Australian History: Gillard must listen to history teachers

Disappointingly, Julia Gillard has signaled that the “me too-ism” that saw Rudd successfully checkmate his way to the Prime Ministership is still very much alive in Labor ranks.

She is reported in the media today as saying that she believed Australia was “settled” rather than “invaded”.

“I would say that Australia was settled,” she said on television. “I can understand that many indigenous Australians would say that it was invaded….”

Why should it only be indigenous Australians who might want to use the word “invasion”? The wording of Gillard’s comment implies that no non-Aboriginal Australian would accept that an invasion began in 1788. There are a significant and growing number of non-Aboriginal Australians who are quite comfortable with the notion that an invasion took place. Or is it only in reference to the post-colonial era that we are meant to take offence should a phrase like “Japan’s plans to settle Australia during WWII” ever, God forbid, be uttered?

But leaving that aside, what is the future of History as an area of study in Australian schools?

We know that John Howard sought to narrowly define an Australian history curriculum for Years 9 and 10. The history of his attempt to control this process and its outcomes is well-documented on the NSW History Teachers Association website (here). Howard intervened over the top of Education Minister Bishop’s head and appointed a hand-picked group of right-wing cultural warriors to create a curriculum that corresponded to his ideological bent.

The resulting Guide to the teaching of Australian History in Years 9 and 10 has been widely criticized. It is structured around Topics, Milestone Events, and People. The Milestones are more like millstones around the necks of teachers and students: impossibly content rich and typically “mainstream”.

This Guide must be dumped by Gillard.

Hopefully she will read right-wing ideologue Kevin Donnelly’s piece in the Australian (Dec 4, 2007, p. 12) in which he gloats that Gillard’s comments are “evidence of the power and longevity of John Howard’s influence on Australian politics.”

The new Labor Government must refer a national History curriculum to its proposed National Curriculum Board, and the education “experts” on that Board must seek out and listen to the voice of the professional associations for the teaching of History in each State and Territory.

Never again must History teachers be excluded from the process for the development of their curriculum.

As progressive educators, we advocate a socially critical curriculum.

We advocate knowledge of the history of human occupation of this country and of the ability to understand sequential or narrative structures applying to that history.

Above all, we advocate the acknowledgement of multiple perspectives, and that such perspectives exist on the question of the history of human occupation, for it is embedded in the culture of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders that they have been here since “time immemorial”, that they have been here “from the start of time” and that concepts such as 50,000 years or 60,000 years are not part of their culture.

(Having said that, when students see a physical representation of time, it can be a humbling experience for some. I used to get them to count out 60 bricks along a section of our school’s Lecture Theatre, with each brick representing a thousand years in the human occupation of Australia. The last fifth of the very last brick always looks so tiny - the entire span of post-invasion Australia!)

We advocate that students be able to distinguish between a primary and a secondary source, and to recognize the value of each; that they can distinguish between fact and opinion, and be able to detect bias or prejudice.

We advocate exposing students to learning about family and local history so that they see themselves as part of history and understand that history can be investigated through artefacts as well as text books, and that artefacts can be classified and catalogued and exhibited for the sharing of historical information and insight.

We advocate students developing the understanding that values don't fall out of the sky but are created by people in different circumstances for particular purposes, and that while one set of values may lead to someone believing that “The story of Australia encompasses settlement and expansion…” (Howard’s The Guide…), another set of values might lead someone to believing that “The story of Australia encompasses unsettlement and encroachment…” Neither view should be forced down the throats of students, but they should be able to identify which of their own values encourages them to lean towards one belief rather than the other.

Gillard may be persuaded to abolish Howard’s History curriculum, for in the same article she also stated that she “supported students being exposed to different interpretations of Australian history and reaching their own conclusions”.

That, at least, is an improvement on the Howard model.

……………………

For an excellent article on the exposure of students to different perspectives, see the article by John DeRose in the Fall 2007 edition of Rethinking Schools magazine, called “History Textboooks: ‘Theirs’ and ‘Ours’”. Unfortunately, it is not yet linked to in the on-line version of the publication.