The ?yay Australia!? brigade turn our messy history into a political football - Sydney Morning Herald

Listening to Alan Tudge’s criticisms of the draft school history curriculum brought home the reality that Australia’s traditionally moronic federal election season can’t be too far away. As we’ve been made painfully aware, the federal Education Minister wants a national curriculum that presents a positive view of Australian history.

Last month he gave the current draft a “C”, claiming it would teach students a “negative, miserable view of Australia,” one that downplays the nation’s Western and Christian heritage. Future generations would be unwilling to defend the nation against threats to its liberal democracy, he warns. I’m likewise worried about research indicating young people aren’t sold on the relative merits of democracy. What I’m not sold on is Tudge’s solution.

This draft curriculum is the work of an independent authority that presumably goes out of its way to recruit masochists and professional fall guys prepared to be publicly flogged for sharing their pedagogic expertise. Because as night follows day, the authority’s recommendations for teaching history were always going to trigger a fresh round in the culture wars with “Anzac Day” lobbed in like the grenade it’s become.

To gauge how intense the battle is likely to get, note the volume of childlike superlatives in Tudge’s remarks last week: Australia is “one of the most wealthy, freest, most egalitarian and most tolerant societies that has ever existed anywhere in the history of the world”. There’s a reason that millions of people want to come here! Of course the nation has dark chapters in its history with First Peoples but, overall, yay Australia!

I’ll venture that gaining a rich understanding of the past spills beyond the narrow frame of reference of either “yay” or “nay”. Which doesn’t preclude the possibility Tudge might be right in saying the draft curriculum is skewed toward negative narratives about Australian history. I note the healthy disagreement among historians on the substance of his claims.

My lay person’s response to specific examples can be taken with many grains of salt, but let’s have a go. First, year 10s will be taught in “Rights and freedoms (1945 to the present)” about “the background and causes, such as discriminatory legislation and policies, to the struggle of First Nations Peoples of Australia for rights and freedoms”. One conservative think-tanker says this is a bad thing. It seems to me a necessary thing.

What about educating all students on “how Indigenous history, culture, knowledge and understanding can be incorporated into teaching core scientific concepts”? I don’t know. But as an idea it seems infinitely more constructive than one positing the teaching of maths is systemically racist - a view held by at least one member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory committee who advised on the draft curriculum, according to reports in the “yay Australia!” media camp.