A middle school in Seoul's Gangdong-gu has found itself at the center of a political bias controversy after including a memoir by President Lee Jae Myung and a book by a Democratic Party of Korea official on its summer vacation reading list. As complaints flooded in online, the school said it would reconvene its book selection committee to review the recommendations.
According to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education and the school, the school sent home a newsletter Tuesday notifying students of recommended reading by subject for the summer break. The list covered 14 subjects, including ethics, Korean language, mathematics, history, science and English. The controversy centered on two books selected under social studies: "My Diary as a Boy Worker" and "The Far Right Is Coming for the 10s and 20s."
"My Diary as a Boy Worker" was published in 2021 while Lee was serving as Gyeonggi Province governor. The autobiographical work draws on diaries from his childhood to recount his life from his days as a young factory worker through his time at the Judicial Research and Training Institute. "The Far Right Is Coming for the 10s and 20s" was written by Jeong Min-cheol, a deputy chair of the Democratic Party of Korea's policy committee. The book examines the rightward shift among young people in their teens and twenties and the spread of online hate culture. Jeong also serves on the online hate response task force of the Roh Moo-hyun Foundation.
After the reading list became public, posts appeared online claiming the books were politically biased and urging people to file complaints with the school and the education office. Some posts shared the school's administrative contact information and encouraged readers to call in protests.
As the controversy grew, the school decided to review the list. It sent a newsletter to parents saying it would supplement the recommendations with books better suited to students' developmental stage and reissue the guidance.
"We understand that many of those who called to complain were not actually parents of our students — a significant number were outsiders," the school said. "We plan to reconvene the book selection committee to review the recommended list."
The social studies teacher who recommended the books is understood to have chosen them out of concern over the recent rightward drift among teenagers and the use of hate speech online.
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