erroneous descriptions of South Korea, but Seoul has not been able to get them fixed due to a lack of manpower, a lawmaker said yesterday.

The state-run Academy of Korean Studies collected 1,207 foreign school textbooks between 2007 and 2009 and so far has found flaws in 477 of them, Representative Hwang Wooyea of the ruling Grand National Party said.

The institute, however, has only six people analyzing and monitoring the foreign textbooks, and about onefourth of the collected textbooks remain unexamined, Hwang said.

The most common error was labeling the waters between Korea and Japan as the Sea of Japan instead of the East Sea, Hwang said.

Japanese and Chinese textbooks said Japan’s 1910-45 colonization of Korea helped the country’s modernization and that Korea was a province of ancient China.

Some British textbooks classified South and North Korea as “less developed” countries that “receive international aid.”


Yonhap
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