Reigniting the History Wars By James Reed
While we have been distracted by fighting the Covid New World Order, the cultural wars have continued in the education system of Australia. A negative view of Australian history is presented in the draft revision of the national curriculum, but fortunately some champions have arisen to fight this “black arm band’ view of our glorious past, including, defending the ANZAC legend.
“Jenni Rickard’s father is a Vietnam veteran, her grandfather was a soldier in World War II, and her great uncle Teddy Sheean was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. She has never fought in a war, but she has witnessed the cost.
As the president of the Australian Parents Council, she wants children to understand those costs, and supports a plan to explore conflicting views in the national history curriculum. This is why she was worried when federal Education Minister Alan Tudge said this week that the Anzac legend was “not going to be a contested idea on my watch”.
For Ms Rickard, the danger lies not in teaching students about differing views of Anzac Day, but in denying them. She believes they should learn from the past. “Educating our children, not indoctrinating our children, is at the core of a quality education,” Ms Rickard said.
Like former Prime Minister John Howard, who famously rejected a “black armband” view of the nation’s past, Mr Tudge is critical of what he describes as an overly negative approach to history in a draft revision of the national curriculum. But Associate Professor Heather Sharp, an education academic who specialises in history, described Mr Tudge’s approach as “Howard on steroids”.
In radio interviews this week, Mr Tudge focused on the draft’s description of events in Australian history – particularly the Anzac legend – as contested.
“Such a miserable negative view of our history … all of us know we live in the greatest country in the world,” Mr Tudge said, adding that the word “contested” appears 19 times in the draft curriculum (elsewhere, it refers to the Brisbane Line, the Treaty of Versailles, and terms such as settlement and colonisation).
“I want people to come out having learned about our country with a love of it rather than a hatred of it. Instead of Anzac Day being presented as the most sacred of all days … it’s presented as a contested idea.”
Mr Tudge’s Twitter account has been blocking historians and teachers who challenge his comments, spawning the hashtag #blockedbyalantudge. The teachers say they were seeking a genuine discussion, and point out that’s what the term ‘contested’ means within the discipline of history: calling into question.
“The issues that are marked as contested or contestable in the draft are firmly grounded in legitimate scholarly debate,” the History Teachers Association of NSW said in a statement.
In response to questions from the Herald, Mr Tudge said the changed wording around Anzac Day was “just one example of the generally negative view of our history being instilled through the draft curriculum changes. Kids should absolutely learn the facts and different views, but we need to strike a better balance between teaching the great parts of our history as much as our weaknesses.”
Mr Tudge’s spokesman said he assumed people were blocked because their comments were offensive.
Dr Sharp, from the University of Newcastle, said there was a mistaken view of history as a story and “a nice story, and everyone in the past agreed with each other. That’s not the case,” she said.
If students were to study the Anzac legend as a contested idea, they could examine the bitter debate over conscription at the time, Dr Sharp said. “Or we could look at, was going to Gallipoli a good idea, militarily speaking? Now, is it a celebration or is it a commemoration?”
“This whole idea that we should not be educating our young people about dark history and shameful past and things that are not all rosy is a bit weird,” Dr Sharp said. “We would expect Germany and Japan to be teaching their kids about their not-so-savoury past, but we don’t apply it to ourselves.”
I like how these academic historians want to debate the past, seeing everything as “contested,” but I would guess that few of them would apply the same scepticism to say the present Covid policies, also part of our history.
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