History Education in the News
Posted in History Education News - World History
Source: The Korea Times
Date: 23 November 2011
Scholars held an international conference under the theme “Multilateral Dialogue on History Education and Textbooks: East Asia, Europe and the Middle East” at Tokyo University on Oct. 22-23. They are history textbook experts from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and eight countries including South Korea.
The Seoul-based Northeast Asian History Foundation sponsored the event. The participants represented their respective country which was once a perpetrator or victim of aggression, occupation or colonial rule. Some nations are still suffering from such conflict.
In their theses presented to the conference, the participants introduced their experiences about how scholars of both aggressors and victimized countries worked together to publish common history textbooks and teach schoolchildren common historical facts.
Scholars from France and Germany presented their papers under the title of “Between Ambitious Goals and Stark Realities.” They shed light on the difficulties in the process of writing three volumes of common history textbooks. They stressed that they managed to overcome the difficulties and complete the writing process, under the motto of “Let’s move forward fair and square to achieve our goals if the direction is right.”
