On very rare occasions, having an incompetent rabble on the Treasury benches can be a blessing in disguise.
Those of you with long memories will recall that in the early days of the Rudd Government, the then Education Minister Julia Gillard promised that by 2011, Australia would have a national curriculum for Maths, Science, English and History.
Shortly thereafter it became obvious they weren’t going to make it and so the deadline was pushed back to 2012, then to 2013 and now it seems we’ll be lucky to see it before 2014.
Believe it or not, that’s a good thing, because as it stands, the national curriculum, in particular the history syllabus, is highly selective, disturbingly incomplete and bears a pronounced left wing bias.
Earlier this month the Gillard Government confirmed that the national curriculum will contain “embedded” content about the supposed benefits and advantages of multiculturalism.
According to a Government response to the Multicultural Advisory Council, students will be trained in “cultural competency”, and taught to “understand and appreciate the value of other cultures.”
In my experience, teachers from Prep right through to Year 12 are already extremely diligent in their efforts to foster respect and civility between all students, not as part of a multicultural agenda, but simply because it’s the right way to treat your fellow human beings.
In my view, emphasising multiculturalism, with its inherent focus on compartmentalisation and cultural sensitivities, runs the risk of undoing much of that good work by accentuating the differences between students rather than the similarities.
On the topic of cultural sensitivities, I would like to digress slightly and suggest that the process of “embedding” multiculturalism will most likely be just the first step in a feel-good campaign to stamp out all forms of racism in our schools. While it’s hard to disagree with the intention, the international evidence, suggests there may be one or two problems.
First among these is the fact that the word “racism” has become so corrupted by overuse, so robbed of its true meaning, that attempts to eradicate it can and do lead to all sorts of silliness. Witness the story of Codie Stott, a 14 year old British high school student who was arrested on suspicion of a “racial public order offence” for asking her science teacher if she could switch groups because the other kids in her group only spoke Urdu and she couldn’t understand them…
For this heinous offence, Codie had her fingerprints and mugshot taken, was relieved of her jewellery and the laces from her shoes, and then spent three hours in a cell.
She was later released without charge, (presumably once somebody with a brain found out what had happened). What is even more remarkable about this story is that nobody was embarrassed by their part in it. When asked why the school had seen fit to contact the police in the first place, the headmaster replied that the school would “not stand for racism in any form.”
Even more bizarre was the official line of the local police who insisted their treatment of the child had been in line with normal procedure for “hate crimes”.
In parts of the UK at least it appears that the war on racism in schools has contributed to the creation of a deformed moral code which permits swearing at your teachers as “self expression” but prohibits any mention of the ethnicity of your classmates as a hate crime. Let us hope we aren’t being led on a similarly demented dance.
Back home, one of the goals of the Year 10 English syllabus is to teach students to recognise “what is stated explicitly in the text and what is implied.” Turning this sort of textual analysis back on the history curriculum provides some interesting results, because while it might not be explicitly stated in the text, it is very clearly implied that Australian society (if not Western society as a whole) is unjust, unsustainable and in dire need of reform. Indeed, implicit in all aspects of the national curriculum are some noticeably partisan political assumptions.
From the body responsible for writing the curriculum (ACARA), we get the suggestion that a national curriculum is necessary to combat “complex environmental, social and economic pressures, such as climate change ...”
From the history syllabus we learn that the coursework “supports the development of students’ world views, particularly in relation to actions that require judgment about past social systems and access to and use of the Earth’s resources.” What’s more, the syllabus will allow students to develop a historical perspective on “the overuse of natural resources, the rise of environmental movements, and the global energy crisis.”
It’s not just overt environmentalism that we have to worry about. There are also some extremely questionable omissions from the history syllabus. For example, the “Rights and Freedoms” unit contained in the Year 10 curriculum teaches students about the United Nations, the US Civil Rights movement and the civil rights of Australia’s indigenous peoples. About the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the French Revolution or the American War of Independence however, it teaches them precisely nothing.
Obviously, a study of “rights and freedoms” which omits such seminal moments in their development can’t be described as anything other than hopelessly incomplete. Thanks to omission such as these, a student could be forgiven for thinking the struggle for individual rights and freedoms didn’t really kick off until after the Second World War.
That’s a bit like being taught that democracy was invented in Philadelphia in the 18th century or that the birth of communism took place in Russia in the 1930s. Not only is it wrong, it’s almost deliberately misleading.
The problems don’t end there. Year 10 history students will also be offered a unit called The Globalising World. The three topics of study on offer therein are: pop culture, the environment (including the concept of Gaia), and Migration Experiences 1945-present (which, if the subject matter is any indication, might more accurately have been titled “Push Factors”).
This is not to say that these topics are not worthy of study, it is merely to say that we are doing our kids a disservice by offering them a highly selective, heavily abridged version of the wider story, viewed through a lens of racism, exploitation and environmental degradation.
While I’m sure it’s tempting for some to view Australia’s 3.6 million schoolkids as a captive audience, ripe for indoctrination, that’s not what education should be about. History is not political science and we should resist vigorously any attempt to conflate the two.
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