Controversial History Education in Asian Contexts

Mark Baildon, Kah Seng Loh, Ivy Maria Lim, Gül İnanç, Junaidah Jaffar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135014209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching History

This book examines both history textbook controversies AND teaching historical controversy in Asian contexts. The different perspectives provided by the book's authors offer numerous insights, examples, and approaches for understanding historical controversy to provide a practical gold mine for scholars and practitioners. The book provides case studies of history textbook controversies ranging from treatments of the Nanjing Massacre to a comparative treatment of Japanese occupation in Vietnamese and Singaporean textbooks to the differences in history textbooks published by secular and Hindu nationalist governments in India. It also offers a range of approaches for teaching historical controversy in classrooms. These include Structured Academic Controversy, the use of Japanese manga, teaching controversy through case studies, student facilitated discussion processes, and discipline-based approaches that can be used in history classrooms. The book's chapters will help educational researchers and curricularists consider new approaches for curriculum design, curriculum study, and classroom research.

Part I

Settings

1 Introduction

Controversy, history and history education in Asia

Loh Kah Seng, Mark Baildon, Ivy Maria Lim, Gül İnanç, and Junaidah Jaffar

There has been growing interest in analysing history textbooks and history curricula to understand how they present particular ‘truths’ about the past.¹ Many of these studies highlight the controversial nature of what is included or excluded in history curricula and textbooks and how assumptions and ideologies of race, gender, nationalism and imperialism, for example, are often promoted either explicitly or implicitly.² At the same time, new approaches to teaching school history recognize the importance of students adopting a critical attitude to historical facts and evidence to develop and apply thinking processes essential to historical awareness and interpretation. Teaching historical controversy is often seen as having the potential to develop important historical thinking skills and understandings as well as prepare students to effectively participate in society. However, highlighting history textbook controversies or teaching historical controversy is fraught with many challenges for educators. Robert Stradling’s study of history education in Europe highlights the role of historical controversy in history education, yet also points to the challenge of how historical controversy might be handled in classrooms:

If one of the main aims in teaching history is to help students to understand the present and how we got to where we are now, then teaching about controversial and sensitive issues of the past is inescapable. Sometimes these issues divide groups or whole societies or neighbouring countries. Such disputes may be about what happened in the past, why it happened, who started it, who was right, who has the best case to argue, and who has been most selective with the evidence. The question is not should we teach them but how should we teach them.

(Stradling 2001: 100)

Drawing attention to textbook and curricular controversies and teaching controversy in schools is typically viewed as a risky enterprise to be handled with care. Historical controversy, history textbooks, and the teaching of history are all inevitably embedded in ideological, political, and cultural contexts. They are bound by particular values, world views, and power relations that operate in a given society.³ Nation-states typically use history education to shape national identities and collective memory (Wertsch 2008). Official historical narratives and history curriculum provide justification of present-day governance by shaping the ways people understand the past and the present. This makes a contextually sensitive understanding of historical controversy, the production of history curriculum and textbooks, and the teaching of historical controversy especially important.

While historians see history as problematic and contested because of the many complex factors that shape understandings of the past and the different interpretations this makes possible, national leaders and public officials, such as those that create educational policy and curriculum, typically create a singular useable past that leaves little room for ambiguity or debate (Wertsch 2008). The effort to promulgate collective memory and create a national identity often trumps teaching historical thinking as a disciplinary or critical practice. History curriculum and the teaching of history inevitably entail entanglements among issues related to the formation of identities, social memory, emotions, and the politics, norms and needs of the nation-state (Zembylas and Kambani 2012). When it comes to history education, this is why so much is considered at stake by political leaders and education officials.

In their review of literature on strategies for presenting and teaching historical controversy in classrooms, Zembylas and Kambani (2012) broadly sketch a range of approaches that might be used: creating a supportive emotional classroom environment based on trust; being sensitive to students’ backgrounds, ideas, and emotions; creating classroom norms and regular opportunities for students to engage with controversial issues; recognizing and critically examining multiple perspectives and interpretations; and using appropriate classroom discussion formats and procedures. However, the way these approaches are enacted in classrooms by teachers will depend on the aims and purposes of schooling and curriculum in particular contexts and the cultural, political or ideological contexts that shape curriculum making and teaching. These approaches are never neutral and as Zembylas and Kambani point out, present several challenges: ‘emotional discomfort of teachers; emotional resistance from students; lack of professional development; inadequate teaching pedagogies, and lack of appropriate instructional materials; and, finally, nation-state structures and norms’ (Zembylas and Kambani 2012: 111). All of these are refracted differently by particular contexts and will need to be addressed in contextually sensitive ways.

This volume offers a new intervention in education studies by situating textbook controversies and the teaching of historical controversy in Asian contexts or with reference to Asian histories. It considers why, where, when, and to whom particular histories, curricula, and ways of teaching may be controversial, and how they may become acceptable (Camicia 2008).

Controversy in the Asian context

This book highlights both problems and possibilities in teaching controversial topics in Asia. There have been many works, mostly American and Western European in origin, on the educational and social value of such an enterprise.⁴ Conversely, ‘memory wars’ over the content of history textbooks in East Asia have drawn considerable scholarly interest.⁵ However, in the first instance, the Western scholarship has tended to lack an understanding of local situations in considering how far pedagogical strategies from certain parts of the world, such as Structured Academic Controversy, are applicable in others. To some degree, it rather optimistically assumes that these ideas, which originated in and are intended to reinforce liberal democratic contexts, constitute a universal toolkit that can easily be transplanted elsewhere. In the second instance, the work on East Asian history textbooks often paints a grim picture of how history and memory are constrained by national imperatives, impeding regional reconciliation and becoming a political battlefield for the fraught international relations between states (Sneider 2011). This reveals a tension between Western ways of researching, writing and teaching history and the use of the past in Asia as an instrument for nation-building programs; it suggests that Western pedagogies would struggle to find a nurturing context to work in non-Western contexts (Muller 2011).

This volume takes a middle path between these two approaches by underlining the diversity, complexity and fluidity of politics and history in Southeast and East Asia. It argues that the teaching of contentious topics is to varying degrees viable in the two regions, while also being sensitive to the subtleties and obstacles that complicate this potential. On the one hand, in underlining the salience of context, the book acknowledges the recent history of political authoritarianism in Southeast and East Asia after World War Two, and how this political culture is further embedded within a long tradition of social deference to authority. Compared to Latin American and Western countries, academic freedom is limited in many Asian universities, ranging from outright taboo topics to ‘informal bans’ on politically sensitive subjects. In Singapore, the latter are known as ‘out of bounds’ (OB) subjects whose public discussion is discouraged; but in Indonesia, Vietnam and China, academics who opposed the state have been dismissed or even jailed (Altbach 2001). The political context is inimical to alternative interpretations to ‘national’ narratives that are robustly engineered by the ruling political elites of Asia. In this context, histories that do not support the unity of the nation – of minority groups, of leftwing socialists and communists – have been marginalized and silenced (Bayly and Harper 2008). Historical controversy in the public sphere in many Asian countries has long been muted.

On the other hand, this volume finds evidence in recent years that the hegemony of the Asian state in the production of history and memory is not complete or unchallenged. It argues that Asian societies have both the social resources and ability to embrace, debate and utilize controversial pasts. In part, this possibility has arisen from the fluid nature of politics in individual countries, in some cases moving towards a more open and accountable political system such as those in the West, in other cases culminating in outright regime change that makes possible the exploration of hitherto suppressed pasts, and at times as a result of the unintended, unpredictable efforts of state-led political and economic reform. The Asian ‘mini-glasnost’ has also derived from a host of factors – from the ending of the Cold War and the growing acceptability of leftist and communist pasts in public discourse, and, with the end of the bipolar conflict, from the centrifugal effects of globalization in weakening the reach and authority of the state. The possibility of change towards the nation’s history is also due to the preservation of counter-hegemonic memories at community and family levels; to the emergence of social media technology allowing for the dissemination and consumption of these memories; and to the emergence of younger generations of Asians who are psychologically less attached to the founding national myths of their elders.

Asian authoritarianism and its shifts

The history of Southeast and East Asia after World War Two oversaw a process of decolonization and the formation of nation-states led for the most part by authoritarian governments. These regimes were ideologically diverse: they were communist in China and former French Indochina; anti-communist in Malaysia, post-Sukarno Indonesia, and post-US occupation Japan; military-led in Thailand (also anti-communist) and Burma; and pragmatic-developmental in Singapore (also anti-communist). What these countries share in common, however, is in the concentration of executive and legislative power in the state, and the absence of institutional checks and balances that characterize the political systems of the United States and Western Europe. Admittedly, there were important instances of broad-based movements for liberal democracy and of social politics in Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s. This was also the case in the Philippines, which has witnessed three separate expressions of ‘People’s Power’ since 1986, the latest in 2001 removing yet another president; the Philippines may be seen as being closest to the Western model of liberal democracy in Southeast Asia. In Japan, too, a relatively robust system of academic freedom was established under American occupation after World War Two (Altbach 2001).

However, for most of the postwar period, democracy in Southeast and East Asia has been conservatively defined and delimited by the state, rather than by the citizenry. The classic example is the ‘guided democracy’ ideal espoused by Sukarno from 1957 to 1966, where the supposedly weak status of a new state and a developing economy in postcolonial Indonesia is held to justify the creation of a strong executive. One can also point to Mao Zedong’s role as the ‘great helmsman’ of communist China, transforming Marxist-Leninist notions of democracy into a cult of personality. Even in the Philippines, we may speak of a form of ‘cacique democracy’ that lies underneath the veneer of American-style liberalism, where economic power is controlled by a tiny elite of land-owning families.

The political authoritarianism of Southeast and East Asia is not surprising when viewed within the long tradition of deference towards authority in most of the countries’ pre-modern histories (Owen 2005). This is obviously the case for East Asian states and Singapore, which have subscribed to Confucian notions of political leadership. In Asian countries that took the communist path, the principle of political morality whereby leaders were expected to demonstrate high moral standards and the ruled expected to comply obediently was also concordant with the Confucianist ethos of societal mobilization (Neher 1994). Other countries, however, have also appealed to the concept of ‘Asian values’ that was offered as an alternative to Western liberal democracy in the 1990s. In Malaysia, the Malay-led Barisan Nasional government exhorted the importance of Asian values that, allegedly, were more historically and culturally appropriate to the country. While the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–8 has greatly weakened the notion of an ‘Asian way’, Asia’s political elites have continued to seek historical and cultural explanations that emphasize consensus over debate. In this way, Asian countries are akin to ‘theatre states’: they seek to perform their modernity and authority through ritual and drama, but are otherwise adverse to public criticism and contestation that penetrate the harmonious facade.⁶

This authoritarianism has made it difficult to interrogate the founding myths of the national histories of Southeast and East Asia. Foremost among the myths is the birth of the nation and the typecasting of its ‘heroes’ and ‘enemies’. Struggles against imperialism and then World War Two and Japanese occupation are commonly held to have galvanized the people against foreign domination, constituting a political ‘big bang’, even though the war had less political impact on some countries than others (McCoy 1980). The founding myths, designed to provide an overarching unity for new nations, are controversial because they often privileged political elites who triumphed in the struggle for nationalist leadership after the war. Despite their contributions to the anti-colonial struggle, the histories of communist and leftwing socialist movements in many countries were marginalized in national narratives. Communist and leftist groups were defeated by both military and political means in Malaya and Singapore, and in both countries even revisionist scholarship on the left wing has tended to emphasize its non-communist basis.⁷ In the Philippines, the populist, communist-led Huk rebellion was put down soon after the war ended, as were communist revolts in rural parts of the country in the 1970s. Communist movements were also violently defeated in Indonesia and Burma in the 1960s and in Thailand in the mid-1970s. In 1987, a new wave of political and social activism was suppressed as being communist-inspired in Malaysia and Singapore. In the period of the Cold War, to accuse locally-rooted radical activism as being manipulated by a global ideological force based in Moscow or Beijing was politically expedient.

Nevertheless, authoritarianism has not been absolute but has been tempered in recent years. Pro-democracy and left-leaning mass movements have been part of Southeast Asia’s postcolonial history, especially in the Philippines where a strong civil society presence is the enduring legacy of the broad-based movement that unseated Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Elsewhere, the Asian Financial Crisis has provided impetus for political change, particularly in Indonesia, where it heralded the downfall of long-time strongman Suharto and a period of greater political pluralism. In Malaysia, too, the Barisan Nasional government has since faced a serious political challenge from a coalition of pro-democracy and Islamic parties, and from the bersih (meaning ‘clean’ in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Settings
• Part II Controversies in history textbooks
• Part III Teaching historical controversy
• Index