The forthcoming article “Teaching the past, informing the present? School history education and attitudes toward foreign countries” by Soyoung Lee and Jeongmin Park is summarized by the author(s) below.
A common assumption in both scholarship and policy debate is that history education emphasizing past atrocities and historical grievances sustains international rivalry—that students who learn about past grievances become less willing to cooperate with the country responsible for them. Our paper examines the theoretical steps underlying this assumption and finds that the connection may be weaker than previously thought.
We test the effect of history education on students’ attitudes using original data from 841 students in 34 classrooms across 17 high schools in Seoul, South Korea. The Korean case allows us to examine two related forms of educational exposure. Korean history textbooks portray Japan’s colonial rule of Korea very negatively, emphasizing forced labor, sexual slavery, and ethnic violence against Koreans. At the same time, textbooks differ meaningfully in how they portray the historical role of the United States, with some emphasizing more positive interactions and others adopting a more negative perspective. These features allow us to examine two questions: How does school history education emphasizing past grievances affect students’ attitudes toward cooperation with the country today? And do students exposed to different historical narratives develop different attitudes toward other countries?
We find that history education had a substantial impact on students’ historical memory—what they understand to be historical facts and how they evaluate past actors and events. Students who had completed their Korean history coursework evaluated historical actions of Japan more negatively compared to their pre-education counterparts, and students exposed to different textbook portrayals of the United States likewise developed correspondingly different assessments of the US role in Korean history.
These changes, however, did not consistently extend to attitudes toward present-day countries or contemporary foreign policy. Students post-education were not at all less supportive of cooperation with present-day Japan. Similarly, differences in textbook portrayals of the United States had much weaker effects on students’ attitudes toward the contemporary U.S.-South Korean relationship.
These findings suggest that learning about negative historical interactions—or even, holding negative opinions about a country’s past behavior—by itself does not necessarily translate into hostile or less cooperative attitudes toward countries today. Our finding that memories of historical grievances do not necessarily reduce support for cooperation between countries is especially notable in light of the East Asian context, where such historical where such historical memories are cited as one of the major obstacles to cooperation.
At the same time, the results should not be interpreted as implying that school curricula are politically unimportant. History education significantly shapes what students understand as historical facts and how they interpret past events. Because disagreements over historical facts can themselves become sources of domestic and international conflict (e.g., territorial borders), decisions about what is included in school curricula remain consequential. More broadly, our findings suggest that understanding the effect of conflict history on rivalries requires distinguishing between the formation of historical memory and the translation of those memories into present-day political attitudes.
About the Author(s): Soyoung Lee is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and a research fellow at the MacMillan Center at Yale University and Jeongmin Park is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University. Their research “Teaching the past, informing the present? School history education and attitudes toward foreign countries“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.