Including comfort women for the Japanese military… Applied in 2025
The May 18 Democratization Movement, the Jeju 4/3 Incident, and the issue of comfort women for the Japanese military, which were controversial because they were omitted from the new curriculum, were specified in the textbook compilation criteria.
The Ministry of Education announced on the 27th that the Korea Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation and the Korea Foundation for the Creativity of Science will announce matters related to the examination of textbooks for textbooks in accordance with the 2022 revised curriculum. When the curriculum changes, the textbooks also change. When publishers develop new textbooks, the Ministry of Education guides them along with the guidelines for publication, such as the ‘evaluation standards’ that include the direction of textbook development and evaluation standards, and ‘points to note in compilation’.
In particular, in the case of the history department, the Ministry of Education said that the ‘learning elements’ missing from the 2022 revised curriculum were reflected in the compilation standards so that major historical events such as the 4/3 Incident, the 5/18 Democratization Movement, and the Japanese Army’Comfort Women’ might be described in textbooks. . After the announcement of the 2022 revised curriculum at the end of last year, the content was included in the compilation criteria when controversy arose because the May 18 Democratization Movement was not included in the elementary, middle, and high school social studies, history, and Korean history curricula.
In the 2022 revised curriculum, the ‘learning element’ item, which contains a list of events that must be covered in textbooks, was omitted in accordance with the general strengthening (simplification) stance of briefly describing only the core contents, and as a result, major historical events were not included in the curriculum.
Publishers and writers are free to develop textbooks, but they must follow the standards for publication in order to pass the examination. As these cases are included in the compilation criteria this time, they are expected to be included in elementary, middle and high school textbooks to be developed in the future.
In the future, publishers and writers will develop and review copies of the textbooks for verification according to the compilation standards. The Creativity Foundation is in charge of mathematics and science subjects, and the Evaluation Institute is in charge of the examination for the rest of the subjects. The textbooks that have passed the examinations of the Evaluation Institute and the Creativity Foundation are finally supplied to schools through a school-specific selection process.
The textbooks for the 3rd and 4th grade of elementary school, the 1st grade of middle school, and the common and elective subjects of high school will be applied to the school site from the new semester in 2025. The textbooks for the 5th and 6th grades of elementary school and the 2nd grade of middle school will be applied in 2026, and the textbooks for the 3rd grade of middle school will be applied in 2027.