Page 3160 - Week 10 - Thursday, 18 October 2007
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rushes. Yes, they learnt something about the gold rushes but not in any context. Really what they tended to learn was how to make things that look like old letters and bits and pieces like that—lots of good arty craft stuff, but there was very little content.
There were times, as a former history teacher, when I advised my children not to bother to do the history courses. It gave me great pain, as someone who was committed to good history teaching, when I actually had to say to my children, “It is not worth doing; it is not a good enough course for you to waste your time on.” That is across sectors, in the government sector, in the non-government sector. I have seen some fantastic history courses, and especially history courses that engage boys, but I used to keep saying to them, “Where is the continuity; where does one history course lead to the other?” And there was no continuity and of course there was no prospect of seeing Australian history in the context of European or even Asian history.
I was quite stunned by this on a number of occasions when children of mine were at university and they asked me very basic questions about Australian history or about world history. On one occasion, one of my children came to me and said, “What happened in 1066?” This is someone with an honours degree now—this is no slouch—and a very good honours degree as well. But in the context of what they do, in the ACT they do not get a basic grounding in the history of Australia and how that fits into the history of the world.
Mr Gentleman can rail all he likes, but he cannot actually take that away. The problem with the Prime Minister’s statement is that I do not think that it goes far enough. My great problem with the Prime Minister’s statement is it is about teaching in years 9 and 10, and we should be starting back in kindergarten and building that program all the way through, which we are not doing, which we are not seeing, and all the posturing from the Labor Party will not change that.
All the really well-qualified history teachers that we have in the ACT—and there are some stunning history teachers—have really insubstantial things to work with. When they get to the colleges they can actually teach history, probably for the first time, but in the first 11 years there is no effective history teaching. It is all cast around with a whole lot of other things in the SOSE program. And that is a great failing in this territory. No amount of posturing by the Labor Party will change that.
But this is really about collaboration, and I think it is very important that we talk about collaboration in education. Mr Gentleman postures about how he would like to collaborate with the commonwealth. Of course they would not. He wants to collaborate with his Labor colleagues across the states to beat the commonwealth over the head.
But let us bring collaboration closer to home and let us talk about this matter of public importance: collaboration in education and how it relates to the ACT. I really wonder how the average parent of a child in an average government school would think that this government has collaborated with them, when they saw the promises broken, when they saw the lies taken to the last election by this government, when this government perpetrated a fraud upon the people of the ACT at the last election, saying, “We will not close any schools,” but then went around and closed 23 schools or are in the process of closing 23 schools.
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