The education ministry said Monday that it has recommended publishers of all eight government-approved Korean history textbooks revise hundreds of factual errors and imbalanced descriptions they were found to contain.

The ministry has reviewed the textbooks endorsed for use at high schools around the country from the 2014 school year after one of them, published by Kyohak Publishing Co., sparked the ire of opposition lawmakers, liberal historians and civic activists for containing a conservative bias and many factual errors on Korean history.

The ministry then claimed seven other textbooks needed to be scrutinized because they have similar problems.

After the review, the ministry said it has asked the publishing houses set to release the books to correct 829 instances of errors, misspellings or ideologically biased descriptions that its team of experts discovered.

Publishers and authors of the texts must submit to the ministry tables showing how the required changes were fixed by Nov. 1, the ministry said.

The authority will exercise its power to order revisions if the publishing houses refuses to make changes without any proper reason, it added. (Yonhap News)