A criticism of the national curriculum

[TrueLight]

Here's a criticism of the national curriculum i found in The Age and i thought it was an interesting opinion piece.

National curriculum gets our history badly wrong
January 9, 2011
Chris Berg

"JULIA Gillard began the development and implementation of the national curriculum as minister for education in the somewhat happier days of the Rudd government. It hasn't gone well. The curriculum's implementation problems keep piling up. It's not at all ready to be taught.

The plan was to have the curriculum rolled out in the 2011 school year, but only the ACT will meet that deadline.

New South Wales and Western Australia have decided to delay the curriculum to 2013. The Victorian government announced recently it would do the same. But there are problems with what's in the curriculum too.

Take, for example, the history syllabus. After a full quota of compulsory schooling, Australian students will be none the wiser about the origins and central tenets of liberalism: the basics of individual rights, representative democracy and the market economy, and the importance of civil society.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are the absolute fundamentals of Western civilisation. And they are missing from the national curriculum.

One need look no further than how the curriculum purports to teach ''struggles for freedom and rights'', a ''depth study'' for year 10 students.

The struggle for liberty against tyranny is one of the most important themes of the history of the past 500 years. From the English Civil War to the American and French revolutions, the proclamation of the rights of individuals has given us a rich inheritance of liberalism and civil liberties. That, at least, is how you'd think it would be taught.

But according to the national curriculum, the struggle for individual liberty started in 1945. Because that's when the United Nations was founded.

To hinge the next generation's understanding of individual rights on such a discredited institution is inexcusable. And it says a lot about the ideology of the curriculum's compilers: as if individual rights were given to us by bureaucrats devising international treaties in committee.

Do we owe our liberties to centuries of effort by moral philosophers and revolutionaries opposed to repressive governments? Or do we owe our liberties to the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, devised by governments, and which only took force in 1976? The curriculum implies the latter.

Students go on to study the fight for freedom in the developing world and battles for rights of developed-world minorities. Worthy topics. But oppressed minorities were seeking the same rights held by the majority. Aboriginal Australians wanted full political rights. Black Americans wanted an end to discriminatory Jim Crow laws. To teach the struggle for minority rights without mentioning how the idea of universally applicable rights came into being is to distort history.

We could dismiss this distortion as an accident if not for the strong impression it would give students - that the history of Western civilisation is primarily characterised by the oppression of minorities, not the long, slow, spluttering development and expansion of political freedom, liberalism and prosperity.

Rights denied to racial minorities is a stain on our past, but it is not the sole attribute of our history. If the struggle for individual rights against the tyranny of government is one pillar of the history of Western civilisation, the other crucial pillar is the boom in wealth and well-being over the past two centuries.

Here too the national curriculum is distinctly lacking. The year 9 study of the Industrial Revolution includes weeks pondering ''the 19th-century concept of progress'' - insinuating that a belief in progress is anachronistic. The syllabus keeps students' attention on labour conditions, social problems and the slave trade. Again: worthy topics. But it is an accepted historical truth the Industrial Revolution was the bed on which our affluence was born. Hopefully that can be squeezed in between discussions on dark satanic mills, machine-breaking and limits to growth.

And the Industrial Revolution was the period in which slavery was ended. Slavery has been a constant throughout history. Its elimination is humanity's greatest achievement. But introducing slavery in the Industrial Revolution unit suggests something else: that the invention of modern capitalism was somehow to blame for this ancient crime.

The entrepreneurial spirit of the Industrial Revolution is one we should encourage in students.

Yet the word ''entrepreneur'' appears nowhere in the curriculum. And when the curriculum talks about ''wealth'', it only refers to the distribution of wealth, not the creation of wealth.

Sure, the ideological assumptions in the national curriculum are subtle. But they're pernicious.

Students will not be taught the origins of their world. They'll learn only of Western civilisation's mistakes, while staying ignorant about its extraordinary achievements.

So Canberra's inability to implement the national curriculum may be for the better."

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/national-curriculum-gets-our-history-badly-wrong-20110108-19jcv.html?from=age_sb

[EvangelionZeta]

That's really fascinating.  From my perspective, the study of history is important because of how it allows us to reflect contemporary society with the society of old.  It does seem unfairly degrading if the national curriculum focuses primarily on the negativities of the past; instead, wouldn't it be a better idea to balance this with truimphs and wondrous achievements, to inspire the present age whilst simultaneously presenting it with notions of what to avoid?

[TrueLight]

yep agree i just think this notion of a nationalized one size fits all approach is the wrong way to go, as well as the concepts, history that will be taught at schools dictated to by the bureaucrats in canberra
i dunno i just have a real bad feeling about it and as the author said
'Sure, the ideological assumptions in the national curriculum are subtle. But they're pernicious.'
its kind of like they are rewriting history very subtlety, unfair indeed

[Zien]

Having been subjected to a national curriculum for history when I was studying in England, looking back now the lack of variety really was disturbing. I had studied the effects of WWII on England non-stop; it's impact on the economy, the evacuation of children from London to the countryside, strategies to mitigate the effectiveness of bombings etc. Year after year would we study this, only delving into the actual WWII some times. Before coming to Australia, I did not even know this country had participated in WWII let alone their efforts at Gallipoli and many places during the War.

The Industrial Revolution, the Tudors (especially Henry VIII) and some others were also major topics that were studied, though not as much. Rarely did we explore outside English history, and when we did it'll be about Napoleon. In fact, I learnt more about slavery in American from my general music classes that explored the impact that they had on the evolution of music in the states.


Some are interesting, some are not. We didn't get to have a choice at all on what types of history we can take; either you like it or you don't but you're forced to do it anyway. In Year 9/10 in Australia, I had the choice of Military History, Tyrants and something else (I think it was Indigenous ?). In the end I picked Military History. So refreshing was this ability for me to actually choose a history I would like, I worked hard at it and did pretty well.

[Eriny]

I think it's a good idea to challenge our history. I think generally people have a pretty high opinion of Australia and the Western world, it may be good for them to focus on the mistakes of the past, and hopefully learn from them.

[EvangelionZeta]

I think it's a good idea to challenge our history. I think generally people have a pretty high opinion of Australia and the Western world, it may be good for them to focus on the mistakes of the past, and hopefully learn from them.

By all means teach the mistakes, but if there's no positive reinforcement, people become depressed about their own identity, and society falters.

[Eriny]

How so? In high school, I learned a lot about how Australia treated Indigenous people but it doesn't make me ashamed of my identity. Firstly, my identity is not tied to nationality, nor should it be. Furthermore, it enables me to view what is happening now in a realistic context. I'm not saying that we need to be negative to get to realism, but in a lot of cases history predominantly is full of horrible things like war, colonisation and the dispossession of land.

I don't know anything about what will be taught, but I think the idea of promoting Western 'liberties' as the apex of civilisation is just as problematic as ignoring them, perhaps more so because it blocks the understanding of other people, intrinsically disparaging cultures which do not enjoy the same freedoms as less accomplished.

[lexitu]

I'm not really in a position to make a considered opinion on the curriculum because I don't know enough about it. One good thing that might come out of it is more resources for students - imagine having access to knowledge from different sources throughout Australia. Companies that make textbooks, for example, would devote more time to their products because there are more profits to be made from the single book.

However, some concerns immediately come to mind: Does it further conventionalise education? Does it restrict range of thought? What happens if schools want to stray from the system? Are minority subjects further ignored and minoritised? Is physical education and health integrated significantly? Does it mean more emphasis on results and rigid testing?

[EvangelionZeta]

How so? In high school, I learned a lot about how Australia treated Indigenous people but it doesn't make me ashamed of my identity. Firstly, my identity is not tied to nationality, nor should it be. Furthermore, it enables me to view what is happening now in a realistic context. I'm not saying that we need to be negative to get to realism, but in a lot of cases history predominantly is full of horrible things like war, colonisation and the dispossession of land.

I don't know anything about what will be taught, but I think the idea of promoting Western 'liberties' as the apex of civilisation is just as problematic as ignoring them, perhaps more so because it blocks the understanding of other people, intrinsically disparaging cultures which do not enjoy the same freedoms as less accomplished.

I speak out of assumption, but even if they try not to, most people associate themselves with some sort of cultural identity.  I know I personally feel offended if anyone speaks out against Australia or Asia in a manner which is unreasonable. 

And I'm also not saying that we should "only" have positive reinforcement.  I completely agree that a sense of realism is necessary; nevertheless, to focus on horrible things is also to miss the reality of history, because lots of great things have happened as well.  And really, think about what writers such as Plato have stated in their commentary (or in Plato's case, Political Philosophy): a healthy society's conscience is made so by knowing what is good and what it aspires to.  Yes, Plato also wrote some very extermist things (eg. his censorship spiel), but really, I think he has a point - after all, monkey see, monkey do, and what better way to see than through history?

[Eriny]

I agree with the notion that 'a healthy society's conscience is made so by knowing what is good and what it aspires to', it's just that it seems like all the things that we feel are good, for example, freedom, has come at such a high price, at least morally speaking. For instance, we are relatively free, living in Australia, because of a displacement of Indigenous people and because London's prisons were getting overcrowded with poor people who had stolen food. The US enjoys its freedoms because it stole land from Mexico, displaced Native Americans, threw some tea in the ocean, and continually invested in warfare consistently since World War II. I don't think that these sorts of things discounts our experience of freedom, I enjoy the freedom of living on this continent quite a lot. But it is sobering to think that freedom isn't ideologically simple and doesn't tend to come without quite a big cost to others, particularly minority groups.

But hey, I don't know, that is a rather depressing thought, and maybe it isn't appropriate for teenagers. Having to read Catcher in the Rye for English is depressing enough as it is, they probably don't need the idea that the best achievements in the world tend to be in part caused by some act of exploitation/violence.

Off-topic: I'm curious as to how a society can express aspiration, or at least, a society as big as a nation-state. To some extent, politicians do express a vision, but the vision would take a long time to achieve and each time a new prime minister comes in, the vision changes. We never seem to be working towards something for very long, unless we are working on maintaining the status quo.