A while back, Kevin Rudd proclaimed the history wars over. He may have been right, at least insofar as the combatants left on the field are looking decidely ghostly; witness the non-event of the launch of Keith Windschuttle’s latest tome. Yesterday’s grapeshot over the history curriculum will, likely, not be followed up by another offensive – the Coalition, and the usual suspects, will move on to criticising the government’s health announcements.
Yet the influence of the Howard-era battles remains – and its most significant legacy might be the fact that history is embedded in the national curriculum at all. This is a major shift from its folding into SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) at P-10 levels in many states.
In an interesting piece for Crikey today, Tony Taylor looks at the reception and implementation of the history curriculum:
The shameful moments came when, uncertain how to tackle a curriculum that was being hyped as traditionalist?—?and while Tony Abbott was pictured crouched in earnest conversation with an Aboriginal elder?—?some Opposition MPs started to count mentions of Aborigines in the curriculum. Should there be a quota on references to Aborigines? Give me a break! How would I feel, I asked myself, if I were an indigenous Australian and yet again in the newspapers I read that my culture’s presence in the nation’s schools was unwelcome?
When both sides of Australian politics acknowledge, with sincerity and generosity, the value and contribution of our indigenous heritage, the country will have truly grown up. Until then, we wait, but not with bated breath.
There were other knee-jerk reactions, too. Gallipoli watchers were at work. Wilful misreaders were prominent. Conspiracy theorists abounded. SOSE educators, a vanishing breed, said the curriculum was too narrow. Conservative commentators, a stubborn sort, said, variously, it was too broad, too stodgy, too socialist and a bit too Asian. More generally though, the new history draft was well received.
But, as Taylor argued, there’s always a potential gap between policy text and pedagogical practice. He goes on to discuss the absence of expertise in history at secondary and primary schools, and crucially for the future of the curriculum, in university Education Faculties.
The whole thing is worth a read.
NB: Previous LP discussion of the draft national curriculum is here.
I would trust Tony Taylor’s judgement. Knows some history, knows the teaching of history.
If we were to teach Australian history against the backdrop of pre-1788 British history, would the History Wars kick in at the Battle of Mount Badon, the Battle of Chester, the Battle of Brunanburh or the Norman Conquest?
Yeah that was a great piece by Tony, really got to the heart of the issue. I couldn’t believe the querulous complaints about not enough Britain. My nana might agree – like Joe Public gives a shit.
I do have to wonder about the ambitiousness of some of these curricula, if you read them literally. The science one struck me as expecting very, very sophisticated, nuanced understandings from the average Year 10 student.
Does anybody else have this sense?
I was rooly disappointed with Julia on A.M. on Monday:
Yes, took the Liberals frame in its entirety, that a less than glowing account of the early colonisation of Australia by the British Empah constitutes a “black arm band view of history”. Glad to see you’re giving Howard and Windschuttle a free kick Julia. They should ignore petty idiocies like “black arm band” and review the teaching of history with an independent eye, rather than adopting wholesale the silly and mean-minded categorisations of the previous government. But that would require some imagination. I guess Julia thought she was opposing the Liberals’ legacy, but she’s accepting it by using that language.
But then, I’m always rooly disappointed with Julia these days.
Well, no Samantha, sorry day is not historical. Like the last 3 years of the Fraser Govrernment, the Hawke and Keating Governments, and the Howard Government Sorry Day is not historical. Its contemporary. It takes thirty years, which is what Julia probably shoulda told Samantha. But then again, she’s not an historian, is she?
btw, where are they going to find the teachers? I suppose one thing this new curriculum will do is show how bad the old one is/was, and how ill-educated many of our teachers are nowadays.
(But then again I always thought there was a difference in the literary quality of the Daily Telegraph and the works of Shakespeare. Hint: Shakespeare was literature.) Fortunately I was never exposed to post modernist bullshit in history.
A lot of the people who are braying loudest about the role of history in the curriculum remind me of our collective drunken uncles’ attitude towards exercise: they know it’s Good For You, but they’d never take it themselves…
“Gallipoli watchers were at work”
Interesting, what could they possibly want to see? Is it ‘black armband’ to teach that we were an invasion force, and that Turkey posed no military threat to Australia at all?
That’s just objective fact, to use the language of positivists. Do they want to rewrite the books so that Suvla Bay was located somewhere west of Darwin, overrun by Turks who eat babies or somesuch?
Learnt everything I needed to about gallipoli history here.
Wash your mouth out, Helen!
Gillard also uses the term “White Bindfold” to balance it. I don’t think you would have heard many Liberal culture-warriors utter that one!
Lighten up! Julia might not be the Messiah (who is?), but she is far from a naughty girl…
Helen @ 5, I’m thinking increasingly that Julia is good at politics but not much chop at policy.
A great pity.
Robert @ 4:
My wife picked this up straight away, but at the Prep/Year 1 level.
Barry McGaw’s background is in the assessment of the realised curriculum to use Tony Taylor’s four phase notion of curriculum, but in order to understand that he would have to look also at the enacted curriculum ie what happens in schools and at the inputs to education, of which the stated curriculum is but one.
So I’m sure he has he has excellent insights into where the strengths and weaknesses are, the more so because he has been involved in the comparative performance across countries. But I’m thinking that working on the stated curriculum and how this moves to enactment would be new to him, and typical of this government there is a lack of realism about the time frames (not his fault).
I didn’t do much history at school. The way it was taught, it was deadly dull – memorising names of kings and generals, endless dates, lines on maps, names of battles, dates of plagues, numbers of dead, etc, etc.
I fled at the first opportunity to take another elective. It took several decades and living in other countries to see history in another light.
Hope they manage to teach history in a different way, in the new curriculum? For example, why don’t they give the lead-up to a conflict situation, then ask the kids how it should be resolved? Then discuss how it actually was resolved, and the outcome on all sides. Then ask the kids if they can think of a similar contemporary situation? What would they recommend, if they were advising the PM?
In other words, rather than a reaallly boring list of facts to memorise for tests and exams, why not use history as a set of models (or mind-maps) for how societies operate and problem-solve?
And why not discuss how countries, societies and cultures are affected over long periods by the relative success or fallout from previous national crises, and past efforts to resolve issues.
Perhaps the better history teachers already do something like this? Hope so, for the kids’ sakes.
I’ll make a couple of comments so this won’t be one big essay.
A big thrust of Taylor’s critique is that we aren’t within cooee of having the specially trained teachers to implement the history curriculum. Back when I was studying education there was a sociologist called Basil Bernstein who said the eduction authorities had never taken the personnel implications seriously. Unfortunately if you do the personnel issues are essentially insoluble.
This relates back to what I think is a central issue in the insulation affair. There was an interesting discussion early on with Geoff Gallop and Peter Shergold on RN. Shergold’s view was that implementation strategies in quite a detailed fashion should be considered at the policy development stage. There is no use having a policy if it can’t be implemented.
Sorry, Ruddster and Gillard, but this is going to be a public administration FAIL.
To approach this from a different angle, Annabel Astbury has a worrying thought that the curriculum is simply overloaded with content the students are meant to know by the end of it. She thinks that the problem is so bad that it will subvert the stated aims of the curriculum:
So what did Labor intend – to have kids learn the skills of acquiring historical knowledge, or just the knowledge itself?
I’d lay odds it was the latter when Kevin07 was putting together his policies for the election. But the history advisory group knew that education is about empowering kids to be able to do stuff, not just regurgitate content, or the history curriculum would be a joke. So they whacked a decent introduction in there, but then didn’t follow through with a curriculum statement that could be enacted to realise their (stated) intent.
I’m saying this on the strength of what Astbury said. She struck me as knowing where things are at.
Third and probably last.
In the post Mark said:
Ain’t that the truth, but unfortunately it’s an arse-about way of going about things.
In Year’s 11 and 12, the content disciplines tend to reign supreme and it’s centrally about gate-keeping for the subject disciplines and the professions. For the students it provides opportunities, which at that level they choose, but for the gate-keepers it’s a sifting and sorting process to find the able and the worthy.
In compulsory education, ethically you have to have a damn good reason for subjecting kids to an institutional press for 11 years. The excuse is that it not only prepares them for full creative and productive participation in society, and the capacity to grow to the extent where they can change that society. It’s also supposed to be an opportunity for personal growth, for finding your feet as a person and developing your personal skills and capacities. It’s more about who you are, about you’re being, becoming and what you can do. Also how you relate.
You can probably add a bit more, but you get the idea. Back in the 70s we used to talk about education for freedom rather than oppression and conformism. People were actually interested in that kind of stuff and took it seriously.
So you look at the whole of the task and then split the ‘universe’ up into manageable bits. That’s how you get ‘learning areas’ or even ‘key’ learning areas if you want to nod towards the back-to-basics mob with names like Language Arts and, yes, Study of Society and the Environment. In developing this further you do recognise the culture you are in and ways of knowing that are well established, some of them perhaps based on essential human nature. That’s another argument.
(If you want to think about the human nature thing one place to look is Howard Gardiner’s multiple intelligences. There are seven in all and each is said to be related to an identifiable part of the brain. In each you must have savants and a bounded skill that is lost if the relevant part of the brain is injured. The following subject areas, or near subject areas are based on separate intelligences in Gardiner’s scheme – language, mathematics, music, physical education and human relationships education. Science, close but no cigar as such. History – nowhere near. More here, I think in the first evah guest post on LP.)
Carving out History sounds great, but chances are that as you add to these four subject areas you are going to find “essential” bits that fall through the cracks. We’ve actually been there and done that from the 1950s onwards. Those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it!
So I for one reject Taylor’s sneer at SOSE. I’m not saying History isn’t worth inclusion. It’s just that carving it out in the first cut and then looking at what’s left is not the way to go.
Elise,
Maybe they could get the kids to assess some primary sources? (Actually, I thought they already did that. You know, Thucydides and Herodotus etc.)
Though how Year Ten students would cope with reading Casanova, I don’t know.
Paul @15, I suspect you are talking about history as taught at uni level.
Or else it has changed mightily from when I was force-fed it in high school?
I wasn’t making a case for whether kids could “assess” primary sources, in the first instance. Rather, it might be possible to explore history as a way of thinking about actions and decisions at a national level.
Brian sums it up well @14: “…it not only prepares them for full creative and productive participation in society, and the capacity to grow to the extent where they can change that society. It’s also supposed to be an opportunity for personal growth, for finding your feet as a person and developing your personal skills and capacities. It’s more about who you are, about you’re being, becoming and what you can do. Also how you relate.”
Researching and assessing primary sources can come later, at uni, if people still want to continue in that direction. Some, like me, would probably still bail-out when another opportunity presented itself. But at least we might have enjoyed the subject and learnt something useful from it?
What makes life interesting is that we all have different interests, which overlap at times, but don’t duplicate. Not everyone is deeply in love with applied maths and interested in its finer points, for example, and not everyone is deeply in love with history to an equivalent degree. Ideally, we all push the boat along, to the best of our different abilities…
@12 – Elise, your comments from that one on seem to indicate that you haven’t looked at the curriculum. Surely it would be worthwhile actually reading it if you’re interested in what’s in it, rather than speculating? We provide these links for a reason – to encourage informed discussion.
Oh, yeah, its little ones, isn’t it. When I was a kid in peimary school we had this thing called Social Studies which taught us about John Curtin, the Murrumbidgee Irrigation area, the cotton industry, and, of course, the British Empire, in the days when the world was coloured red … what on earth am I rabbitting on about? Anyway, you get the idea.
Elise, I gather by the mid 70s, kids were using primary sources in high school. (I didn’t, way back, though I do remember reading a fascinating book about Ancient Crete and the decipherment of Linear B.)
“A big thrust of Taylor’s critique is that we aren’t within cooee of having the specially trained teachers to implement the history curriculum.”
This surprises me. When I took History honours, quite a few of the people in the class said that they intended to do a Dip Ed afterwards and become history teachers.
I mean, it’s not as if jobs for historians leap out at you in droves when you open the employment section of the newspaper. Teaching or government: what other options are there?
I’d wager there are far more teachers with a 3 or 4 year major in history, than with a major in physics or mathematics.
Mark @17, you are right, I didn’t read the curriculum. I simply expressed a hope that history would not be the ghastly subject it was when I was in high school.
Paul @18: “Elise, I gather by the mid 70s, kids were using primary sources in high school.”
Mid-70′s I was at uni. We didn’t use primary sources.
“Social Studies which taught us about John Curtin, the Murrumbidgee Irrigation area, the cotton industry, and, of course, the British Empire, in the days when the world was coloured red…”
Yep. Ghastly, and deadly dull.
Year 5:
Year 6:
http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/Explore/History
Paulus @ 19, this is from Taylor’s article:
Then read the paragraphs following those.
Not everyone who does tertiary history studies would want to teach. This is a few decades ago, but I recall that 50% of students studying music at tertiary level at that time did nothing work-wise with it.
At the risk of being beaten up, for venturing here again without reading the full curriculum (except for those excerpts kindly provided by Mark @21), there was one further thought I would like to tender for consideration. Different thinking styles.
The link from Brian @14 to an earlier piece on different mental skills/abilities got me wondering about why those history teachers in my past taught the way they did. Checking with better half, he found history every bit as excruciating, and volunteered independently that he fled the topic at the first opportunity.
Did we both just get an unusually bad set of teachers throughout high school, or do teachers of this subject view the world differently?
Presumably in those days, there were more teachers with history knowledge and interests (60′s to early 70′s)? Presumably most loved their subject? Why did it drive otherwise conscientious students to surreptitiously clock-watching, doodling and day dreaming?
Thinking further from Brian @14, there is another model for looking at how people think, which divides on a continuum, for X-axis of “cerebral”/thinking to “limbic”/gut feelings, and Y-axis of “left-brain”/analytical/practical to “right-brain”/holistic/generic. The model is called HBDI and was developed for business and personnel development in the first instance.
Anyway, the main thesis of HBDI is that people who have thinking styles which are very different are drawn to (and thrive in) different fields of endeavour. Furthermore very different styles can find it difficult to relate to each other if they each hold to their preferred style of thinking.
The greatest difficulties are supposedly “across diagonals”, such as a strongly cerebral/right-brain person trying to relate to a strongly limbic/left-brain thinker.
For example, “limbic/left-brain” types apparently LOVE detail, lots of it, and they like sorting and compiling the details. They make wonderful administrators, accountants, collectors, etc. They might love history also, and become history teachers? They might find the discussion of endless detail endlessly fascinating in its own right?
By contrast, “cerebral/right-brain” types apparently LOVE concepts and “helicopter thinking”. These people drift towards creative roles, R&D or higher management, if they also have complementary other skills. They find the discussion of endless detail agonising, unless it is required for developing a new concept, or analysing and understanding a critical situation.
Put the above styles together, without modification, and you have a recipe for ships which pass in the night. Or worse, slam right into each other, if they are bone-headed. At the least, there is a lack of appreciation of the other’s perspective. When it occurs in families, and the odd one out is a teenager…
Coming back to the point, if history is to be taught to everyone, perhaps some regard should be given to the idea of reaching kids with different thinking styles? There will be a subset of the kids who are bored totally witless by lots of historical detail, unless it relates to developing a concept to which they feel some ownership.
The converse problem would equally apply to delivering maths (a “cerebral/left-brain” nerdy habitat) to relationship people (“limbic/right-brain” style). The other diagonal contrast. If relationship-style kids do not see the problem as a life skill, then they may switch off?
Teachers have probably thought this combination through already, very thoroughly, because they are themselves most likely relationship people, or they would not have chosen the teaching profession.
Apologies again for not being in the teaching field and not knowing the syllabus, but has an equivalent aspect been considered for the delivery of history?
Oops, sorry, the X and Y axes are transposed in that summary of HBDI.
X-axis is left-right brain thinking. Y-axis is cerebral-limbic thinking.
It does not change the discussion, but you will notice if you google HBDI.
There’s more to it, I’m sure, but so-called left-brain thinking people tend to think in words whereas right-brainers use pictures. I’m a somewhat left-brain type married to a definite right-brainer.
But many can do both, so it’s not an either-or.
School learning and academic work generally is said to favour the left brain, and I suspect History traditionally so, although there is now a wealth of pictorial material, videos etc that can be used.
Brian @25: “But many can do both, so it’s not an either-or.”
Yes, true. I called it a continuum, with the implication that there was a single point on the continuum, but in reality most people do have some capability in all areas. No such thing as 7 discrete aspects, 4 discrete thinking models, etc.
That’s the trouble with trying to simplistically model behaviour as if it were a maths problem! The HBDI people get around this by drawing a natty little vector diagram which looks like a kite, and suggesting people have some ability in all quadrants. Most have lop-sided kites, very occasionally a nearly-square kite.
They also try to model the low-stress behavioural style versus the high-stress style. You know, people who significantly change their thinking pattern (or turn into a caricature) when they become frightened, angry, pressured, etc. A most interesting analysis.
“School learning and academic work generally is said to favour the left brain…”
Yep, and apparently our society is dominantly composed of people with a left-brain preference to their thinking style (and similar proportion of right-handedness, although not necessarily concommitant). Furthermore, there is apparently a dominantly limbic style also (preference for historical past practice or gut-feeling decisions). Theoretically, therefore, a lot of students may have no real problems with rote-learning loads of historical detail, which suits a left-brain/limbic pattern.
However, the HBDI mob think that most of the outstanding scientists, leaders, thinkers, creative people, etc are right-brain dominant. They are a minority, to be sure. A regimented schooling system may well not get the best out of these kids. I think I read somewhere that Einstein’s parents were told their son was not particularly good at school, and they should perhaps think of taking him out early… Wonder how those teachers felt a couple of decades later, when they reviewed their condescending assessment of him?
“…left-brain thinking people tend to think in words whereas right-brainers use pictures…”
I suspect it may be true about right-brain preference for pictorial representation; preference for graphs and diagrams rather than text. However, it is more than that. It shows up in all manner of things.
I went to a 3-day seminar on HBDI in London. They tested us beforehand, and seated us in sequence in a semi-circle without explaining the pattern (in sequence according to scoring in the dominant quadrant). We were asked to introduce ourselves, before they gave out the test results.
You already knew, before comparing results, that you were most like the people nearest you, even though they came from different countries, different professions, and different business backgrounds. You just plain liked the way they described themselves and their lives. The far side of the semi-circle felt the same way about each other, as did those on each side of the middle.
We were then set a widely varying series of tasks, to complete in groups and pairs. It was starkly apparent that people had the easiest time with others of similar style (even though the approaches used were as different as the styles), and struggled to find common ground with those of diametrically opposite style. It was a most interesting 3 days.