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High school history textbooks have long been the subject of controversy both within and between nations. Which is why they’re now the subject of a comparative analysis project by Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center. Associate director Daniel Sneider says that we’re creating separate memories of the past.
I took a trip through the Phillipines last year and stopped at a war memorial. It commemorated the phillipinos who died in World War II and a war I never heard of before, The Phillipine-American War. My old high school text book referred it as an insurgence, devoting just one sentence to the conflict.
This is so true, and it's something should be paid more attention to.
If anyone is interested in learning more, I'd recommend Laura Hein and Mark Selden's book Censoring History, which includes German textbooks in the analysis. While the Japanese Ministry of Education's "guidelines" have proven inhibitive of full accounting of Japanese atrocities, Chinese and Korean textbooks are subjected to much more stringent censorship. I fully sympathize with Korean and Chinese protests against the most conservative Japanese textbook (which has only been adopted by one school district), neither country has demonstrated interest in candor about their own history.
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