U.S. sees bias in S. Korea textbooks

SEOUL — The United States is trying to persuade South Korean educators to tone down anti-Americanism in textbooks, standardized tests and lessons in middle and high schools.

Although anti-American sentiment, which reached a peak last year, is declining, the U.S. Embassy in Seoul is worried about how the United States is being presented in the classroom — and it intends to do something about it.

“We are moving pretty aggressively on this,” a senior U.S. diplomat here said in an interview.

“We are doing a survey to figure out how the United States is being portrayed in textbooks — primarily history books — and to see what the references and the omissions are. There aren’t a lot of references about the United States liberating Korea from the Japanese, for example,” he said.

Once the survey, which is in its initial stage, is concluded, the embassy plans to redirect some of its resources for public diplomacy to programs that would address the problem. It also hopes to get more money from Washington.

“We have grants for people who are book writers and curriculum developers, so we have to target them. We’ll send them to the United States to show them how our textbook writers operate and expose them to the American experience,” the senior diplomat said.

“So we’ll try to find people who are at least willing to talk to us, who are in responsible positions — ideally, it would be someone who 10 years from now will be the minister of education,” he said.

The embassy was particularly alarmed by a test that members of the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers’ Union, an alternative union not recognized by the state, gave their students soon after the war in Iraq began in the spring.

“It’s so anti-American, it’s amazing,” the senior diplomat said about the multiple-choice quiz, an English translation of which the embassy provided to The Washington Times.

One of the questions, for example, includes the statement: “President Bush has officially cited several reasons for striking Iraq, but they have not been convincing enough for people around the world.”

One of the possible answers to another question asks rhetorically: “If the war against Iraq started because the country has [weapons of mass destruction], then doesn’t this mean that the United States, which possesses the greatest amount of WMD in the world, should be attacked by U.N. forces?”

The test also asks: “Which is a false statement about the Iraq weapons inspections?”

Although the embassy’s copy did not have what the union considered correct answers, it is fairly obvious that the one here is incorrect: “After failing to find WMD in the air, sea and underground, Bush searched the inside pockets of [Saddam] Hussein and found thousands of state-of-the-art micro nuclear weapons hidden there.”

According to the test, therefore, this is a correct statement: “Hearing Bush say that WMD exist in Iraq even after the final U.N. weapons inspection report came out, Hussein proposed that ‘the U.S. CIA and FBI, known to have the world’s best intelligence capabilities, should come and search for themselves.’ However, Bush ignored such remarks and continued to insist that WMD do exist in Iraq.”

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