Creating the National Other: Opposing Images of Nationalism in South and North Korean Education

This article is a study of how the North and South Korean governments have sponsored differing national identities through their school curricula. Each regime has instructed its people in a specific definition of Korean identity by incorporating a national Other into its national identity. For both governments, national identity has been based upon historical legacies as well as a need to distinguish itself from its rival while following the idiom of it own ideology. For the South, I study Todok (Ethics) textbooks taken from the early 1960s and 1979. For the North, I examine seventeen textbooks published between 1986 and 1991.