The most dispiriting intellectual spectacle of the past decade would have to be the so-called “history wars”, where academics, politicians and commentators on the extreme left and right battled for domination in telling the story of modern Australia.
The history wars were essentially an exercise both in understatement and overstatement. The right-wingers tried to pretend that Australian history was nothing other than a happy story involving the orderly and humane progression of European civilisation on these shores, where no indigenous children were ever stolen, no families ever broken up, and whatever dislocation or hardship Aborigines experienced was at worst an accident, brought about by the purest of motives.
The left-wingers retaliated by branding the conservatives as liars, and telling a version of Australian history which reads like a long string of human rights abuses, with repeated acts of savagery against a wholly peaceful indigenous populace.
Without wanting to sound like a fence-sitter, and based on what I have learnt and read, the truth of our history lies somewhere between these so-called “white blindfold” and “black armband” versions. And I suspect that most Australians, who happily missed the rancour of the history wars, are capable of feeling deep pride in the overwhelmingly positive history of our nation, while also being prepared to acknowledge bad things which happened in the past.
One of the best stories to make the point is one of the saddest – the 1838 Myall Creek massacre where 28 Aboriginal men, women and children were murdered in a cold-blooded act of genocide. But the seven white men who killed them were arrested and charged with murder, and in accordance with the laws of the day, hanged for their crimes. Justice was done, and it could not have been done without the criminal justice system we were lucky to inherit through British settlement.
The launch of the new national school curriculum by Education Minister Julia Gillard will hopefully draw a line under the recent divisiveness of the history debate by equipping our young people to have an even-handed understanding of our past.
It’s a good thing that all students will be required to study history until the end of year 10. And from what has been reported so far, and judging from the information on the curriculum website, the architects of this new framework have tried hard to be neither the captives of the left nor the right in determining what our young people learn about who we are.
Unless you’re a flint-hearted revisionist it is impossible to tell the story of Aboriginal Australia without looking at the negative impact European arrival had on indigenous people. But the curriculum strives to do that without laying a guilt trip on students – and focuses on important modern landmarks such as the 1967 referendum (which included Aborigines in the census,) the Mabo decision which recognised the existence of native title over land, and the formal apology to the Stolen Generations.
And while it might have been poor marketing to lump Sorry Day alongside Anzac Day in the public explanation of the new curriculum, this oversight does not suggest that there’s been any dilution in the teaching of the importance of Anzac Day (and the decidedly less solemn Australia Day) to primary and high school students.
The one exception to this balanced approach, strangely enough, is to be found in the science curriculum of all places.
The curriculum is still in draft form and it is to be hoped that some hard-headed scientific purists roll up the sleeves of their lab coats and fight for some sense to be injected into this part of the syllabus.
As The Australian reported on Saturday, it’s not until Year 10 that science students will have any exposure to the periodic table of elements – potassium, hydrogen, all that stuff you used to learn rote-form back in the good old days. But there’s some waffly nonsense about non-western views of science, including Chinese medicine, and Aboriginal ideas of farming and land management.
Worst of all is the proposal to teach Aboriginal Dreamtime stories as part of the science stream. With due deference to the Rainbow Serpent, this is spiritualism not science, and every bit as wrong as the calls from Christian hardliners for the utter rubbish that is “creation science” and “intelligent design” to be taught alongside evolution and natural selection.
The greatest test of the curriculum will be the extent to which it can restore some basic old-fashioned principles of literacy, grammar, spelling – all the stuff that went out of fashion in the 1970s when everyone was simply encouraged to set their minds free and use their imagination, even if you could barely understand a word they had written.
The approach being taken with everyone’s favourite dysfunctional state government here in NSW stands as a warning against the mediocrity which has infected teaching in recent times.
While not everyone can, or should, attend university, there’s something desperately unambitious about the NSW Board of Studies decision to modify the second-tier NSW English Studies course to remove Shakespeare, but allow the “study” of rubbish movies such as The Matrix and the irritatingly twee television show Seachange.
If we are going to dumb down what is already a basic English course then maybe we should introduce a new subject called an Introduction to Remedial English – like a Dummy’s Guide to Dummy’s Guides.
At least we are not seeing this approach from Julia Gillard, who will have won plaudits from many parents yesterday – and probably upset the teachers unions – by arguing yesterday that too many Australian kids no longer have a basic grasp of reading and writing.
To judge the draft curriculum for yourself, go to the ACARA website - www.acara.edu.au – and follow the links. They’re the same people with responsibility for the Myschool website, so if it keeps crashing on you, be patient.
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