tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/history-curriculum-10118/articlesHistory curriculum – The Conversation2022-02-16T18:57:31Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1767832022-02-16T18:57:31Z2022-02-16T18:57:31ZThe national history curriculum should not be used and abused as an election issue<p>Everyone has an opinion about what should go into history curriculum. Politicians are especially good at expressing theirs. </p>
<p>The acting federal education minister, Stuart Robert, has <a href="https://ministers.dese.gov.au/robert/doorstop-commonwealth-parliamentary-offices-melbourne">announced</a> a delay in approving the <a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/curriculum-review">revised Australian Curriculum</a> until at least April. This means the ongoing debate about Australian history in the curriculum is likely to be dragged out to the eve of the next federal election. History curriculum is political but should not be used as a political plaything at election time. </p>
<p>The federal government and Western Australian government <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/education/minister-trumpets-return-of-what-it-means-to-be-australian-to-the-curriculum-20220204-p59tz1.html">are concerned</a> that the revised history curriculum is “very busy”. Robert <a href="https://ministers.dese.gov.au/robert/doorstop-commonwealth-parliamentary-offices-melbourne">said</a> Western civilisation “is well and truly back in the curriculum, but it remains quite cluttered”. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-crowded-curriculum-sure-it-may-be-complex-but-so-is-the-world-kids-must-engage-with-157690">A 'crowded curriculum'? Sure, it may be complex, but so is the world kids must engage with</a>
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<p>This latest delay comes after the then education minister, Alan Tudge, last year rejected the first draft. Tudge <a href="https://ministers.dese.gov.au/tudge/sky-news-live-first-edition-peter-stefanovic">called for</a> “a positive, optimistic view of Australian history” and more content about Australia’s “Western heritage”. </p>
<p>The draft was the product of an independent review by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (<a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/about-us">ACARA</a>).</p>
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<h2>Delay gives Coalition an election issue</h2>
<p>The delay gives the Coalition the opportunity to control the debate and use history curriculum as a wedge issue in the lead-up to the election. </p>
<p>We saw the way historical narratives get split along political lines last year. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/08/alan-tudge-says-he-doesnt-want-students-to-be-taught-hatred-of-australia-in-fiery-triple-j-interview">Tudge argued</a> for describing Anzac Day as “sacred” rather than “contested”. This was criticised by Labor’s shadow education minister, Tanya Plibersek, who <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/dec/07/tanya-plibersek-to-deliver-riposte-to-alan-tudges-campaign-against-national-curriculum">spoke</a> about the importance of not censoring history. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-past-is-not-sacred-the-history-wars-over-anzac-38596">The past is not sacred: the 'history wars' over Anzac</a>
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<p>Signing off on the revised curriculum close to an election might be a good political tactic. A national history curriculum that promotes a more “patriotic” narrative would appeal to Coalition voters. It would also reinforce an ideological point of difference from Labor. </p>
<p>Around the world governments promote their preferred historical narratives to push their political agendas. And, of course, public discussion about the complexities of Australian and world history is important. So is debate about how and what young people study in history. </p>
<p>However, if these issues are used to divide voters, they are in danger of being simplified and reduced to political rhetoric. We know from past rounds of the “history wars” that the <a href="https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/student-journals/index.php/NESAIS/article/view/1465/1579">black armband versus white blindfold history</a> approach has a dividing effect. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/anna-clark-275704/articles">Anna Clark</a> notes in her latest book, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/making-australian-history-9781760898519#:%7E:text=Making%20Australian%20History%20is%20bold,incorporates%20the%20stories%20of%20people.">Making Australian History</a>: </p>
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<p>“History can play a vital role in truth-telling and reconciliation […] Seeking justice, remembering and addressing this nation’s past is an ongoing and necessary condition of individual and collective healing.” </p>
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<p>Expanding our collective historical understanding takes much more than a series of media moments. </p>
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<h2>‘Cluttered’ curriculum claim is overblown</h2>
<p>Attempts to extend debate about “decluttering” history overlook the complexities of curriculum reform. Decisions do need to be made about what topics are included at each year level. However, we cannot apply a Marie Kondo approach to history and keep only the bits that “<a href="https://konmari.com/marie-kondo-rules-of-tidying-sparks-joy/">spark joy</a>”.</p>
<p>The minister’s insistence that history content must be reduced further suggests a neater narrative is needed. </p>
<p>Historians help us to understand that the past is long, messy and requires special skills for interpreting it. For this reason, the approach taken in the <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/humanities-and-social-sciences/history/">Australian Curriculum</a> places equal emphasis on the skills and knowledge students need to do historical inquiry. </p>
<p>One of the stated aims is to ensure students develop interest in and enjoyment of historical study. Another is to develop understanding of historical concepts: evidence, continuity and change, cause and effect, significance, perspectives, empathy and contestability. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/teaching-a-hatred-of-australia-no-minister-heres-why-a-democracy-has-critical-curriculum-content-167697">Teaching a ‘hatred’ of Australia? No, minister, here’s why a democracy has critical curriculum content</a>
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<p>History curriculums provide maps for teachers and students to navigate a range of topics. Some topics get selected and some do not. </p>
<p>Even after the introduction of the national curriculum, <a href="https://www.deakin.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/428424/Moments-in-Time_FinalReport_May2015.pdf">research shows</a> it still gets adapted at the state and territory level. Teachers in schools then interpret the curriculum in different ways. Local context is seen to be an important factor in selecting content and perspectives. </p>
<p>Therefore, not every point in the curriculum will get covered. So perhaps it does not matter if the history curriculum is “busy”. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/first-its-not-an-instruction-manual-3-things-education-ministers-need-to-know-about-the-australian-curriculum-173058">First, it's not an instruction manual: 3 things education ministers need to know about the Australian Curriculum</a>
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<p>We also know <a href="https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/contact/brochure-thematic-reports-on-curriculum-redesign.pdf">from research</a> that students will make their own meanings of curriculum, regardless of how other people might want them to make sense of certain messages. </p>
<p>The government’s attitude to delaying the review process and now inviting “mums and dads to be involved” fails to acknowledge <a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/docs/default-source/curriculum/timeline-f-10-ac-review6e6513404c94637ead88ff00003e0139.pdf">the process</a> of a curriculum review. There was an <a href="https://theconversation.com/proposed-new-curriculum-acknowledges-first-nations-view-of-british-invasion-and-a-multicultural-australia-160011">extended consultation period</a> in 2021. Teachers, subject experts, educational organisations and curriculum professionals have worked hard during that process to improve the existing curriculum. </p>
<p>The government will use the overdue publication of <a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum#:%7E:text=Once%20approved%2C%20the%20updated%20Australian,be%20known%20as%20Version%209.0.&text=It%20gives%20teachers%2C%20parents%2C%20students,or%20which%20school%20they%20attend.">version 9.0</a> of the Australian Curriculum as an opportunity to stamp its authority on it. But decisions about history curriculum should not be a matter of political opinion.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176783/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Cairns does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>By pushing the timing of approval back to April, likely just before the election, the government has put itself in a position to use the curriculum to score political points.Rebecca Cairns, Lecturer in Education, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1706262021-10-26T02:14:03Z2021-10-26T02:14:03Z10 things every politician should know about history<p>The federal Education Minister, Alan Tudge, has <a href="https://ministers.dese.gov.au/tudge/roaring-back-my-priorities-schools-students-return-classrooms">announced a major edit</a> of the <a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/curriculum-review">draft history curriculum</a> by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) as part of an effort to lift educational standards. “Ultimately, students should leave school with a love of country and a sense of optimism and hope that we live in the greatest country on Earth and that the future is bright,” he said. </p>
<p>But is that really the purpose and function of a history curriculum? Here’s a quick primer for the minister.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/proposed-new-curriculum-acknowledges-first-nations-view-of-british-invasion-and-a-multicultural-australia-160011">Proposed new curriculum acknowledges First Nations' view of British 'invasion' and a multicultural Australia</a>
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<p><strong>1. “History” is not the same as “the past”.</strong> </p>
<p>History is a way of thinking about and studying the past. Teaching students to memorise a list of important facts without understanding what they mean isn’t history; neither is teaching how Australian students should “feel” about the past without any contextual knowledge. </p>
<p>A sound history education gives students the skills to find evidence, analyse sources and present their own interpretations based on their research. It also gives them the confidence to distinguish uneducated opinion and polemic from well-informed historical analysis.</p>
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<p><strong>2. Not all historians agree.</strong></p>
<p>Because history is based on interpretation as well as evidence, historians often disagree on “what happened”. </p>
<p>Interpretation is inherently subjective. History education should teach students how to deal with diverse and contrasting interpretations by historians, as well as over time. (For example, that could include a unit on the contrasting interpretations of Australian history by education ministers over the past 30 years.)</p>
<p><strong>3. History is contested (see above).</strong></p>
<p>You know how members of your family might disagree over what happened? (Like that Christmas lunch in 1974 when Grandpa stormed out before the pudding? Or the discovery of a horrible family secret?) </p>
<p>History is the same. Sometimes, disagreements over the past create significant political debate and even violent confrontations in or between communities. Such contest shows that history matters. </p>
<p>The heated nature of some historical debates doesn’t mean they should be avoided in school, however. Far from it. Teaching about history’s contestability helps students learn to navigate and assess different perspectives in a liberal democracy.</p>
<p><strong>4. History teachers are trained professionals.</strong></p>
<p>History teachers are trained in instruction, pedagogy and the skills of history. They teach because they want to make Australia a better place. Trust them.</p>
<p><strong>5. Practising critical history doesn’t mean you “hate” Australia.</strong></p>
<p>Critical analysis is a vital historical skill. It enables historians to interrogate historical evidence, allowing us to ask: what is this source? Where did it come from? Is it reliable? Who is the author? Does it tell the whole story? </p>
<p>Being “critical” doesn’t mean you’re negative — just that you’re curious and rigorous.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/teaching-a-hatred-of-australia-no-minister-heres-why-a-democracy-has-critical-curriculum-content-167697">Teaching a ‘hatred’ of Australia? No, minister, here’s why a democracy has critical curriculum content</a>
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<p><strong>6. The current history curriculum draft does not diminish the legacy of Western civilisation.</strong></p>
<p>The curriculum draft simply acknowledges that other knowledges and civilisations (e.g. Eastern and Indigenous) have worldviews and cultures worth knowing. It asks students to think about their own place in time and in the world, as well as asking them to think about what is unique about being Australian. </p>
<p>What’s more, studying history in its disciplinary form is testament to the ongoing influence of Western civilisation and liberalism in our education system. As well as including culturally diverse historical perspectives and approaches in recent years, historical practice also draws on a long tradition that includes the methods of 19th-century scientific historians, histories from the Enlightenment, and ancient Greek chronicles. </p>
<p><strong>7. Historical views change over time.</strong></p>
<p>Each generation asks its own questions of the past and interprets the past according to prevailing values of the day. Think about the relatively recent inclusion of the “Stolen Generations” in our curriculum, for example, or the acknowledgement of the women’s suffrage movement in the story of Australia’s democracy. While their presence reveals our contemporary historical priorities, such topics haven’t always been included in Australian histories. </p>
<p>Teaching students to understand changing historical approaches is an important part of a good history education.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241970/original/file-20181024-48721-9z3ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241970/original/file-20181024-48721-9z3ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=214&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241970/original/file-20181024-48721-9z3ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=214&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241970/original/file-20181024-48721-9z3ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=214&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241970/original/file-20181024-48721-9z3ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241970/original/file-20181024-48721-9z3ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241970/original/file-20181024-48721-9z3ys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=269&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The significance of the women’s suffrage movement in the story of Australia’s democracy hasn’t always been acknowledged in history education.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library of Australia</span></span>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/captain-cook-discovered-australia-and-other-myths-from-old-school-text-books-128926">Captain Cook 'discovered' Australia, and other myths from old school text books</a>
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<p><strong>8. Historical revision is not a dirty word.</strong> </p>
<p>Every generation of historians, from Thucydides to Geoffrey Blainey to Clare Wright, revises history. They even say so explicitly.</p>
<p><strong>9. School students are not “blank slates”.</strong></p>
<p>Filling them up with idealised images of Australia’s past won’t wash. It’s boring, as well as being bad history. </p>
<p>In fact, “Anzac” is such a successful topic to teach because it allows students to imagine their way into the past, to empathise <em>and</em> use their skills of critical analysis. Sources, such as diaries from the front line, war propaganda, letters from the home front and newsreel footage, are accessible and gripping documents of the past. </p>
<p>Students can see how this event changed the world as well as affecting their own families and communities. They can also see how Anzac has been remembered over time. Trust them.</p>
<p><strong>10. The national benefit of history education comes from students learning to be active, questioning, thoughtful citizens.</strong></p>
<p>Teaching that “we live in the greatest country on Earth” is not history. It’s jingoistic nationalism. Ironically, it’s also an approach more aligned with the standards for history education in the Chinese national curriculum than the histories being taught and discussed in Australian classrooms as we speak. </p>
<p>Sometimes history asks difficult questions and requires hard answers. That’s OK. It makes Australia better.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/170626/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Clark receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>Education Minister Alan Tudge has rejected the draft history curriculum. He wants students to learn that ‘we live in the greatest country on Earth’. That’s not history. It’s jingoistic nationalism.Anna Clark, Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Public History, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1676972021-09-13T20:05:36Z2021-09-13T20:05:36ZTeaching a ‘hatred’ of Australia? No, minister, here’s why a democracy has critical curriculum content<p>Australian Education Minister Alan Tudge <a href="https://ministers.dese.gov.au/tudge/triple-j-hack-interview-avani-dias">says</a> he does not want students to leave school with “a hatred” of their country because the history curriculum for years 7 to 10 “paints an overly negative view of Australia”. The minister is critical of proposed <a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/curriculum-review">changes to the Australian Curriculum</a>. He sees teaching about the contested nature of Anzac Day and its commemoration as a particular concern.</p>
<p>Two interwoven threads run through current debates about the minister’s view. </p>
<p>First, public debates about the curriculum like this are arguably a sign of democracy at work. Suggesting that some things, such as Anzac Day, are sacred and beyond critical inquiry is not. </p>
<p>Second, at the heart of this discussion is how children should learn about history and how this relates to their development as Australian citizens. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/gonski-2-0-teaching-creativity-and-critical-thinking-through-the-curriculum-is-already-happening-95922">Gonski 2.0: teaching creativity and critical thinking through the curriculum is already happening</a>
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<h2>What is the Australian Curriculum?</h2>
<p>The Australian Curriculum applies to all primary and secondary schools, affecting over 4 million students. It <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/about-the-australian-curriculum/">sets</a> “the expectations for what all young Australians should be taught”.</p>
<p>Developed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), the curriculum is reviewed every six years. In the current <a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/curriculum-review">review</a>, public consultations have ended and the revisions will be finalised by the end of 2021.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/7031/hass_history_all_elements_7-10.pdf">history curriculum</a> seeks to promote understanding and use of historical concepts. These concepts include: </p>
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<li><p><strong>evidence</strong> – obtained from primary and secondary sources to support a hypothesis or to prove or disprove a conclusion</p></li>
<li><p><strong>historical perspectives</strong> – comprising the point of view, beliefs, values and experiences of individuals and groups at the time</p></li>
<li><p><strong>interpretations</strong> – contestable explanations of the past about a specific person, event or development, typically as a result of a disciplined inquiry by historians</p></li>
<li><p><strong>significance</strong> – assigned to an issue, event, development, person, place, process, interaction or system over time and place.</p></li>
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<p>The minister’s response to the proposed revisions follows <a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-is-only-one-front-in-the-history-curriculum-wars-30888">a recent tradition</a> of objections to aspects of the curriculum. Critical exploration of Australia Day – perspectives of which vary depending on one’s point of view – has been another source of debate.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-is-only-one-front-in-the-history-curriculum-wars-30888">Australia is only one front in the history curriculum wars</a>
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<p>Three related issues arise in relation to Tudge’s concern.</p>
<h2>History is neither static nor unproblematic</h2>
<p>First, history is not static. This means one can expect the curriculum to change as new discoveries, insights and perspectives emerge over time. </p>
<p>Second, we would hope to foster learners who are curious, critical and well-informed about Australia’s rich (and sometimes troubled) history. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.dese.gov.au/alice-springs-mparntwe-education-declaration">Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration</a> outlines education goals for all Australians. These goals include development of critical thinking and intercultural understanding. All education ministers signed the declaration.</p>
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<p>Students should learn about events such as Anzac Day and Australia Day, their historical origins and different meanings when viewed from various perspectives. It’s a valuable way of developing both critical thinking and understanding of people who are different from ourselves.</p>
<p>Acknowledging this to an extent, Tudge told <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/education-minister-tells-hack-proposed-school-history-curriculu/13532152">ABC Hack</a> he is “not concerned” about the curriculum in relation to “the arrivals of the First Fleet, people should learn about that, and they should learn the perspective from Indigenous people at that time as well”. What he <a href="https://ministers.dese.gov.au/tudge/triple-j-hack-interview-avani-dias">doesn’t like</a> is that certain events are critically explored: </p>
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<p>“Instead of ANZAC Day being presented as the most sacred of all days in Australia, where […] we commemorate the 100,000 people who have died for our freedoms […] it’s presented as a contested idea [but] ANZAC Day is not a contested idea, apart from an absolute fringe element in our society.” </p>
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<p>Setting aside who that “fringe element” might be (some historians?), this implies a settled, uncritical view of history. Tudge suggests the curriculum is “asking people to, instead of just accepting these for the things which they are, such as ANZAC Day, to really challenge them and to contest them”. </p>
<p>Commemorating sacrifice is compatible with critically reflecting on the conditions in which that sacrifice occurred and how that sacrifice is memorialised. Further, the assertion that the challenging of ideas produces hatred is as problematic as uncritically accepting things for whatever the minister thinks “they are”. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-past-is-not-sacred-the-history-wars-over-anzac-38596">The past is not sacred: the 'history wars' over Anzac</a>
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<p>“We’ve got a lot to be proud of,” Tudge said, “and we should be teaching the great things that have happened in Australia, as much as we should our weaknesses and flaws and some of the historical wrongs.”</p>
<p>History is often a messy contestation and confluence of violence and discovery. Pride has its place too, but pride can withstand critical inquiry, and perhaps even be strengthened by it. </p>
<p>Tudge says he wants “to make sure there’s a balance” of perspectives. That’s precisely the point of the revised curriculum. </p>
<h2>Debate is a good thing</h2>
<p>Finally, having a robust and vibrant debate about the curriculum, in which people take an active interest in what is taught, is a sign of healthy democracy. Such debate can only be strengthened when young people are encouraged to recognise that people have different points of view and history is not set in stone, as the curriculum seeks to do. It’s one key dimension of developing active, informed citizenship. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/young-people-remain-ill-equipped-to-participate-in-australian-democracy-153536">Young people remain ill-equipped to participate in Australian democracy</a>
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<p>The <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/about-the-australian-curriculum/">Australian Curriculum is founded on the idea</a> that:</p>
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<p>“Education plays a critical role in shaping the lives of young Australians and contributing to a democratic, equitable and just society that is prosperous, cohesive and culturally diverse.”</p>
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<p>The minister’s objection to proposed changes to the curriculum inadvertently illustrates why it should be taught: it’s not about hatred, but a sign of healthy democracy while meeting Australia’s educational goals.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167697/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucas Walsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Public debates about the Australian Curriculum are arguably a sign of democracy at work. Suggesting that some things, such as Anzac Day, are sacred and beyond critical inquiry is not.Lucas Walsh, Professor and Director of the Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1651152021-07-28T14:59:40Z2021-07-28T14:59:40ZSpain wants to fine Franco apologists – the latest example of using laws to address uncomfortable history<p>If you get to Spain this summer, watch your tongue. A careless word that could be construed as sympathetic to General Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from his victory in the country’s civil war (1936-9) until his death in 1975, <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/spain-makes-it-a-crime-to-apologise-for-franco-or-glorify-civil-war-dmqr7k9qg">could land you with a hefty fine</a>. </p>
<p>The proposed <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spains-democratic-memory-bill-honour-dictatorship-victims-2021-07-20/">democratic memory bill</a>, which will honour people who suffered under Spain’s fascist dictatorship, also has sanctions for those who remember it fondly. Penalties range from €200 (£170), for a casual expression of admiration for the dictator, up to €150,000 if you destroy the evidence of the burial pits dug for his victims. </p>
<p>This is the latest in a series of moves by European states to outlaw the expression of inconvenient or unpalatable historical views. Poland, for instance, has criminalised any reference to Nazi death camps on Polish soil, such as Auschwitz, as “<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1c183f56-0a6a-11e8-bacb-2958fde95e5e">Polish death camps</a>”. You can also fall foul of the law for suggesting that Poles supported or helped the Nazi persecution of the Jews. This, despite the fact that antisemitism was rife in Poland at the time of the German invasion, a point made in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-confusing-rules-on-swastikas-and-nazi-symbols/a-45063547">Nazi symbols may not be displayed</a> by law in Germany and, in 2006, the British historical writer and Nazi apologist David Irving was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/20/austria.thefarright#:%7E:text=2006%2013.42%20EST-,The%20British%20revisionist%20historian%20and%20Nazi%20apologist%20David%20Irving%20was,first%20day%20of%20his%20trial.">sentenced to three years in prison</a> for breaching Austria’s law banning Holocaust denial. And woe betide anyone who risks Vladimir Putin’s wrath by deploring Stalin’s atrocities, as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/10/vladimir-putin-russia-rehabilitating-stalin-soviet-past">human rights group Memorial found in 2016</a> when it was branded a “foreign agent” for doing just that.</p>
<p>This sort of approach is by no means confined to Europe. In Japan, controversy has long raged about the way school textbooks <a href="https://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/3173/article.html">ignore atrocities</a> carried out by its soldiers during the second world war, such as killings and rape in China and the wholesale forcing of Korean women to serve as sex slaves for Japanese troops. The 1985 Argentinian film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089276/">La Historia Oficial</a> (The Official Story) tells of how memory of “disappearances” under the country’s former military regime was repressed and omitted from state textbooks.</p>
<p>At a time when the UK is gripped by arguments about statues to figures, heroic and otherwise, from Britain’s imperial past, these examples of the legal imposition of official historical versions are of increasing relevance.</p>
<h2>Uncomfortable heritage</h2>
<p>All states have aspects of their history which they find difficult to face up to and will try to suppress. It took the French state <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzyW53KsZF4">until the 1990s</a> to own up to the role that French functionaries and police officers willingly played in rounding up Jews, holding them in inhuman conditions and forcing them onto trains to German extermination camps in Poland. Until then, the most commonly expressed view was that the Holocaust was imposed on the French by the Germans and that any French involvement was entirely under duress.</p>
<p>The Irish still find it difficult to know how to deal with the memory of those Irish who <a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/the-irish-world-war-ii-shame-irish-soldiers-faced-hostility-after-arriving-home-153574625-238132961">served in the British armed forces</a> in the two world wars. It is particularly difficult with regards the second world war because Ireland stayed neutral in that conflict and the Irish government was the only one to express its condolences on Hitler’s death.</p>
<p>It is absolutely right for governments to face up to such difficult histories, whether by erecting memorials or issuing apologies or simply enabling the truth to be taught. In 2013 William Hague, as UK foreign secretary, ordered the release of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13336343">thousands of documents</a> relating to the torture of Kenyans suspected of being part of the Mau Mau resistance group, that had been locked away for half a century. After the <a href="https://theconversation.com/mau-mau-apology-is-a-victory-50-years-in-the-making-14981">High Court ruled</a> that British camps in colonial Kenya did come under the jurisdiction of the UK’s legal system, Hague also announced a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22790037">payout of some £20 million in compensation</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mau-mau-apology-is-a-victory-50-years-in-the-making-14981">Mau Mau apology is a victory 50 years in the making</a>
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<h2>Whose history</h2>
<p>But should the courts decide on matters of historical judgement? Professor Sir Richard Evans, who acted as an expert witness in Irving’s unsuccessful libel case in 2000 against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for labelling him a Holocaust denier, <a href="https://www.richardjevans.com/publications/telling-lies-hitler/">wrote in his account</a> of the trial that a law court proved an unexpectedly good forum for settling the historical points at issue. </p>
<p>But would a judge necessarily look kindly on anyone who might point out that the Spanish economy grew under Franco or that many Poles were happy to see their Jewish neighbours removed? </p>
<p>Most scholarly work on tackling difficult and sensitive histories has been in the context of the school history curriculum, though political scientists have also looked at the role history has played in the process of nation-building. Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian, the late <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Imagined_Communities/nQ9jXXJV-vgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=anderson+imagined+communities&printsec=frontcover">Benedict Anderson</a>, argued that it was shared but selective versions of the past which had originally helped create the modern nation state – and that they still play an important part in maintaining it. </p>
<p>So perhaps we should not be surprised to find states using their machinery of power to delete one version of the past and enforce another – it can be seen as a form of self-defence. Whether it’s a good idea is another matter.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165115/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Lang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Spain has made it a punishable offence to praise the regime of General Franco.Sean Lang, Senior Lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1600112021-04-30T01:53:34Z2021-04-30T01:53:34ZProposed new curriculum acknowledges First Nations’ view of British ‘invasion’ and a multicultural Australia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397975/original/file-20210430-14-128htej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/group-smiling-primary-school-students-outdoors-147614555">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Proposed changes to the Foundation to Year 10 Australian Curriculum were <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/consultation/">released for public consultation</a> yesterday. </p>
<p>While many of these changes are minor tweaks and refinements, much like a curriculum oil change and tune-up, there are some noteworthy changes in the mix. </p>
<p>They include a more accurate reflection of the historical record of First Nations people’s experience with colonisation, with a commitment to “truth telling”. This means in part recognising Australia’s First Nations peoples viewed Britain’s arrival as an “invasion”. </p>
<p>There is also much stronger emphasis on cultural diversity and inclusion in the <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/consultation/humanities-and-social-sciences/">Humanities and Social Sciences</a> curriculum.</p>
<p>Here is a summary of some of the good and the bad detail in the proposed curriculum changes.</p>
<h2>Why is the curriculum being reviewed?</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/">Australian Curriculum</a> was originally introduced in 2012 to provide support and greater consistency for what students learn in Australian schools in eight key learning areas. These are: English, Mathematics, Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, The Arts, Technologies, Languages, and Health and Physical Education.</p>
<p>In 2014, conservative commentator, Kevin Donnelly, and business academic, Ken Wiltshire, conducted the first review of the curriculum. </p>
<p>Their <a href="https://www.dese.gov.au/australian-curriculum/resources/review-australian-curriculum-final-report-2014">report</a> called for <a href="https://theconversation.com/national-curriculum-review-experts-respond-26913">greater emphasis</a> on Western literature and Judeo–Christian heritage, as well as an increased focus on literacy and numeracy in the early years of primary school. </p>
<p>The Donnelly–Wilshire review also recommended the Australian Curriculum be reviewed every five years.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/curriculum-review-set-to-reignite-the-literacy-wars-21999">Curriculum review set to reignite the 'literacy wars'</a>
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<p>An updated Australian Curriculum was released in 2015. This has since been used by state and territory education authorities, and independent and Catholic schools to inform their curriculum planning.</p>
<p>The Australian Curriculum is not prescriptive, with each state and territory having jurisdiction over its own curriculum frameworks. For example, New South Wales has its own <a href="https://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/11-12/Understanding-the-curriculum/nsw-curriculum-syllabuses">suite of syllabuses</a> for each course. These include the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes expected in each course. </p>
<p>Similarly, the <a href="https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/">Victorian Curriculum</a> incorporates the Australian Curriculum but reflects standards set out by Victoria.</p>
<p>In June 2020, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority announced the first <a href="https://acara.edu.au/curriculum/curriculum-review">five-year review</a> of the Australian Curriculum. One of the aims <a href="https://www.acara.edu.au/docs/default-source/curriculum/ac-review_terms-of-reference_website.pdf">was</a> to refine and reduce the content across the eight learning areas. </p>
<h2>The good: arrival of the British seen as ‘invasion’</h2>
<p>The new curriculum includes significant changes to the <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/cross-curriculum-priorities/">cross-curriculum priority</a> (learning areas that aren’t distinct but found across all of the curriculum) of <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/7137/ccp_atsi_histories_and_cultures_consultation.pdf">Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures</a>. This is to more accurately reflect the historical record and contemporary context.</p>
<p>For example, the current curriculum states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities maintain a special connection to and responsibility for Country/Place.</p>
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<p>This has been changed to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The occupation and colonisation of Australia by the British, under the now overturned doctrine of <em>terra nullius</em>, were experienced by First Nations Australians as an invasion that denied their occupation of, and connection to, Country/Place.</p>
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<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397979/original/file-20210430-23-u0cdd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Satellite dish in Uluru with a painted Aboriginal flag saying " src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397979/original/file-20210430-23-u0cdd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397979/original/file-20210430-23-u0cdd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397979/original/file-20210430-23-u0cdd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397979/original/file-20210430-23-u0cdd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397979/original/file-20210430-23-u0cdd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397979/original/file-20210430-23-u0cdd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397979/original/file-20210430-23-u0cdd2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The new curriculum acknowledges the denial of First Nations’ peoples land and culture with the arrival of the British.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/iQa9Qxh-Nwk">Alessia Francischiello/Unsplash</a></span>
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<p>Another statement in the current curriculum is very broad:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies have many Language Groups. </p>
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<p>But the review has the statement changed to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>First Nations Australian societies are diverse and have distinct cultural expressions such as language, custom and beliefs. As First Nations Peoples of Australia they have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural expressions, while also maintaining the right to control, protect and develop culture as Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property.</p>
</blockquote>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/captain-cook-discovered-australia-and-other-myths-from-old-school-text-books-128926">Captain Cook 'discovered' Australia, and other myths from old school text books</a>
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<h2>The good: a multicultural Australia</h2>
<p>The proposed <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/consultation/humanities-and-social-sciences/">Humanities and Social Sciences</a> curriculum changes signal a much stronger emphasis on cultural diversity and inclusion. This sits at odds with the 2014 review’s focus on Western culture and Christianity. </p>
<p>For example, currently in Year 7 Civics and Citizenship, students learn:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How Australia is a secular nation and a multi-faith society with a Christian heritage. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The proposed change will recommend students learn:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How Australia is a culturally diverse, multi-faith, secular and pluralistic society with diverse communities, such as the distinct communities of First Nations Australians.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The backlash to these proposed changes in the <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/editorials/a-blueprint-for-narrower-more-ideological-education/news-story/09dc037d8a948628131ef4aa877eda3e">conservative media</a> has already begun with an editorial in The Australian claiming “no faith-based school worth its salt could tolerate such bias”.</p>
<h2>The bad: ‘back to basics’</h2>
<p>Just like in 2014, there has been a reductive push in the first years of primary schooling to focus on literacy and numeracy at the expense of other rich curriculum experiences, such as the arts. </p>
<p>For example, the Foundation to Year 2 <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/7076/english_comparative_information_f-6.pdf">English curriculum</a> has been substantially revised, with an increased emphasis on phonics and decoding, while the use of computer word processing has been moved to the Technology curriculum.</p>
<p>To make room for the additional focus on literacy and numeracy in the early years, both the <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/7127/ac_review_2021_the_arts_whats_changed_and_why.pdf">Arts</a> and <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/7123/humanities_and_social_sciences_whats_changed_and_why.pdf">Humanities and Social Sciences</a> curriculum have been significantly reduced.</p>
<p>And in what appears to be an odd curriculum change, learning times tables in <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/7120/ac_review_2021_mathematics_whats_changed_and_why.pdf">Mathematics</a> has been postponed from Year 3 to Year 4.</p>
<h2>Controversy</h2>
<p>The proposed changes will likely continue to generate some harsh criticism, especially from conservative commentators who feel a stronger commitment to cultural diversity and social inclusion in the curriculum will come at a cost to students learning about the Western literary canon and Australian history since 1788. </p>
<p>But these changes are not a zero-sum game. They are a long-overdue recognition of the diverse communities and heritages that make up contemporary Australia and deserve to be studied and celebrated.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397983/original/file-20210430-17-ig0b1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Girl reading book" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397983/original/file-20210430-17-ig0b1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397983/original/file-20210430-17-ig0b1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397983/original/file-20210430-17-ig0b1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397983/original/file-20210430-17-ig0b1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397983/original/file-20210430-17-ig0b1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397983/original/file-20210430-17-ig0b1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397983/original/file-20210430-17-ig0b1t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The curriculum may a usual flare up of the ‘reading wars’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/toddler-girl-book-near-window-528426013">Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>There will also be the usual flare-up of the “reading wars”, in which <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-every-child-needs-explicit-phonics-instruction-to-learn-to-read-125065">advocates of teaching phonics</a> (teaching children the sounds made by individual letters or letter groups) will claim there is still not enough of it in the curriculum. </p>
<p>Other educators will argue the <a href="https://theconversation.com/reading-is-more-than-sounding-out-words-and-decoding-thats-why-we-use-the-whole-language-approach-to-teaching-it-126606">increased emphasis on phonics</a> removes the opportunity for children to understand the broader meaning of texts as part of their literacy learning in primary school.</p>
<h2>Inequality still prevails</h2>
<p>Tinkering with the curriculum fails to address the biggest issue in Australian schooling, which is social disadvantage and inequity. </p>
<p>While elite private schools receive generous government funding in addition to tuition fees charged to families, some of the most disadvantaged public schools continue to be <a href="https://apo.org.au/node/310954">inadequately resourced</a>. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-schools-are-becoming-more-segregated-this-threatens-student-outcomes-155455">Australian schools are becoming more segregated. This threatens student outcomes</a>
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<p>Australian schooling is one of the most inequitable in the world and disadvantaged Australian students are up to <a href="https://www.oecd.org/pisa/Equity-in-Education-country-note-Australia.pdf">three years behind</a> the most-advantaged students.</p>
<p>Without adequate resourcing and funding models in place, no amount of reform will ensure all students receive access to a rich curriculum.</p>
<p><em>The <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/consultation/">public consultation</a> window for the proposed curriculum is ten weeks — from April 29 until July 8 2021.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160011/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stewart Riddle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Australia’s curriculum is being reviewed for the first time since 2014. The proposed changes include positive additions to acknowledge our many cultures. But there are some reductive changes, too.Stewart Riddle, Associate Professor, School of Education, University of Southern QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/984312018-06-21T14:59:15Z2018-06-21T14:59:15ZBlack history is still largely ignored, 70 years after Empire Windrush reached Britain<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224311/original/file-20180621-137734-1f1uyam.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Notting Hill Carnival: set up in the wake of race riots. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/home">via shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks on June 22, 1948 marked a watershed moment in the recent history of immigration to Britain. The day before the ship arrived from the Caribbean, the Evening Standard sent an airplane to photograph the vessel as it approached Britain. The photo appeared on the front page under the headline: “Welcome to Britain! Evening Standard plane greets 400 sons of Empire.” But the reception of the new arrivals was <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/they-used-to-tell-us-go-back-home-1165125.html">far from unequivocally positive.</a></p>
<p>Now, 70 years and three to four generations later, the legacy of those who arrived on the Windrush and the ships that followed is being rightly remembered – albeit in a way which calls into question how much their presence, sacrifices and contributions are valued in Britain.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"878261455442763776"}"></div></p>
<p>The “sons of the Empire” came not as immigrants, but as British subjects exercising a form of “freedom of movement” within the borders of the British territories. They came invited – job adverts regularly appeared in local newspapers – to rebuild Britain after the devastation of World War II. The <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/11-12/56/enacted">British Nationality Act</a> in 1948 imparted the status of citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC status) to all British subjects connected with the UK or a British colony.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/windrush-generation-the-history-of-unbelonging-95021">Windrush generation: the history of unbelonging</a>
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<p>Caribbean communities were quickly established in areas such as Brixton in south London, St Pauls in Bristol, Handsworth in Birmingham and St Anns in Nottingham. Today, London’s Notting Hill Carnival, established in 1959, is one reminder of the distinctive and vibrant Caribbean presence in Britain. Yet the carnival <a href="https://www.mynottinghillcarnival.com/the-story-of-the-notting-hill-carnival/">began as a way</a> to counter rising racial tension which came to a head in the <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/gah/notting-hill-riots-1958">1958 Notting Hill Race Riots</a>.</p>
<p>For many Caribbean migrants at the time, discrimination based upon the colour of their skin was a way of life. Poor <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00xf0mt">working conditions</a>, lack of decent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/15/theresa-may-immigration-bill-racist-landlords">accommodation</a> and stigmatisation at <a href="http://www.irr.org.uk/news/schools-still-failing-black-children/">school</a> are all <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/08/50-anniversary-race-relations-act-uk-prejudice-racism">amply documented</a>. They kept working, but they also fought in many ways to gain better treatment in British society – for example through <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23795655">the 1963 Bristol bus boycott</a>, which led to the ban on ethnic minorities working on Bristol’s buses being overturned. Further lobbying for laws to penalise racial discrimination resulted in a series of Race Relations Acts in 1965, 1968, 1976.</p>
<p>The recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/windrush-generation-latest-to-be-stripped-of-their-rights-in-the-name-of-migration-control-95158">Windrush scandal</a> has been a stark reminder of this contested history of settlement, integration and exclusion. Hundreds of people who had come to the UK with CUKC status as children faced immigration detention and <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/home-affairs/Correspondence-17-19/Letter-from-Home-Secretary-to-Chair-regarding-Windrush-follow-up-questions-28-May-2018.pdf">some have even been deported</a>. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hostile-environment-the-uk-governments-draconian-immigration-policy-explained-95460">Hostile environment: the UK government's draconian immigration policy explained</a>
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<p>British Caribbean communities were especially appalled that after such long periods of service to Britain, they were seen as disposable, at risk of being kicked out of a country they deemed as their own and forced to go back to places they could barely remember. The scandal has highlighted a deeper truth about the remaining obstacles to the inclusion of British Caribbean communities – and other non-white Britons – into the dominant imagination of what it to be British today.</p>
<h2>Erasing black Britain</h2>
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<p>Britain values multiculturalism and diversity, especially when it looks good on the world stage as in the case of the 2012 Olympic Games. But the government is far less proactive when it comes to tackling the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/race-disparity-audit">consistent racial disadvantages</a> that characterise a substantial part of non-white British citizens’ experiences, in all areas and at every level of society. </p>
<p>Seven decades ago Britain pleaded with its Commonwealth subjects to come to work and rebuild the country – and then, in a bout of amnesia, was ready to kick out some of those same people or their descendants as part of a new “<a href="https://theconversation.com/hostile-environment-the-uk-governments-draconian-immigration-policy-explained-95460">hostile environment</a>” on immigration. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, black Britons are still constantly asked to prove who they are, and are still commonly asked questions such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/29/british-by-afua-hirsch-review-identity-race-nikesh-shukla">“where are you really from?”</a> Part of the problem is the state of the school curriculum. It’s very rare that the contributions and histories of black people in Britain – which go back <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/30/what-it-means-to-be-black-in-britain-today">way further than 1948</a> – are incorporated or openly acknowledged within the curriculum. </p>
<p>It is far more common for students to become familiar with Britain’s “heroic” involvement in the abolition of slavery in the 19th century than with the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/industrialisation_article_01.shtml">financial benefit</a> Britain wrought from the slave trade in the two centuries beforehand. This absence contributes in “whitening” Britain, solidifying the myth that until 1948, Britain was an exclusively white country with a homogenous population.</p>
<p>It is only since 2013 that the Windrush arrival was included in the teaching of British history <a href="http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/h/history%2004-02-13.pdf">for 11 to 14-year-olds</a> and even then that is optional. This is surprising – considering the magnitude of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/09/windrush-shaped-britain-70-years-immigration-national-holiday">contribution that Caribbean migrants</a> made towards British society. </p>
<p>The first 492 people on the Empire Windrush (and those that came after) were pioneers who came from across the Caribbean. They were pioneers who didn’t come with much and didn’t know what to expect. Many stayed for a lifetime, establishing firm Caribbean roots on British soil, watching the births of their children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, growing up and continuing to contribute in many ways towards British society. We should not only remember them, but we should celebrate their legacy, thank them for their service to Britain and right the many wrongs they have encountered. </p>
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<p><em>You can listen to a longer version of the conversation between April-Louise Pennant and Nando Sigona on what it means to be British in the University of Birmingham’s <a href="https://soundcloud.com/unibirmingham/unfiltered-what-does-it-mean-to-be-bristish/s-s255O">Unfiltered podcast</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98431/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>April-Louise Pennant receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the University of Birmingham </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nando Sigona does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What is the legacy of the Empire Windrush for black Britishness today?April-Louise Pennant, PhD Researcher, University of BirminghamNando Sigona, Reader in International Migration and Forced Displacement and Deputy Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/976972018-06-06T06:19:27Z2018-06-06T06:19:27Z‘Western civilisation’? History teaching has moved on, and so should those who champion it<p>The Australian National University recently decided not to accept money from the <a href="http://www.ramsaycentre.org/">Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation</a> to set up a Western civilisation degree. They join the University of Melbourne, Macquarie University and others that have also been approached but <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/anu-gutless-to-reject-study-of-west-says-uni-boss-greg-craven/news-story/3e7d39757b1d08a3b17f060561cc633d">not pursued</a> any similar arrangement. </p>
<p>The centre has been <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/tony-abbott-blamed-over-failure-of-western-civilisation-course/news-story/b415477d567dfb8357e61a7c9c93d4fa">criticised</a> for its narrow and outdated agenda, and the views of its board members, including former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott. </p>
<p>The processes of making and evaluating history and history curricula are complex. When it comes to public opinion about which histories should be taught in schools and universities, politicians from across the spectrum tend to over-simplify this. </p>
<p>This cycle of political interference stagnates the discussion. The politics of who is represented in history requires ongoing investigation, but the conversation could be moved in a more educationally constructive direction. We should instead ask how history education can better explore competing narratives and perspectives in history. </p>
<h2>A history of political interference</h2>
<p>Political interference in history curriculum intensified during the Howard government years. Howard revived Australia’s “<a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/1270703045/robert-manne/comment">history wars</a>” by bringing the concept of the “<a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/RP9798/98RP05">black armband view of history</a>” to national attention. This refers to overly negative accounts of Australian history, particularly in relation to the treatment of Indigenous Australians. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-concept-of-western-civilisation-is-past-its-use-by-date-in-university-humanities-departments-87750">The concept of 'Western civilisation' is past its use-by date in university humanities departments</a>
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<p>The left and right accused each other of misusing history. Conservatives regarded the history curriculum as too politically correct, biased and postmodern. In 1999, the Howard government initiated the <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/33390475?q&versionId=45302877">National Inquiry into School History</a>, based on concerns young Australians lacked knowledge of national history. </p>
<p>This resulted in the creation of the <a href="http://www.civicsandcitizenship.edu.au/cce/expert_views/teaching_historical_literacy_the_national_history,9323.html">National History Project</a> and the National Centre for History Education. The centre was discontinued in the mid-2000s.</p>
<p>Howard re-engaged with the debate in his <a href="http://australianpolitics.com/2006/01/25/john-howard-australia-day-address.html">2006 Australia Day speech</a>. He sought to renew the position of Australian history in curriculum and promote the teaching of an uncomplicated and structured narrative of the national story. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/news/national/history-revision-in-two-years/2006/08/17/1155407959634.html">National History Summit</a> was launched later that year. Howard’s handpicked team developed the <a href="https://www.htansw.asn.au/docman/2007-destguidetoteachinghistory11oct/download">Guide to the Teaching of Australian History in Years 9 and 10</a>. </p>
<p>The election of the Rudd Labor government in 2007 meant the plan to mandate 150 hours of stand-alone Australian history was never implemented. Despite this, Australian history and Western history remain prominent in the current curriculum. </p>
<p>History was one of the four subjects prioritised in the new national curriculum, drafted in 2010 under the Labor government. Labor’s world history framework focused much more on Asia, a stark contrast to the structured national narrative supported by Howard. Some <a href="https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/senior-secondary-curriculum/humanities-and-social-sciences/">criticised</a> the over-emphasis on Western societies in some units, resulting in alternative topics (for example, ancient India) being added. </p>
<p>A review of the Australian curriculum was called for in early 2014, following the election of the Abbott Coalition government. The then education minister, Christopher Pyne, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/christopher-pyne-curriculum-must-focus-on-anzac-day-and-western-history">expressed concerns</a> about the national curriculum not placing enough value on “the legacy of Western civilisation”. Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire – both conservative critics of the Australian curriculum – were selected to lead the review. Commentary was again polarised.</p>
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<p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-history-of-misinformation-pyne-spreads-curriculum-myths-8413">A history of misinformation: Pyne spreads curriculum myths</a>
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<p>The <a href="https://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/review_of_the_national_curriculum_final_report.pdf">final report</a> highlighted some submissions were “critical of the Australian Curriculum for failing to properly acknowledge and include reference to Australia’s Judeo-Christian heritage and the debt owed to Western civilisation”. Despite this, it was decided the curriculum adequately covered Western history. Only minor changes were made. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://matthewguy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Liberal-Nationals-Education-Values-Statement-2018.pdf">Victorian Liberal-National</a> Coalition parties expressed similar arguments at the start of 2018. They argued the Victorian curriculum had inadequate coverage of Australian history, religious tolerance and Western Enlightenment principles. </p>
<h2>Evidence-based approaches to teaching history</h2>
<p>To ensure Australian students have access to a range of quality history curricula at school and university, we need to consider the responses of history experts and teachers, rather than politicians. Current history teaching recognises historical narratives are complicated and shaped by multiple and opposing perspectives. They also offer students the critical thinking tools needed to understand these complexities. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/identity-politics-have-not-taken-over-university-history-courses-85972">'Identity politics' have not taken over university history courses</a>
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<p>The work of Canadian <a href="http://historicalthinking.ca/peter-seixas">Professor Peter Seixas</a> has been influential in this area. The <a href="http://historicalthinking.ca/">historical thinking concepts</a> he helped develop provide a framework for historical inquiry and critical thinking. </p>
<p>This framework is built around the idea students need to do more than just recite what happened in the past. Students need to be able to ask why things are historically significant to certain people at certain times. They need to understand the past from their position in the world, as well as different perspectives in relation to their own cultural identities.</p>
<p>This framework is grounded in international <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2015.1101363?src=recsys">evidence-based research</a> on teaching history. Many countries have adapted it, including Australia in its national curriculum. </p>
<p>Politicians who privilege Western perspectives are doing the opposite of what we’re trying to get students to do in classrooms. To be successful in learning about history, it’s crucial students understand world history, <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137554314">contested and rival narratives</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220272.2014.956795">how history is used in different places and times</a>. This enables us to move beyond outdated labels such as “Western civilisation”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97697/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Cairns does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Australia has been having the same disagreement about what and how history should be taught. We need to move on and listen to the evidence so our children have the best history education possible.Rebecca Cairns, Lecturer in Education, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/759762017-05-17T00:06:46Z2017-05-17T00:06:46ZAre movies a good way to learn history?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169574/original/file-20170516-11966-7ci4ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Daniel Day-Lewis won the 2012 Academy Award for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. Is Spielberg's historical drama a good way to learn about the 16th U.S. president?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.fox.co.uk/lincoln">Touchstone Pictures</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Hollywood loves history. At <a href="http://oscar.go.com/news/winners/oscar-winners-2017-see-the-complete-list">this year’s Academy Awards</a>, three nominees for Best Picture (“<a href="http://www.fencesmovie.com/">Fences</a>,” “<a href="http://www.hacksawridge.movie/">Hacksaw Ridge</a>” and “<a href="http://www.hiddenfigures.com/">Hidden Figures</a>”) were “historical” to today’s teenagers – set in or about events that occurred before they were born.</p>
<p>History movies, like most movies, have a huge audience in the U.S. Even Disney’s notorious 2004 version of “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318974/">The Alamo</a>” – <a href="http://business.time.com/2012/03/21/the-top-ten-biggest-money-losing-movies-of-all-time/slide/the-alamo/">a box office “bomb”</a> – was seen by millions. That’s far more people than read most best-selling historians’ books.</p>
<p>A lot of these viewers are kids, watching the movies in theaters, at home and even at school. I’ve observed “The Alamo” used by teachers on more than one occasion.</p>
<p>But are motion pictures like these good for learning about history? As a scholar of social studies education and <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-History-with-Film-Strategies-for-Secondary-Social-Studies/Marcus-Metzger-Paxton-Stoddard/p/book/9780415999564">the use of film to teach history</a>, I offer the response that films can support learning – if used to meet specific goals and connected to the proper subject matter.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">2016’s ‘Hidden Figures’ was nominated for Best Picture. Will it be used in classrooms some day to teach about this moment in the 1960s?</span></figcaption>
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<h2>The allure of history movies</h2>
<p>Fact-based or fictional, realistic or fantastic, history movies shape the way people think about the past. In a study of how 15 families discussed historical understanding of the Vietnam War era, <a href="https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831206298677">kids and parents both spontaneously drew on memories of movies</a>. “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109830/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Forrest Gump</a>,” in particular, was referenced by both generations.</p>
<p>It’s not surprising that teachers want to draw on this cultural power, showing movies in class to get students more excited about history. In one study of <a href="http://www.mccc.edu/pdf/cmn107/the%20burden%20of%20historical%20representation%20race%20freedom%20and%20educational%20hollywood%20film.pdf">84 Wisconsin and Connecticut teachers</a>, nearly 93 percent reported that they use some portion of a film at least once a week. While not enough to draw clear conclusions, this study does suggest that history films are likely used quite often in the classroom.</p>
<p>So why do teachers choose to show movies with class time?</p>
<p>People often talk about the <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/pros-and-cons-movies-in-class-7762">stereotype of the busy/lazy/overwhelmed teacher</a> who puts on a movie instead of doing “real” teaching. However, research indicates that teachers actually tend to have good motives when it comes to showing movies in class.</p>
<p>In that study of 84 teachers, most felt that students are more motivated and learn more when a film is used. Case studies also describe <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-History-with-Film-Strategies-for-Secondary-Social-Studies/Marcus-Metzger-Paxton-Stoddard/p/book/9780415999564">other academic goals teachers have for using movies in class</a>, which include understanding historical controversies, visualizing narratives of the past and studying movies as “primary sources” that reflect the time at which they were made.</p>
<p>In a recent study of <a href="https://www.history.org.uk/publications/categories/304/resource/7132/the-international-journal-volume-12-number-1">more than 200 Australian teachers</a>, many described how movies added audio and visual elements to learning and showcased a more personal, empathetic look at historical figures and events – both aspects that the teachers felt resonated with the learning styles and preferences of their pupils.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169557/original/file-20170516-11966-kob1uw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169557/original/file-20170516-11966-kob1uw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169557/original/file-20170516-11966-kob1uw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169557/original/file-20170516-11966-kob1uw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169557/original/file-20170516-11966-kob1uw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169557/original/file-20170516-11966-kob1uw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169557/original/file-20170516-11966-kob1uw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169557/original/file-20170516-11966-kob1uw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">1994’s ‘Forrest Gump’ is a popular cultural touchpoint for thinking about the Vietnam War.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.paramount.com/movies/forrest-gump">Paramount Pictures</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<h2>Do students trust movies?</h2>
<p>Most young people are savvy enough to know that movies and TV are fictionalized, but that doesn’t mean they know how to keep history and Hollywood separate. After all, movies and TV shows set in a historical period can be extensively researched and often <a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/57hsn7hf9780252076893.html">blend fact and fiction</a>.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ760285">a study of two U.S. history classes,</a> high school students interviewed claimed that “Hollywood” films are less trustworthy sources of information. Yet in classroom activities, they treated them like any other legitimate source – perhaps because the teacher adds some unintentional legitimacy simply by choosing the film. The teacher “must see some good history in it,” explained one student. “I don’t think he’s going to show something random,” said another.</p>
<p>A case study by education professor <a href="http://education.uconn.edu/person/alan-marcus/">Alan Marcus</a> found that students believed most movies watched in class to be <a href="http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Celluloid-Blackboard-Teaching-History-with-Film">at least somewhat trustworthy</a> – a source of information to gather facts.</p>
<p>The level of trust students have may also depend on their prior knowledge or cultural viewpoints, as in a study of <a href="http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Celluloid-Blackboard-Teaching-History-with-Film">26 Wisconsin teenagers</a> – half of them white and half Native American. The Native American teens found the 1993 Kevin Costner film “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099348/">Dances with Wolves</a>” to be slightly more trustworthy than their white peers did. The white students, on the other hand, rated the school textbook as much more trustworthy than the Native American teens did.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169561/original/file-20170516-11956-1oo69a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169561/original/file-20170516-11956-1oo69a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169561/original/file-20170516-11956-1oo69a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169561/original/file-20170516-11956-1oo69a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169561/original/file-20170516-11956-1oo69a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=254&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169561/original/file-20170516-11956-1oo69a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169561/original/file-20170516-11956-1oo69a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169561/original/file-20170516-11956-1oo69a4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=319&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The perceived trustworthiness of Kevin Costner’s ‘Dances with Wolves’ may depend on a student’s cultural background.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Orion Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Educational challenges</h2>
<p>The complicated relationship between fact and fiction is just one of the many challenges educators face when using history movies in their classrooms. It’s not as simple as pressing “play.”</p>
<p>Among the host of practical and academic challenges:</p>
<ul>
<li>Many history movies are R-rated, with material parents may not want shown in class.</li>
<li>Some administrators aren’t supportive of spending class time on popular media.</li>
<li>Pressure to cover content standards and prepare for testing can leave little time for intensive media projects.</li>
</ul>
<p>The very structure of the school day, in fact, <a href="http://www.iajiss.org/index.php/iajiss/article/viewArticle/116">makes it difficult to fit film viewing into the curriculum</a> – especially if discussion and reviewing strategies are included.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most daunting question is whether movies are actually good for learning history.</p>
<p>In one Australian study, most participating teachers believed film to be useful, but some took the position that <a href="http://www.iajiss.org/index.php/iajiss/article/viewArticle/116">film can confuse students with inaccurate portrayals</a>. “Hollywood distorts history, but kids remember what they‘ve seen more than the facts,” said one teacher.</p>
<p>A psychological research study found that viewing history films <a href="http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/Roddy%20article%20PDF%27s/Butler%20et%20al%20(2009)_PsychSci.pdf">considerably increased factual recall</a> when the film matched historical readings. However, students came away with considerable misinformation when the film conflicted with the readings – because the students remembered the film and not the text. This occurred even when students were generally warned that the history movies were fictional.</p>
<p>With specific warnings about false details, most students were able to remember the accurate information as well as the misinformation. Teachers must set the stage when a movie is introduced, helping students mentally tag which elements are inaccurate.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169567/original/file-20170516-11956-d5q30w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169567/original/file-20170516-11956-d5q30w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/169567/original/file-20170516-11956-d5q30w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169567/original/file-20170516-11956-d5q30w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169567/original/file-20170516-11956-d5q30w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169567/original/file-20170516-11956-d5q30w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169567/original/file-20170516-11956-d5q30w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/169567/original/file-20170516-11956-d5q30w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Zack Snyder’s 2006 epic ‘300’ has some big pieces of misinformation, but the bulk of the narrative elements is more accurate than many people think.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.warnerbros.com/300">Warner Bros.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>How to learn history from Hollywood</h2>
<p>History movies have potential as learning tools, but that potential isn’t easy to realize.</p>
<p>Teachers need strong subject matter knowledge about the topics portrayed, so that they can frame the movie and its relationship to fact and fiction. Teachers also need to have sound learning goals and awareness of the diverse cultural viewpoints that students bring to the classroom. And they need the time and resources for meaningful discussion or assignments after viewing.</p>
<p>Simply put, history movies – and most other media – by themselves don’t teach.</p>
<p>If a teacher lines up proper film choice, lesson goals, subject matter and class activities using the film, it is possible to really learn about history by way of Hollywood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75976/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Alan Metzger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>History movies may have Oscar potential, but their educational potential is more complicated. Should teachers use Hollywood to teach?Scott Alan Metzger, Associate Professor of Education, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/749722017-03-31T20:29:08Z2017-03-31T20:29:08ZHow should World War I be taught in American schools?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163500/original/image-20170331-27263-1ug7790.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Modern high school students are learning two very different approaches to World War I.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/classmate-friends-classroom-597114503?src=lSrbukCX8E_Tq0AlybtDZA-2-25">Africa Studio / Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The centennial of the end of World War I is reminding Americans of a conflict that is rarely mentioned these days.</p>
<p>In Hungary, for example, World War I is often remembered for the Treaty of Trianon, a peace treaty that ended Hungarian involvement in the war and cost Hungary two-thirds of its territory. The treaty continues to be a <a href="http://www.americanhungarianfederation.org/news_trianon.htm">source of outrage</a> for Hungarian nationalists.</p>
<p>In the United States, by contrast, the war is primarily remembered <a href="https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/38/4/727/2754606/The-World-War-and-American-Memory">in a positive light</a>. President Woodrow Wilson intervened on the side of the victors, using idealistic language about making the world “<a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366">safe for democracy</a>.” The United States <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-one/world-war-one-and-casualties/first-world-war-casualties/">lost relatively few soldiers</a> in comparison to other nations.</p>
<p>As a professor of social studies education, I’ve noticed that the way in which “<a href="https://archive.org/details/warthatwillendwa00welluoft">the war to end war</a>” is taught in American classrooms has a lot to do with what we think it means to be an American today.</p>
<p>As one of the first wars fought on a truly global scale, World War I is taught in two different courses, with two different missions: U.S. history courses and world history courses. Two versions of World War I emerge in these two courses – and they tell us as much about the present as they do about the past.</p>
<h2>WWI: National history</h2>
<p>In an academic sense, history is not simply the past, but the tools we use to study it – it is the process of historical inquiry. Over the course of the discipline’s development, the study of history became deeply entangled with <a href="http://www.h-france.net/vol2reviews/vol2no91kramer.pdf">the study of nations</a>. It became “partitioned”: American history, French history, Chinese history. </p>
<p>This way of dividing the past reinforces ideas of who a people are and what they stand for. In the U.S., our national historical narrative has often been taught to schoolchildren as one where more and more Americans gain more and more <a href="http://teachinghistory.org/issues-and-research/research-brief/23488">rights and opportunities</a>. The goal of teaching American history has long been <a href="http://www.socialstudies.org/publications/socialeducation/september2006/social-studies-wars-now-and-then">the creation of citizens</a> who are loyal to this narrative and are willing to take action to support it.</p>
<p>When history is taught in this way, teachers and students can easily draw boundaries between “us” and “them.” There is a clear line between domestic and foreign policy. Some <a href="http://www.oah.org/about/reports/reports-statements/the-lapietra-report-a-report-to-the-profession/">historians have criticized</a> this view of the nation as a natural container for the events of the past.</p>
<p>When students are taught this nationalist view of the past, it’s possible to see the United States and its relationship to World War I <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/inside-first-world-war/part-nine/10801898/why-america-joined-first-world-war.html">in a particular light</a>. Initially an outsider to World War I, the United States would join only when provoked by Germany. U.S. intervention was justified in terms of making the world safe for democracy. American demands for peace were largely based on altruistic motives.</p>
<p>When taught in this manner, World War I signals the arrival of the United States on the global stage – as defenders of democracy and agents for global peace.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163478/original/image-20170331-27277-y5xopk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163478/original/image-20170331-27277-y5xopk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163478/original/image-20170331-27277-y5xopk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163478/original/image-20170331-27277-y5xopk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163478/original/image-20170331-27277-y5xopk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163478/original/image-20170331-27277-y5xopk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=538&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163478/original/image-20170331-27277-y5xopk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=538&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163478/original/image-20170331-27277-y5xopk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=538&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Woodrow Wilson addressing Congress, April 8, 1913.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/ggb2005011653/">Bain News Service / Library of Congress [LC-B2- 2579-2]</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>WWI: World history</h2>
<p>World history is a relatively new area of study in the field of historical inquiry, gaining particular ground in the 1980s. Its addition to the curriculum of American schools is <a href="http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/1.1/lintvedt.html">even more recent</a>.</p>
<p>The world history curriculum has tended to focus on the ways in which economic, cultural and technological processes have led to <a href="https://www.learner.org/courses/worldhistory/whatis.html">increasingly close global interconnections</a>. As a classic example, a <a href="http://en.unesco.org/silkroad/about-silk-road">study of the Silk Road</a> reveals the ways in which goods (like horses), ideas (like Buddhism), plants (like bread wheat) and diseases (like plague) were spread across larger and larger areas of the globe.</p>
<p>World history curricula do not deny the importance of nations, but neither do they assume that nation-states are the primary actors on the historical stage. Rather, it is the processes themselves – trade, war, cultural diffusion – that often take center stage in the story. The line between “domestic” and “foreign” – “us” and “them” – is blurred in such examples.</p>
<p>When the work of world historians is incorporated into the school curriculum, the stated goal is most often <a href="http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/oct02/vol60/num02/Growing_Good_Citizens_with_a_World-Centered_Curriculum.aspx">global understanding</a>. In the case of World War I, it’s possible to tell a story about increasing <a href="http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/the_way_to_war">industrialism, imperialism and competition for global markets</a>, as well as the deadly integration of <a href="http://theconversation.com/as-the-u-s-entered-world-war-i-american-soldiers-depended-on-foreign-weapons-technology-75034">new technologies</a> into battle, such as tanks, airplanes, poison gas, submarines and machine guns.</p>
<p>In all of this, U.S. citizens are historical actors caught up in the same pressures and trends as everyone else across the globe.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163486/original/image-20170331-27277-wmi5oz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163486/original/image-20170331-27277-wmi5oz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163486/original/image-20170331-27277-wmi5oz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163486/original/image-20170331-27277-wmi5oz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163486/original/image-20170331-27277-wmi5oz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163486/original/image-20170331-27277-wmi5oz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163486/original/image-20170331-27277-wmi5oz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163486/original/image-20170331-27277-wmi5oz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The British Mark IV Tank ‘Britannia’ was brought to New York City and put on exhibit to help sell war bonds. Oct. 25, 1917.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.25571/">Bain News Service / Library of Congress [LC-B2- 4379-7]</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The US school curriculum and World War I</h2>
<p>These two trends within the field of historical inquiry are each reflected in the American school curriculum. In most states, both U.S. history and world history are <a href="http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/mbprofall?Rep=HS01">required subjects</a>. In this way, World War I becomes a fascinating case study of how the same event can be taught in different ways, for two different purposes.</p>
<p>To demonstrate this, I’ve pulled content standards from three large states, each from a different region of the United States – <a href="http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/SS_COMBINED_August_2015_496557_7.pdf">Michigan</a>, <a href="http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf">California</a> and <a href="http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter113/ch113c.html#113.41">Texas</a> – to illustrate their treatment of World War I.</p>
<p>In U.S. history, the content standards of all three states place World War I within the rise of the United States as a world power. In all three sets of state standards, students are expected to learn about World War I in relationship to <a href="http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newsouth/5488">American expansion</a> into such places as Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii. The ways in which the war challenged a tradition of <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp">avoiding foreign entanglements</a> is given attention in each set of standards.</p>
<p>By contrast, the world history standards of all three states place World War I under its own heading, asking students to examine the war’s causes and consequences. All three sets of state standards reference large-scale historical processes as the causes of the war, including <a href="http://hti.osu.edu/world-war-one/main/lessonplans/why_did_they_fight">nationalism, imperialism and militarism</a>. Sometimes the U.S. is mentioned, and sometimes it’s not.</p>
<p>And so, students are learning about World War I in two very different ways. In the more nationalistic U.S. history curriculum, the United States is the defender of global order and democracy. In the world history context, the United States is mentioned hardly at all, and impersonal global forces take center stage.</p>
<h2>Whose history? Which America?</h2>
<p>Scholars today continue to debate the wisdom of President Wilson’s <a href="http://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/remaking-the-world-progressivism-and-american-foreign-policy">moral diplomacy</a> – that is, the moral and altruistic language (like making the world “safe for democracy”) that justified U.S. involvement in World War I. At the same time, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center has shown that the American public has <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/04/americans-put-low-priority-on-promoting-democracy-abroad/">deep concerns</a> about the policy of promoting democracy abroad.</p>
<p>In an age when protectionism, isolationism and nationalism are seemingly <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/berenberg-similarities-trump-brexit-1930s-protectionism-populism-nationalism-2016-11">on the rise</a>, our country as a whole is questioning the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.</p>
<p>This is the present-day context in which students are left to learn about the past – and, in particular, World War I. How might their study of this past shape their attitudes toward the present?</p>
<p>History teachers are therefore left with a dilemma: teach toward national or global citizenship? Is world history something that happened “<a href="http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/overthere.htm">over there</a>,” or is it something that happens “right here,” too?</p>
<p>In my own view, it seems incomplete to teach just one of these conflicting views of World War I. Instead, I would recommend to history teachers that they explore competing perspectives of the past with their students.</p>
<p>How do Hungarians, for example, generally remember World War I? Or how about Germans? How about the Irish? <a href="http://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocide.html">Armenians</a>? How do these perspectives compare to American memories? Where is fact and where is fiction?</p>
<p>Such a history class would encourage students to examine how the present and the past are connected – and might satisfy both nationalists and globalists alike.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74972/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kyle Greenwalt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>High school students in America learn two very different perspectives on World War I in their U.S. and world history classes. But which of these competing viewpoints should take center stage?Kyle Greenwalt, Associate Professor, Michigan State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/315992015-01-26T10:56:45Z2015-01-26T10:56:45ZWhat countries teach children about the Holocaust varies hugely<p>As the world pauses to remember the Holocaust, it is important to at what children around the world are learning about the horrific events of 70 years ago and their aftermath. </p>
<p>A recent <a href="http://www.gei.de/en/research/europe-narratives-images-spaces/international-status-of-education-on-the-holocaust-a-global-mapping-of-textbooks-and-curricula.html">research project</a> between the Georg Eckert Institute and UNESCO attempted to map the status of the Holocaust in secondary school-level history and social studies curricula and textbooks around the world. The <a href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002287/228776e.pdf">resulting report</a> can help us to better understand the ways in which information and learning about the past is treated in societies as geographically and historically remote as Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Namibia, Spain and the United States. </p>
<h2>Big disparities in curricula</h2>
<p>The research involved thorough and carefully co-ordinated research which scrutinised 272 currently valid curricula from 139 countries and territories in more than ten different languages, and 89 textbooks published in 26 countries since 2000. Great care was taken to ensure that conceptualisations and narratives of the Holocaust were documented and compared adequately in spite of the variety of languages into which its history has been translated. </p>
<p>The curricula analysis revealed considerable disparities around the world, which have been visualised in various maps. Even the very names of the event differ, ranging from “Shoah”, “Holocaust”, “genocide”, “massacre”, or “extermination” to the “concentration camp” or “final solution”. </p>
<p>In total, 57 curricula clearly stipulate the Holocaust with a direct reference to words such as “Holocaust” or “Shoah”, while 28 do not. The countries which make no reference to the Holocaust in their curricula – shaded in yellow on the maps – include Egypt, Palestine, New Zealand, Iraq and Thailand. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69909/original/image-20150123-24503-11vqkra.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The status of the Holocaust on the curricula in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002287/228776e.pdf">UNESCO/Georg Eckert Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The curricula of eight countries address the Holocaust only partially – where it is mentioned to achieve a learning aim that is not specifically related to the Holocaust. In Mexico, for example, the Holocaust is mentioned as one among other aspects of human rights education. A further 46 countries, such as Algeria and Japan, provide only the context in which the Holocaust may be taught and thus refer only to World War II or to National Socialism. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69908/original/image-20150123-24552-rwh1en.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=722&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002287/228776e.pdf">UNESCO/Georg Eckert Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The findings of our textbook study reveal that representations of the Holocaust adhered to broadly shared patterns. For example, most textbooks focus on the years of intense killing from 1942 to 1944 or the years of World War II. They name the geographical spaces in which the Holocaust took place in general terms as “Europe” or “Germany”, while neglecting the general government, occupied territories, or satellite and collaborating states.</p>
<p>Images in these books are more likely to depict the perpetrators than victims or bystanders – and the conspicuousness of Adolf Hitler suggests that he was largely responsible for the event. At the same time, there are radical differences in the ways in which the Holocaust is narrated and the didactic methods applied to it when teaching, especially in explanations of its causes and effects.</p>
<h2>Comparisons with local examples</h2>
<p>Most strikingly, Chinese textbooks borrow the language and imagery of the Holocaust and apply them to the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/nanjing-massacre">Nanjing massacres</a> of 1937 by the Japanese army. Japanese textbooks likewise adopt the language of the Holocaust in presentations of the devastation of cities by atomic bombs at the end of World War II. </p>
<p>Historians thus “tragedise” their own pasts by conspicuously re-contextualising vocabulary customarily used to describe the Holocaust, including “terrible massacres”, “killings”, “mass murders”, “atrocities” and “extermination”. These have been adopted, for example, in Rwandan textbooks to describe the genocide of 1994. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69910/original/image-20150123-24541-13szzhd.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The status of the Holocaust on the curricula in Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002287/228776e.pdf">UNESCO/Georg Eckert Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Holocaust is also domesticated, or conceptualised in new idiosyncratic or local ways. For example, Chinese textbooks do not employ the terms “Holocaust” or “Shoah”, but rather “genocide” (datusha) and “kinds of crimes” (zhongzhong zuixing). The Chinese textbooks render the event understandable for local readers in a language which is familiar to them, yet which does not convey the historical specificity traditionally ascribed to the Holocaust by western scholars and teachers. </p>
<p>There is no international standard for talking about the Holocaust. Teaching about it is proof of the divergence of overlapping narratives, dominated by local circumstances in which children learn about it. That said, similarities occur between specific textbooks or between regions, nations and continents without adhering to a singular pattern.</p>
<h2>More systematic approach</h2>
<p>The recommendations, published at the end of our report, acknowledge these local idiosyncrasies while calling for greater historical accuracy and more systematic comparisons of genocides. As the maps show, few countries already include the Holocaust in their history teaching while others refer only indirectly to the event or to its historical context.</p>
<p>In Africa, further inclusion of the Holocaust in curricula would constitute a step towards greater awareness of European history. Likewise, comparisons between genocides both here and there would raise awareness of African history in Europe. Yet it remains to be seen whether lessons of the past will, in practice, entrench humanitarian and human values around the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/31599/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The Holocaust curricula mapping project was funded by UNESCO and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, where Eckhardt Fuchs is currently deputy director. He is also President of the International Standing Conference on the History of Education. </span></em></p>As the world pauses to remember the Holocaust, it is important to at what children around the world are learning about the horrific events of 70 years ago and their aftermath. A recent research project…Eckhardt Fuchs, Deputy director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and Chair for History of Education and Comparative Education, Technical University BraunschweigLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/330392014-10-22T05:27:36Z2014-10-22T05:27:36ZColorado curriculum kerfuffle showed activism can beat vested interests<p>Students in Jefferson County, Colorado, popularly known as JeffCo, have learned an important civics lesson about their power to influence policy. In late September, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/26/-sp-colorado-ap-history-curriculum-protest-patriotism-schools-students">hundreds of students organized</a> to oppose the JeffCo school board’s attempt to restructure the district’s history curriculum. As a result, on October 3 the school board <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/us/after-uproar-colorado-school-board-retreats-on-curriculum-review-plan.html?_r=0">decided to back down</a>, although students are still dissatisfied with its conservative majority. Their efforts reflect a consistent theme in US history: that peaceful resistance has an important place in democracy.</p>
<p>At issue was a proposal by a conservative school board member to create a “review committee” to assess the district’s US history curriculum. In general terms, the proponent of the committee believed recent revisions to the <a href="http://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/english-history-and-social-science/us-history">Advanced Placement history curriculum</a> (which occurred at the national level) did not portray the US in a good light.</p>
<p>But the proposed review committee had a particular task that students found problematic. Specifically, the committee would ensure that history materials promoted, among other things: “patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights”. It would also prohibit the adoption of materials that condoned civil disorder, social strife and disregard of the law. </p>
<h2>Peaceful opposition</h2>
<p>The school board engendered precisely the reaction they wanted to prevent: civil disobedience. In reaction to the proposal, hundreds of students left their high schools, taking to the streets to protest the review committee. Broadly speaking, students contended that the proposal was part of a larger plan to “whitewash” history. The result would be a glossy portrayal of the nation that would conveniently overlook defining struggles for equality.</p>
<p>It is worth noting that political activism was the most effective route for the students to challenge the proposal. Had students sued, they would have lost. The school board did not act on any proposal, so parents and students did not suffer any injury that courts could have remedied. In other words, the students were wise to exercise their free speech rights in the court of public opinion, rather than a federal courthouse.</p>
<h2>Symbol of a larger struggle</h2>
<p>This issue should not be seen in isolation. Rather, it reflects continuing struggles in education policy that are being played out across the nation. JeffCo is a microcosm of these debates. Indeed, in the course of the last few months, controversy has developed around almost all areas of contested policy at the national level. These <a href="http://co.chalkbeat.org/topics/jeffco-public-schools-interrupted/">include</a> the use of test scores in evaluating teachers, the role of unions in education, different forms of teacher compensation, and control over curriculum.</p>
<p>But the protests in JeffCo reflect something else: the collision of outside interests with local grassroots political activism. The recent election of several conservative members to the board <a href="http://action.americansforprosperity.org/app/write-a-letter?0&engagementId=47748">has been linked</a> to a larger efforts by a national interest group, <a href="http://americansforprosperity.org/">Americans for Prosperity</a>, with close ties to the influential Koch Brothers. </p>
<p>The billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch have devoted considerable resources to promoting their conservative agenda at the national level. <a href="http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=465AB626-A4C2-41F6-8790-0A41197593F4">More recently</a>, they have focused on local elections and policy formation. For the moment, the power of outside influences may have met their match in the form of students who actually attend the schools where the policies would take effect. </p>
<h2>Youth democratic spirit</h2>
<p>In <a href="http://www.oyez.org/cases/1960-1969/1968/1968_21">Tinker v Des Moines</a>, the seminal 1960s case concerning student First Amendment rights, the US Supreme Court cautioned that our children are not “closed-circuit recipients” of “official” knowledge. </p>
<p>In that case, the Supreme Court was asked if school officials violated the First Amendment by disciplining students for wearing black armbands to school. In finding that in fact they did, the Court recognized that the vitality of democracy depends on the ability of our youngest citizens to think independently and transfer their rights into political action. When young people disagree with the government, they should know how to translate that sentiment into action. That’s exactly what happened in JeffCo.</p>
<p>At the risk of being too optimistic, these events offer encouraging signs. To begin with, young students empowered themselves. They used their constitutionally guaranteed right to speak. To be sure, the school board did not completely scuttle the plans for a committee, but they have reconstituted the proposal to include a broader base of people reviewing the curriculum. </p>
<p>At the moment, this has not appeased the teenage students, some of whom cannot vote. The students are <a href="http://co.chalkbeat.org/2014/10/11/jeffco-students-at-rally-flirt-with-recall-effort/#.VD683-fzjoo">currently discussing</a> whether they will attempt a recall election of the conservative school board members. A <a href="http://kdvr.com/2014/10/11/jeffco-students-continue-protests-against-changes-to-ap-curriculum/">recent rally</a> attracted the attention of the state’s lieutenant governor, Joe Garcia.</p>
<p>These events may also reflect the limits of outside, non-local interest groups based in Washington DC on local issues. As local policy may be more transparent and subject to focused public attention, especially when compared to what transpires in Washington DC, the influence of outside organizations may be reduced. That could be one explanation, at least so far, of why the school board proposal was thwarted or, at the least, came to public light.</p>
<p>No matter how this story ends, JeffCo students have learned the most valuable lesson of their public schooling: they can influence their government. With all due respect to the teaching profession, no class experience could have simulated this lesson.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33039/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Paige does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Students in Jefferson County, Colorado, popularly known as JeffCo, have learned an important civics lesson about their power to influence policy. In late September, hundreds of students organized to oppose…Mark Paige, Assistant Professor, UMass DartmouthLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/329562014-10-20T04:02:19Z2014-10-20T04:02:19ZPyne curriculum review prefers analysis-free myth to history<p>Education Minister Christopher Pyne launched his review of the Australian Curriculum last week and, as expected, the recommendations for the teaching of history left a lot to be desired. Stuck in its “Judeo-Christian” time-warp, the history review is in part a politicised treatise that attempts to confirm the publicly announced pre-review biases against the curriculum of the reviewers and minister.</p>
<h2>Bias in the curriculum? Or the review?</h2>
<p>The review promised to be balanced, but a simple word count reveals some interesting biases. There are 111 cited or authored references to “religion” or “religious”, 57 references to “spiritual”, 63 to Christianity, 26 of which are references to the mythic “Judeo-Christian heritage”, 123 references to “values”, 55 references to “moral” and 93 references to “Western”. </p>
<p>In contrast there are only 73 references to “pedagogy” (how we teach and learn) and 42 references to “inquiry”. The review demonstrates a lack of comprehension of modern educational practice by confusing inquiry-based learning (teacher-guided investigation) with student-centred learning and constructivism (engaging students by starting with their interests and experiences). Also, at times, the review incorrectly assumes that a curriculum framework is a prescriptive syllabus.</p>
<p>Nationally and globally, history education is the most contentious area of study in school curricula. In Australia, several Liberal Party politicians, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and The Australian have seemingly had a fixation with replacing alleged <a href="http://journals.publishing.monash.edu/ojs/index.php/ha/article/view/1040/1370">“Leftist” infiltration</a> of the history curriculum with their own version of the past.</p>
<p>Did the review find any Leftist infiltration? Well, actually, it didn’t. All it could say was that while an unstated number of submissions argued that the Australian Curriculum was balanced, the reviewers received an unstated number of submissions saying that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Australian Curriculum did not pay enough attention to the impact of Western civilisation and Judeo-Christianity on Australia’s development, institutions and broader society and culture. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>There was no evidence or analysis, just a note that some people thought the history curriculum was balanced and others thought it wasn’t. These competing commentaries led the reviewers to their pre-ordained conclusion: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>History should be revised in order to properly recognise the impact and significance of Western civilisation and Australia’s Judeo-Christian heritage, values and beliefs. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The major failing of this approach is that the review summarises two sides of an argument and favours one over the other without any analysis. Not only that, but Australia’s “Judeo-Christian heritage” is a fabricated myth. </p>
<h2>More Australian history? It’s already there</h2>
<p>As for the other subject recommendations they are, first, that students should be able to cover all the key periods in Australian history, especially the 19th century. However the current curriculum already covers Australian history from pre-European settlement to 2010. </p>
<p>Second: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the curriculum needs to better acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses and the positives and negatives of both Western and Indigenous cultures and histories. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62189/original/hdbf2xgs-1413770363.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62189/original/hdbf2xgs-1413770363.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62189/original/hdbf2xgs-1413770363.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62189/original/hdbf2xgs-1413770363.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62189/original/hdbf2xgs-1413770363.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62189/original/hdbf2xgs-1413770363.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62189/original/hdbf2xgs-1413770363.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62189/original/hdbf2xgs-1413770363.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The curriculum already details key periods in Australian history.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hindmarsh/4305222665">Flickr/Peter Hindmarsh</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A close examination of the curriculum will show that both Western and Indigenous histories are already covered in very great detail. As for strengths/weaknesses and positives/negatives in historical analysis at the school level, these are students’ evidence-based judgement calls, not imposed views laid down in the curriculum. </p>
<p>A part of that same recommendation argues that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>especially during the primary years of schooling, the emphasis should be on imparting historical knowledge and understanding central to the discipline instead of expecting children to be historiographers. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are two problems with this suggestion. Thirty years of global research in history education says we no longer “impart”. Imparting is a 19th-century educational term. The second problem is that there is no suggestion in the primary curriculum that students become historiographers.</p>
<h2>More time should be dedicated to historical overviews</h2>
<p>One of the more intractable problems in studying history is the balance between depth and chronological context or narrative. The Australian Curriculum had attempted to resolve this at secondary school level by having, at each year level, Depth Studies (detailed investigations) embedded within a broad narrative background known as an “Overview”. Here is how this approach looks in Year 9, “The Making of the Modern World”.</p>
<p>The Year 9 Depth Studies are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Making a Better World?</p></li>
<li><p>Australia and Asia</p></li>
<li><p>World War One</p></li>
</ul>
<p>From each of these Depth Studies, students must select a total of three electives making up 90% of class time over the year. There is then “Overview” content that is taught to all students regardless of the electives they choose. This includes things like the nature and significance of the Industrial Revolution and how it affected living and working conditions, the extent of European imperial expansion and different responses, and Australia´s engagement with Asia. </p>
<p>This system allows students to background their three Depth Studies. If, for example they choose The Industrial Revolution, Making of a Nation and World War One, they also get to find out about the more general European, Australian and Asian topics that they haven’t studied in detail.</p>
<p>Originally these Overviews were meant to take up about 25% of class time over the school year. After pressure from some major states the Overviews were cut to a mere 10%, making them almost meaningless. </p>
<p>The lone teacher involved in the history review process, Clive Logan, a NSW private school principal, who is supportive of the history curriculum, has come up with a sensible suggestion. He argued that this issue needs more attention and one of the review’s history recommendations suggests that more room be given for dealing with broad narrative contexts for the intensive Depth Studies.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62055/original/mwkgcpyb-1413511667.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62055/original/mwkgcpyb-1413511667.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62055/original/mwkgcpyb-1413511667.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62055/original/mwkgcpyb-1413511667.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62055/original/mwkgcpyb-1413511667.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62055/original/mwkgcpyb-1413511667.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62055/original/mwkgcpyb-1413511667.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62055/original/mwkgcpyb-1413511667.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">More time should be spent learning history overviews.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From a history educator’s point of view, this is a welcome development, given that in some schools and jurisdictions the history curriculum is being squeezed into near invisibility. </p>
<p>The curriculum was originally designed with an indicative figure of 80 hours a year for history alone. As the design process went on the figure dropped from 80 to 70 to 60 to 50 hours and eventually disappeared altogether. This gives every state and territory and every timetabler in every secondary school the opportunity to bury history in an obscure corner of the curriculum. </p>
<p>Indeed, one Victorian high school has compressed history into 20 timetabled hours a year. That’s not a good look for a subject that was originally intended to be one of four core disciplines and which arouses so much interest and passion.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32956/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony Taylor receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Education Minister Christopher Pyne launched his review of the Australian Curriculum last week and, as expected, the recommendations for the teaching of history left a lot to be desired. Stuck in its “Judeo-Christian…Tony Taylor, Adjunct Professor, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/308882014-09-10T20:32:06Z2014-09-10T20:32:06ZAustralia is only one front in the history curriculum wars<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/57723/original/8cxqty5f-1409289230.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Conservative governments in Australia and elsewhere have attempted to meddle with the curriculum to suit their own ideologies. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The national history curriculum in Australia is under “review” by the conservative government. Those reviewing the curriculum have criticised what our kids learn in history class, saying there isn’t enough of a focus on our <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/christopher-pyne-appoints-critics-of-school-curriculum-to-review-system-20140110-30l4b.html">“Judeo-Christian”, Western</a> roots. </p>
<p>How history is taught in schools is often the subject of vigorous debate, and not only in Australia. Not because the past is fascinating, complex and ever-changing in its interpretations, but because all too often political, religious and cultural interests hijack studies of the past to present them through an ideological lens.</p>
<p>Of all school subjects, history is the discipline most targeted by politicians. Ideologically based abuse of history education is a global phenomenon.</p>
<p>Conservative politicians often use history education in schools to promote their view of how they see the world. We know this because it happened in <a href="http://hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard-educational-review-volume-69-issue-2/herbooknote/history-on-trial_160">the US in the 1980s</a>, <a href="http://www.edu.uwo.ca/hse/99granatstein.html">in Canada in the 1990s and the early 2000s</a> and in the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/13/michael-gove-teaching-history-wars">UK from the early 1980s through to the present day</a>.</p>
<h2>How is history taught elsewhere?</h2>
<p>Two recent <a href="http://cumbria.ac.uk/Public/ResearchOffice/Documents/Journals/InternationalJournalOfHistoricalLearningTeachingAndResearchVol11No2.pdf">academic collections</a> of <a href="http://www.infoagepub.com/products/History-Wars-and-The-Classroom">studies</a> also show the range of countries and regions where history education remains a vexed issue. These 25 case studies show in detail how conservative forces with nationalistic inclinations have attempted to interfere in how history is taught in schools.</p>
<p>Of these case studies, attempted and actual political interference has been a strong element in recent debates about history education in democratic countries such as Australia, Canada, Spain, Cyprus, England, Israel, Japan, Russia, Turkey and the US. Most of the more intense debates occur in nations with substantial migrant-descent populations such as <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hwj/summary/v067/67.de-vos.html">the Netherlands</a>, in states where immigration debates have turned nasty <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2013/03/greek-politics">as in Greece</a>, or in nations with substantial minority populations (Northern Ireland, Canada and Israel). We also have nations where the recent past has left countries with troubled legacies, as in Germany and Russia.</p>
<p>In modern Germany, a nation that has never had a national curriculum, not even under the Nazis, the education authorities in the 16 Länder (states) ensure the Nazi era, the Holocaust and pre-unification national history are focuses. Sylvia Semmet, German president of Euroclio, <a href="http://thenhier.ca/en/content/semmet-sylvia-%E2%80%9Ccontroversiality-and-consciousness-contemporary-history-education-germany%E2%80%9D-20">has argued</a> the Third Reich era is seen by many students and teachers as Nazi overload (it is also studied in other subjects such as language classes, civics and religious education). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/57724/original/6hzh82hp-1409289329.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/57724/original/6hzh82hp-1409289329.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/57724/original/6hzh82hp-1409289329.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/57724/original/6hzh82hp-1409289329.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/57724/original/6hzh82hp-1409289329.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/57724/original/6hzh82hp-1409289329.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/57724/original/6hzh82hp-1409289329.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/57724/original/6hzh82hp-1409289329.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">History lessons in Germany don’t shy away from atrocities in their past.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Holocaust is studied carefully with an emphasis on site visits, oral histories, remembrance days, local projects and eyewitness testimonies. Semmet reports that many modern German students, while more aware of the Holocaust than their parents and grandparents, feel disconnected from the events of 1933-1945. Her proposed solution for keeping the memory alive is more curricular emphasis on an “emotional and personal” touch. Overall, though, German schools take their investigative historical responsibilities very seriously.</p>
<p>Russia is a multi-ethnic nation with a highly centralised education system and a century-old history of massive traumas. During the chaos of the Yeltsin-era “Roaring Nineties”, history teaching was freed up to examine pre-soviet and soviet eras with impunity. There was an unprecedented sense of liberation in the education system. </p>
<p>According to ACU’s Associate Professor Joseph Zajda, this investigative freedom has gradually been shut down during the Putin administration. The Russian leader promotes an emphasis on the “bright spots” in Russian history, authorising a <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/russia/131120/russia-history-textbooks">pro-Putin single textbook</a> and advocating a return to <a href="http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2007/06/21/2137_type82917type84779_135471.shtml">patriotic values</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are developing a national ideology that represents the vision of ourselves as a nation, as Russians, a vision of our own identity and of the world around us. Teachers will then be able to incorporate this national ideology, this vision, into their practical work in a normal way and use it to develop a civic and patriotic position.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Conservative interference in history</h2>
<p>Globally, it is clear that the rhetoric of these debates centres on common conservative themes. These include a purported crisis of national identity, a belief that history has been taken over by radicals, a dislike of allegedly inappropriate topics and an assertion that history in schools should be a celebratory/commemorative activity as opposed to a structured, open-ended enquiry led by historically literate teachers.</p>
<p>But the annexation of history is not the prerogative of conservative parties. While it is the case that in democratic societies, history education and indoctrination of the kinds described above tend to be a major concern of the nationalistic Right, in totalitarian societies putting history to use as an unashamed agent of indoctrination is a phenomenon of both sides of politics.</p>
<p>However, in Australia, there is no evidence of interference by Labor politicians in history education. Arguably, this is because leftist politicians in Australia (not necessarily paragons of political virtue themselves) have paid little or no attention to using history as an educational tool. Unlike their conservative counterparts, they see education as more a pathway to personal growth within a public school system than as a means of defending the national psyche.</p>
<p>With the creation of the Australian Curriculum in history, to avoid students being subjected to overt or covert in-school propaganda exercises, it is vital that the subject be taught as a non-ideologised, discipline-based, expert-led investigative activity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/30888/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony Taylor has received funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>The national history curriculum in Australia is under “review” by the conservative government. Those reviewing the curriculum have criticised what our kids learn in history class, saying there isn’t enough…Tony Taylor, Adjunct Professor, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/306642014-08-21T22:39:44Z2014-08-21T22:39:44ZEvidence-free beliefs: history in the hands of the Coalition<p>Back in January, Education Minister Christopher Pyne set up a contentious review of the national curriculum, to be led by two controversial appointees, ACU’s Kevin Donnelly and business academic Ken Wiltshire. Submissions are in. The <a href="http://theconversation.com/australian-curriculum-review-what-the-submissions-say-29319">majority are in favour</a> of the status quo.</p>
<p>The review’s final report was originally promised for May 2014 for implementation in 2015. It’s now late August 2014. We are still waiting.</p>
<p>In the absence of that final report, I thought it might be timely to fill the gap and announce the interim findings of another national curriculum review. This is an Australian Research Council comparative study of history curriculum implementation in two apparently history-obsessed nations, Australia (a liberal democracy) and Russia (a “managed” democracy). </p>
<h2>The history curriculum in Australia</h2>
<p>Leaving Russia aside, there are some very interesting conclusions about the Australian side of things in a project that has involved two pilot surveys (2012 and 2013) of 191 secondary school teachers in Victoria and Queensland (we plan a national survey for later this year). Our interim review is also based on the voices of 49 interviewees (teachers, curriculum officials, history educators and academic historians) from all states and territories except the Northern Territory. These 2013 interviews were planned, carried out and transcriptions checked by a research officer who operated at arm’s length from me as project leader. </p>
<p>Although survey respondents felt that there were technical issues still to be overcome, the predominant position of teachers surveyed was supportive of the history curriculum (88% in Victoria and almost 90% in Queensland). Positives included a new level of consistency within Australian schools in the teaching of history, a chronological structure, emphasis on historical skills, teaching of history as a separate discipline, greater inclusivity and diversity in non-European history and the promotion of more sophisticated thinking. There was no indication that the respondents believed that there was any ideological bias in the curriculum.</p>
<p>With the interviewees, the overwhelming response was again positive. The only mildly dissenting voice was an academic historian who felt that the curriculum was piecemeal and that economic history and religious history needed inclusion. Of those teachers interviewed, none felt that the curriculum demonstrated political bias one way or the other. </p>
<p>There were common concerns about content overload, students in Year 7 studying only two of Egypt, Greece and Rome, emphasis on Asia (mainly squeezing it in - and anxiety that not many teachers would be up to scratch on Asian history) and Indigenous history (anxieties about inexperienced teachers transgressing cultural sensitivities) – and there was a bit too much on war.</p>
<h2>Politicians interfering with history</h2>
<p>When it came to ideology, both teachers and curriculum officials had widespread concerns about political interference, not from the Left but from the Right. Christopher Pyne and Tony Abbott received mentions. </p>
<p>In that context, two illustrative and disconcerting examples were cited about how Liberal politicians approached the need for curriculum change in history. The first concerned Kylie Minogue and the second was to do with trade unions.</p>
<p>In February 2011, <a href="http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2011/02/destroying-their-future/">Quadrant magazine</a>, journal of the Right, reviewed an Institute of Public Affairs publication that had commented on the national history curriculum. The review highlighted what it saw as the IPA’s major criticism of the curriculum, which was:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>human history of the past ten thousand years … portrayed as reaching its climax with AC/DC and Kylie Minogue.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the following year, former prime minister John Howard <a href="resources.news.com.au/.../801957-sir-paul-hasluck-foundation-inaugural-lecture.pdf">followed this lead</a> by pointing out that:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>those who wrote this curriculum, in their infinite wisdom, believed that ACDC (sic) and Kylie Minogue are more important to an understanding of the globalising world since 1945. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem with the Kylie Effect proposition was this. One of our interviewees, a teacher who had followed this debate and who had written the (elective) Year 10 unit in which Kylie allegedly featured, commented in his interview that neither AC/DC nor Kylie <a href="http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/humanities-and-social-sciences/history/Curriculum/F-10?layout=1#level10">had been mentioned in the national history curriculum</a> at all. Not anywhere. Not any time. He said in his interview:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is the fabrication that irks me and I get really upset … there were so many inaccuracies and falsehoods.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Christopher Pyne offered a slightly different ideological interference allegation (which he had been riffing on for some time as opposition education spokesman). He argued in January 2014 that the curriculum was politically biased because, among other things, it “elevates the role of the trade union movement”. </p>
<p>One interviewee, a curriculum official, was asked to prepare a ministerial brief on mentions of this “elevated” role. She discovered two mentions of unions:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>they were both in elaborations, which are examples for teachers to use, not mandated content, but examples of how teachers might use the content if they’re needing more guidance. And anyway the two – these two references to trade unions – one of them was in the [optional] Depth Study in year 9 about the Industrial Revolution … the other reference to trade unions was in the [mandatory] Depth Study on World War I and just suggesting that teachers might look at particular groups in Australian society who objected to conscription and then in brackets it has a suggestion that that might be Irish Catholics or trade union groups.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These two incidents reflected a common view among teachers that any intended changes to the curriculum by a Coalition government would be founded on evidence-free belief rather than on evidence-based professional knowledge.</p>
<p>Based on the reactions of our respondents, the curriculum needs to cut back on content in Years 7-10, students in Year 7 should be able to study Egypt, Greece and Rome, the curriculum needs to have a little less Asian history and the states and territories should make sure that teachers get enough professional development so that history staff can approach Indigenous issues with accuracy and confidence. There should also be less emphasis on the world wars and maybe there should be a bit on the Vietnam war. That’s about it.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see how the Pyne/Donnelly/Wiltshire review stacks up when compared with our evidence-based findings and the voices of 240 committed professionals.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/30664/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony Taylor has received funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Back in January, Education Minister Christopher Pyne set up a contentious review of the national curriculum, to be led by two controversial appointees, ACU’s Kevin Donnelly and business academic Ken Wiltshire…Tony Taylor, Adjunct Professor, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/273522014-05-30T10:45:48Z2014-05-30T10:45:48ZAbsence of postcolonial texts at GCSE level ignores that English literature was always worldly<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49887/original/k3zs7txf-1401442610.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=171%2C3%2C852%2C567&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" would help students to question stereotypes.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingthedeepfield/2300334017/sizes/l">Angela Radulescu</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, the fictional character Whisky Sisodia comments that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means”. It is this complex and often unsavoury history – a history of conquest, dispossession, and violence – that Rushdie’s fiction attempts to make sense of. </p>
<p>Reading postcolonial literature not only makes us better readers and writers, it can also help us to better understand the history of British colonialism – warts and all. Indeed, it was this intimate relationship between literature and empire that the literary critic Edward Said articulated in his reflections on the <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_World_the_Text_and_the_Critic.html?id=cwF60MVVGAsC&redir_esc=y">worldliness of texts</a> and his injunction to critics <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-reith-lectures-speaking-truth-to-power-in-his-penultimate-reith-lecture-edward-said-considers-the-basic-question-for-the-intellectual-how-does-one-speak-the-truth-this-is-an-edited-text-of-last-nights-radio-4-broadcast-1486359.html">to speak truth to power</a>. It is precisely such an understanding of British culture and history that the current political establishment would prefer us to forget. </p>
<p>Like his recent policy proposal to <a href="https://theconversation.com/school-history-exams-shouldnt-just-be-a-test-of-britishness-25799">design a history curriculum for schools</a> that nostalgically celebrates the achievements of the British empire, secretary of state for education Michael Gove’s move to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10861214/More-British-writers-in-new-English-literature-GCSEs.html">focus the GCSE English literature on more British texts</a> is a further sign of his postcolonial melancholia. It is a longing for Pax Britannica in an era of financial austerity and right-wing populism.</p>
<p>It is important to acknowledge that contemporary authors such as Meera Syal and Kazuo Ishiguro are represented under the heading of “Exploring modern and literary heritage texts” in <a href="http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/168995-gcse-english-literature-specification-j352-draft-.pdf">the draft version of the OCR’s specification</a> for its new English Literature GCSE. Yet the main focus of the set texts in the literature curriculum is Shakespeare and 19th century prose. Similar emphasis exists in other exam boards’ drafts, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-27610829">including AQA’s</a>. </p>
<p>Gone from the OCR’s draft are Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi, not to mention American books To Kill a Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men (texts that <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10857079/Michael-Gove-attacks-fictitious-claims-he-has-banned-US-books-from-schools.html">Gove has denied he wanted banned</a> from the curriculum).</p>
<h2>Amnesia about imperialism</h2>
<p>If Gove’s ideas about British imperial history are amnesiac, he also seems to forget that English literature was always worldly. In a well-known essay on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the <a href="http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/spivak.html">literary critic Gayatri Spivak</a> wrote that “it should not be possible to read 19th century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English”. One might say the same about Shakespeare’s The Tempest – a play that stages the politics of colonial dispossession and cultural imperialism using the conventions of a courtly masque. </p>
<p>Reading English literature from the postcolonial world can help to shed further light on the ways in which narrative, genre and metaphor are implicated in Britain’s colonial history. It is no accident that Jane Eyre compares herself to a slave and a “suttee” [<em>sic</em>] in Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous novel. </p>
<p>Yet, as Spivak suggested, it is only by reading this novel in conjunction with Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Wide_Sargasso_Sea.html?id=EBBylYGdeHkC&redir_esc=y">Wide Sargasso Sea</a> that one can begin to identify the ways in which Jane’s narrative of upward social mobility is made possible by the spoils of empire. One of the striking achievements of Rhys’ prose was to evoke a Caribbean landscape and history that resisted the authority of the English language and called into question civilising myths of British imperial culture. </p>
<p>In a similar vein, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe used the formal conventions of narrative prose in novels such as Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God to register the complex society and history of Igbo life. He did so in a way that encourages readers to question the cultural stereotypes of African cultures that circulate in 19th century English literary texts such as H. Rider Haggard’s She or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (a text which <a href="http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html">Achebe famously criticised</a>). </p>
<p>Secondary school students, their parents, and most of all their teachers understand very well that a national English literature syllabus has <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/29/set-texts-for-english-gcse-plumbs-new-depths-of-incoherence-robert-mccrum?CMP=twt_gu">always been shaped by the political agendas</a> and interests of the powerful. What is perhaps less clear is the way in which reading literature should be both a critical and a worldly activity: one that encourages readers to think about literary texts in imaginative ways that speak truth to power.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/27352/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Morton has received funding from the British Academy. </span></em></p>In Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, the fictional character Whisky Sisodia comments that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo…Stephen Morton, Professor of English, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/257992014-04-29T05:13:10Z2014-04-29T05:13:10ZSchool history exams shouldn’t just be a test of Britishness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47150/original/6dfbpfh9-1398681651.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There's more to history than kings and queens. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/298031269/sizes/l">wallg</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The government has recently <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/302102/A_level_history_subject_content.pdf">announced changes</a> to the content of GCSE and A level history exams in England. As in previous reforms to the history curriculum, the documents set out the proportion of British history which children must learn in their history course. <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/gcse-subject-content">At GCSE</a> level, exams will now have to have a 40% focus on British history, up from 25%, but at <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gce-as-and-a-level-for-history">A level</a>, the proportion of British content has been reduced from 25% to 20%. </p>
<p>When I was an A level examiner in the 1980s and early 1990s, the exam consisted of two equally weighted papers, one British, one European, so British history accounted for 50% of the subject content which was studied. </p>
<p>Unlike the draft version of the national curriculum for history unveiled by the department of education in February 2013 and <a href="http://www.consider-ed.org.uk/historical-associations-response-to-the-draft-national-curriculum">strongly criticised by over 90% of history teachers</a> in a Historical Association survey, the new proposals read as if they have been constructed by people with a sound grasp of the principles involved in history education. I suspect there is very little in the aims and objectives section that practising history teachers would find objectionable or inappropriate. </p>
<p>There are many questions to ask about the purpose and design of history exams, but I’m going to focus here on two: to what extent should history examinations be based around the story of the nation’s past? And should history teaching attempt to present a positive picture of the nation’s past, rather than a dispassionately objective and critical one? </p>
<h2>The purposes of school history</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8043872/Conservative-Part-Conference-schoolchildren-ignorant-of-the-past-says-Gove.html">Politicians</a> and <a href="http://www.politeia.co.uk/sites/default/files/files/Final%20Appendix%20to%20Lessons%20from%20History.pdf">some think tanks</a> have argued that the main purpose of school history should be to provide young people with an understanding of the main political and constitutional developments in the nation’s past that have led us to where we are today. </p>
<p>Some historians have argued this gives young people a reductionist and archaic picture of the discipline of history. David Cannadine <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/this-sceptical-isle/96008.article">points out</a> that, since World War II, “historians of ideas, of culture, of capitalism, of technology, of population, of race, of sex, of gender and of religion were rarely concerned with specific national boundaries at all”. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.schoolshistoryproject.org.uk/ResourceBase/downloads/MandlerKeynote2013.pdf">his critique</a> of an early draft of the new history curriculum, historian Peter Mandler noted: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is nothing about ‘Britain transformed’ by the rise of the mass media (from radio and cinema to television and the internet), or by secularisation, or by women’s entry into the labour market, or by youth sub-cultures, or by consumerism, or by globalisation, or by the ebb and flow of equality and inequality, or by family limitation, or by Americanisation, or by social mobility, or by environmental change or ideas of history and heritage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mandler also pointed to the danger of only teaching British or non-European history when people from those countries become part of the empire or emigrate to Britain. </p>
<p>It should be borne in mind that the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study">new national curriculum</a> for history, like its predecessor, focuses mainly on British history at Key Stage 3 (the two or three years before GCSEs), so pupils will already have studied British history from 1066 onwards. </p>
<p>Under the new examination arrangements, (as in the national curriculum for history), the subject will still be presented primarily in geographical terms: British/European/other. And although there is still a paragraph about exploring history from a range of perspectives, it is likely that political history will once again prevail for the most part. </p>
<p>This is in spite of the fact that history is about the human past, not just the national one. Cultural and supranational issues such as climate change, food supply, employment, population, globalisation, migration, power and inequality are arguably more relevant to young people’s lives than kings and queens. </p>
<p>Yet the secretary of state for education Michael Gove <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1255899/Children-learn-poetry-monarchs-England-heart-Tory-plans.html">has argued</a> that what most people want is “a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England”.</p>
<h2>Back to the past</h2>
<p>This brings us to the second question about the way a nation’s past should be presented in schools, and in examinations. Before the 1970s, history in English schools was taught in the main as a positive and celebratory “progress narrative”, sometimes termed “Whig History”. </p>
<p>From the 1970s, there was a move towards a more objective, critical and questioning enquiry into the nation’s past. More emphasis was put on the virtues of pupils developing an understanding of the discipline of history, with its rules and conventions for ascertaining the validity of claims made about the past. </p>
<p>There is no question that Gove is pushing for a return to a positive and celebratory rendering of “our island story” in English schools, the sort of school history which prevailed in Victorian times and up to the 1970s. He has <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8043872/Conservative-Part-Conference-schoolchildren-ignorant-of-the-past-says-Gove.html">argued</a>: “The current approach to school history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story … this trashing of our past has to stop.” </p>
<p>It is argued by Gove and others (including much of the tabloid press), that the return to this heroic rendering of “our island story” will aid social cohesion. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47153/original/vbmc66vt-1398684161.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Always at the centre of history?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/4404528478/in/photolist-7HdmSb-7GaACn-cnxXKW-7GaADV-6viywK-55nonT-4p1jLh-ciPfBj-cUXBMQ-6kGg8o-KKeAg-4gzTG8-daAq9X-KeoVu-7rTNDH-55oPrU-55oSeb-55jCPk-7rTNK2-7rTPbB-7ZmsGq-dFtBgB-55rzkm-4gATc6-7HTkqE-7HtgW3-crJMkQ-7GaAGB-7HtgNJ-cZCKDf-KewHD-crJMg1-d1TDYq-d1TDVs-6kCbCV-cZCJDS-96C9qz-cZCLdh-cZCK9s-ekmfd-2C6FbV-8ZqMLG-Kh1Vn-d1TE81-d1TE27-d1TE5m-dFiiQQ-dFijzj-dFiiTJ-dFiea1">Boston Public Library</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>I <a href="http://www.researchgate.net/publication/229545644_IDENTITY_AND_SCHOOL_HISTORY_THE_PERSPECTIVE_OF_YOUNG_PEOPLE_FROM_THE_NETHERLANDS_AND_ENGLAND">have argued elsewhere</a> that this is an unexamined assumption. The easy availability of other sources of information about Britain’s past, on the internet, on television, in newspapers and in popular history magazines makes it difficult to sustain this idealised past. Pupils will learn from other sources that all countries have their skeletons in the cupboard.</p>
<h2>Good history from bad</h2>
<p>It is important that history exams should assess pupils’ understanding of the substantive past. But they should also develop understanding of the nature and status of historical knowledge. This is part of what makes history useful to young people and to a healthy democracy. </p>
<p>The late historian <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/22/history.politicalbooks">Eric Hobsbawn pointed out</a>, “History is being invented in vast quantities … the world is today full of people inventing histories and lying about history.” Given the variability in the quality and integrity of history that is now publicly available, and the sophistication with which information about the past is manipulated and used, it is more important than ever that children should be educated to discern good history from bad. </p>
<p>The strength of the government’s new proposals is that there is a clear acknowledgement of the importance of the development of critical and reflective learners, capable of handling information intelligently, and awareness that history teaching “<a href="http://www.uea.ac.uk/%7Em242/historypgce/purposes/purpose_critical_judgement.htm">has to take place</a> in a spirit which takes seriously the need to pursue truth on the basis of evidence”. </p>
<p>The danger is that the examinations will continue to place too much emphasis on the political and constitutional strands of “our island story” with a bit of European and world history thrown in. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25799/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Terry Haydn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The government has recently announced changes to the content of GCSE and A level history exams in England. As in previous reforms to the history curriculum, the documents set out the proportion of British…Terry Haydn, Professor of Education, School of Education & Lifelong Learning, University of East AngliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.