Page 3164 - Week 10 - Thursday, 18 October 2007
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national curriculum and, most recently, requiring that Australian history be taught to year 9 and 10 students nationally. This last attempt has drawn criticism from state and territory governments, from the teachers and the education unions and from the public.
Ensuring that school children have a sound understanding of Australian history is a good thing. However, the curriculum of the history courses should be the result of collaboration between teachers, students, governments and other members of the education community. It should not be solely based on what Mr Howard and his mates want kids to know. It is a little bit like the citizenship test in that it prescribes what it believes Australians should know.
My own understanding is that history should be taught in a critical sense. We are all aware that people are best off if they look at the primary documents, if they go back to the diaries and the letters of the day. These are the things that bring history alive to people because then they can identify with the people of those times and see that we are not talking about different people and different times; they were people just like us, but grappling with rather different problems. I will elaborate on that point in a minute.
At present, ACT schools have some liberty to determine their own curriculum within a human society and environment grouping. If an Australian history course were imposed on an already crowded curriculum, something else would have to go. Who decides which course loses out? We all have an opinion on which courses are more important than others. For instance, I heard young Aaron, Young Australian of the Year, say recently that he thought that teaching environmental science should be compulsory. I am sure that people who love music would say that music should be compulsory, and so on. We will always be having debates about the curriculum.
I would insist, for instance, that some parts of the curriculum should be developed within the school. Focusing on areas to promote your own agenda, as the Prime Minister has done in this case, does not take into account the particular needs of students in particular schools. Also, in my experience as a teacher and a parent and someone who knows a lot of young people, students in year 9 and 10 are at a very self-involved stage of their life. These are among the most difficult years to teach—any teacher will tell you so—and forcing a traditional program of Australian history down their throats is not likely to have any useful effect. In fact, I would say it probably will not stick at all. I suggest that we should move the in-depth Australian history course to years 11 and 12 as an elective and give years 9 and 10 a course that resonates more closely with students’ lives.
If I were still teaching and in a position to determine what I taught, I would work with the students along the lines of a research project, for instance, into their own genealogy, their own history, to go back so that they can look at people and then look at where their ancestors, their grandparents, their aunts and their uncles came from. With that, they can learn not just history, but a bit of geography as well, a bit of sociology and more about themselves. Then they are going to be interested because it is about them. We cannot change that about young people at that age. Indeed, it is important that we do not try to because it is part of who they are and their becoming the people that they will be. It is called actualisation and achieving your potential, and these are the aims of a good education system.
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