'Comfort women' and a lesson in how history is shaped in California textbooks
Flowers lie at the Glendale memorial to "comfort women." (Roger Wilson / Glendale News Press)
ter nearly a decade of delays, California educators released a draft guideline that will shape how history is taught to students across the state.
The nearly 1,000-page "History/Social Science framework" received little public attention and went largely unreported in mainstream media when it was announced in December.
But in multicultural California, that hardly means it went unnoticed.
In Japanese and Korean communities on both sides of the Pacific, the guidelines have been breathlessly covered in news reports and generated rival petitions signed by thousands on each side.
The brouhaha concerns two sentences describing what will be taught in 10th-grade world history classes about the women known as "comfort women," who were coerced into sexual slavery in wartime brothels for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The passage has been met with celebration among Korean American groups that have campaigned to bring attention to the issue in the U.S., and concern from some Japanese groups that consider it an unfairly negative portrayal of their home country.
The Japanese and Korean groups are only the latest to bring their historic contentions to California classrooms, where the subject of world history is increasingly entangled with questions of personal identity and family history rather than a set of supposed facts that designated experts hand down from ivory towers.
Until recently world history focused mainly on European history in U.S. high schools. As the scope expands to other parts of the world, California classrooms are becoming battlegrounds in which recent immigrant groups wrestle over whether and how their ancestors' stories are told to the state's next generation.
In the years that the committee of educators has been working on the guidelines, Hindu and Sikh groups, Polish Americans and Persian historic societies have each come before the authors of the framework with requests on how their history is depicted.
The community groups who spoke at public meetings about their history far outnumbered teachers or educational professionals, said Nancy McTygue, who co-chaired the committee crafting the framework until last year.
"People were angry, people were pleading. People were excited, happy. Every emotion you can think of," said McTygue, herself a former teacher who has taught high school history. "History is an interpretive discipline, and everybody's got their own interpretation."
James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Assn., said history should get revised as scholars and educators learn more about the world, and that the increased number of voices getting involved would ultimately be a blessing for California students.
"The conversation is going to be a hell of a lot more interesting and more contentious, but that's a good thing," he said. "The conversation is going to reflect a wider perspective on 'Comfort women' and a lesson in how history is shaped in California textbooks - LA Times: