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.
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.
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.
Supporters of the late Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, during a gathering of far right wing supporters in Madrid, March 2021.
Marcos del Mazo/Alamy Live News
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.
A man adds his comments to a spontaneous memorial of flowers and sidewalk writing that has appeared a block from the Tree of Life Synagogue on Monday, Oct. 29. A gunman shot a killed 11 people while they worshipped at the synagogue the Saturday before.
Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
To grasp how extraordinary evils are often committed by ordinary people, we need to consider how we define evil, and most importantly, whom we consider to be the agents of evil.
Notting Hill Carnival: set up in the wake of race riots.
via shutterstock.com
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
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?
British teenagers visit Auschwitz on a school trip.
Chris Radburn/PA Archive/
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…
An important lesson in free speech.
Rick Wilking/Reuters
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…
The history curriculum review was supposed to be free from bias, but unfortunately that’s not the case.
AAP
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…
Conservative governments in Australia and elsewhere have attempted to meddle with the curriculum to suit their own ideologies.
Shutterstock
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…
Teachers and curriculum officials have complained about the way the coalition government has tried to frame the teaching of history.
AAP
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…
Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” would help students to question stereotypes.
Angela Radulescu
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…
There’s more to history than kings and queens.
wallg
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…
Deputy director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and Chair for History of Education and Comparative Education, Technical University Braunschweig