Korean History Education in the United States

Abstract

This article was written as a part of a project to design an introductory Korean history course conducted in English for foreign students. Normally, the lectures would have been tailored to accommodate the students’ background knowledge in Korean history. Because of the diversity of the student population, however, it was difficult to measure their background knowledge in Korean history as a group. Therefore, we decided to focus on the way Korean history is taught in the U.S. public education system. I picked the U.S. since it is the nation where Korean studies is most advanced outside Korea. Since the educational reform of the 1980s, the U.S. education system has emphasized importance of history education. Another part of the reform was the attempt to improve the quality of education by standardizing textbooks and evaluative methods. In addition, the debate on what should be taught in history classes offered by public schools began to attract more attention as the debate on how to structure the standard history textbooks intensified. Putting aside the political agendas, at the center of the debate was the position of European history in world history. In other words, the main disagreement was on whether world history should be centered on European history as it was traditionally done or be restructured to better accommodate the kind of global perspective that springs from cultural relativism. The debate is still alive and will continue to be relevant as research in history continues to advance. Analysis of history education standards for K-12 in three relatively large U.S. states (California, Texas, and Florida) indicates that there is not enough time allocated for world history, with the exception of California. Again with the exception of California, Korean history also takes up only a miniscule part of world history education. As shown in the examples of three U.S. universities with good Korean studies programs (UCLA, Harvard University, Columbia University), education in Korean history in U.S. universities is very much inferior compared with that of Chinese or Japanese history. An exception is UCLA which offers many more classes in Korean studies than others. The courses that they offer also tend to focus on social or cultural history rather than the more traditional forms of courses that focus on political, institutional, or economical history.