Hate speech floods classrooms as middle school history textbooks devote just 6 pages to democratization

A culture of historical distortion and hate expression has been spreading across South Korean schools, most visibly through the Baejaego baseball team's "Starbucks cheer" incident, which shocked the public and sparked widespread controversy.

Amid the fallout, analysts are raising concerns that middle school history curricula allocate far too little time to modern and contemporary history.

Some in the education community argue that the distortion and hate culture seen among middle and high school students stems in part from a Korean history curriculum at the middle school level that is heavily weighted toward pre-modern history.

An analysis of all seven current middle school history textbooks (History 2) found that modern and contemporary history accounts for an average of 17.2 percent of total content.

However, the Mirae-en textbook — widely regarded as the most commonly used in middle schools nationwide — devoted just 12.7 percent of its pages, or 28 pages, to modern and contemporary history.

That figure shrinks further to just 16 pages when covers, inquiry activities and other supplementary material are excluded.

Particularly striking is the coverage of the democratization process — a topic at the center of frequent historical distortion and hate expression among students. Across all seven textbooks, it averaged just 10.5 pages, or 4.8 percent of total content.

The Mirae-en textbook devoted only 6 pages, or 2.7 percent, the least of any of the seven titles. Coverage of the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement was limited to two sentences in a single paragraph.

Some observers say the Baejaego controversy could accelerate the government's push to expand the share of modern and contemporary history in middle school history textbooks.

The Ministry of Education had earlier submitted a curriculum revision request to the National Curriculum Committee calling for the share of modern and contemporary history in middle school history courses to be raised from the current 20 percent to 30 percent.

The committee held a meeting last month to discuss the ministry's proposal, but members were divided and agreed to gather further input before resuming deliberations.

The committee plans to put the proposal to a vote at its full session Thursday, though the outcome remains uncertain.

Meanwhile, a survey released Tuesday by the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union, covering 1,109 teachers at elementary, middle and high schools nationwide, found that 89.3 percent of respondents had encountered hate speech, discriminatory language or historical distortion among students in the past year.

By school level, middle school teachers reported the highest exposure rate at 92.7 percent, compared with 87.4 percent for elementary school teachers and 86.4 percent for high school teachers.