‘Vlad the mad’ psychological analyses don’t help us understand Russia’s war. Historians gain insights by examining the enabling and determining factors behind why conflicts erupt.
Workers lower a a statue of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, onto a truck as a crowd watches in Kingston, Ont., June 18, 2021.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lars Hagberg
The study of the Holocaust, as the ultimate example of genocide, allows teachers to raise the universal message of human rights abuses and mass violence.
Charlottesville city workers drape a tarp over the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in 2018. Debate over removing the statue continues today.
AP Photo/Steve Helber, File
Once stripped of their symbolic power, problem monuments offer what educators call ‘teachable moments,’ helping people assess society’s current values and compare them with what mattered in the past.
An analysis of Australian history narratives in secondary school textbooks shows many still repeat the myth that Aboriginal peoples were nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Today, and into the future, consulting archival documents increasingly means reading them on a screen.
(Shutterstock)
As our societies lose paper trails and increasingly rely on digital information, historians, and their grasps of context, will become more important than ever.
Adolf Hitler (second from the right in front) is shown in this 1939 file photo along with German and Italian army chiefs after having signed the German-Italian military pact in Germany.
AP
A scholar’s efforts to learn how textbooks in New Jersey were portraying the Holocaust leads her to testify against a history teacher who taught his students to question if the Holocaust took place.
Politicians meddling in the history curriculum is nothing new, and it holds back progress in how history is taught.
Peter Rae/AAP
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.
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?
Touchstone Pictures
Karina Urbach, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Michael Gove must be off his head. In Germany any politician who tried giving professionals a history lecture would be considered a lunatic. German historians love to argue among themselves, and there…
History in schools is not engaging our students.
History class image from www.shutterstock.com
In 2008, historian Dr. Anna Clark conducted a survey of the state of history education in Australian classrooms. The book that resulted from this study — History’s Children — presented a bleak image of…
Opposition leader Tony Abbott has signalled he’d like to see the history curriculum change. But is it a good idea for government to intervene?
AAP Image/AFP Pool, Saeed Khan
In the last week of the campaign, some naggingly familiar comments came out from the Coalition. Then opposition leader Tony Abbott said he wanted to see the national curriculum in history changed because…
There are some powerful stories in the Anzac tradition but many more that are unknown to students.
Australian War Memorial
“What are your legs? Springs. Steel springs”. Archy’s nervous mutterings before he sprints into gunfire are familiar in Australian history classes. So are the tale of Simpson and Duffy and their “bravest…
Why is it that we no longer teach the big story of how everything came to be?
Universe image from www.shutterstock.com
All human societies construct and teach creation myths or origin stories. These are large, extraordinarily powerful, but often ramshackle narratives that try and tell the story of how everything came to…
Australian humanities subjects need to get on board with MOOCs and develop Australian voices in online learning.
World image from www.shutterstock.com
FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: We continue our series on the rise of online and blended learning and how free online courses are set to transform the higher education sector. Today Ruth Morgan looks at the…
By deliberately making false historical sources, students can learn to think more critically.
Historical hoax image www.shutterstock.com
What happens when you teach students how to lie? Answer: they become better historians. More than a decade ago, back in the days of Web 0.5, a student of mine submitted a generally well-written essay on…
If the same parts of Australian history are taught over and over again, we shouldn’t be surprised that students lose interest.
Flickr/murphyeppoon
Buried away in the correspondence columns of last week’s Sunday Age, a former history teacher’s letter “Where’s our history?” started an intense and confused debate about a “threat” by the national curriculum…