Stop panicking: Aussie history can be saved
Like Mumbai, London, Moscow, New York or Bali before it, an Australian has again been killed in an act of jihadist terrorism on foreign soil.
By Associate Professor Tony Taylor
With a new approach, our nation's stories will be welcomed in schools.
The debate about the ''threat'' to Australian history in schools has generated more heat than light. The clear and panic-stricken implication has been that somehow the new national curriculum will kill off the study of Australian history.
The argument that years 11 and 12 students will not be taught history under the proposed national curriculum has been rolled into a proposition that all students will somehow be obliged to forfeit the study of Australian history, and we are approaching the end of civilisation as we know it.
Let's clear up some misunderstandings that have featured in this most recent of the many, many controversies about the teaching of Australian history.
Students will not ''lose'' Australian history under the national curriculum. By the time they get to year 11, all Australian school students will have had nine years of classes about their nation's past.
If the relevant states and territories want to keep it, the new national senior curriculum will still allow stand-alone Australian history in years 11 and 12 to remain on the books. That fact has been largely ignored in commentary. If, on the other hand, the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority decides to drop stand-alone senior Australian history because of declining numbers, the cost of administering a course in sharp decline and the fact that there is a large Australian element in the national senior modern course, that will be a Victorian decision. And that's what Victorian history teachers should really be worried about.
And it was not the well-intentioned but misguided Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE) that nearly killed off interest in Australian history. In the 1990s and the first part of the previous decade, SOSE nearly killed off all histories, and by the way, it nearly obliterated geography.
Why then is Australian history in particular in such sharp decline? The research tells us that students, particularly the more senior students, see the subject as bland and boring when they compare it with histories of other nations and other societies. The French Revolution trumps Federation every time.
Not only that but the research shows that topic repetition during primary and middle secondary schools years has produced yawn-inducing sentiments about the seeming monotony of the Australian past. Ned Kelly has only got so much mileage in him when taught in primary school, year 9 and year 11. This over-familiarity breeds contempt, leading to decisions about subject choices in year 11 that have adversely affected the position of VCE Australian history. The figures are these. In 1998, 2308 students took the Australian year 12 course but by 2011 the numbers had dropped to 1071. If this slide continues, by 2020 we shall probably see year 12 Australian history figures in the low 500s.
What needs to happen is this. First, we must stop talking about Australian history as if we are parents encouraging children to eat their greens. Given a fair timetabling chance and the new non-repetitive primary/mid-secondary national curriculum, Australian history may well thrive. In my view, and I am not alone here, Australian history, especially its social history, is fascinating in its own right and needs to be sold in that light, not offered as a sour-tasting dietary supplement. Second, we need more emphasis on getting qualified and capable teachers into history classrooms, with not so much of the current benighted PE-teacher-armed-with-a-textbook-and-a-puzzled-frown approach.
Third, we need more emphasis in education faculties on the latest research into how history education is taught in the 21st century and no emphasis at all on how SOSE was taught in the 1990s. Finally, we need more informed public debate about this important topic.
Associate Professor Tony Taylor teaches and researches in the Faculty of Education at Monash University's Gippsland campus. He is a member of the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority's history advisory group.
This article originally appeared in The National Times.