 The Age
Author: - Tony Taylor was director of the National Centre for History Education (2001-2007) and is now involved in the National Curriculum Board's school history deliberations
TONY ABBOTT'S recent doorstop comment that there were not enough facts about English history in the current National Curriculum Board framing paper on school history has a familiar ring.
It took me back to the early 1990s when Margaret Thatcher expressed a similar opinion that there was not enough British history in the draft British national curriculum. The colonial cringe aspect of Abbott's remark was soon wittily countered by John Hirst's remark that Abbott remembered he was a (British) monarchist but forgot he was a (Roman) Catholic.
Abbott's impromptu interview once again raised a perennial difficulty in the recent development of national history programs in Western democracies - the problem of attempted political interference.
Thatcher set the trend of active intervention in 1989, when her government was drafting a national curriculum in an effort to regulate the "secret garden" of Britain's school system. From the first, she made it plain that she was particularly interested in the history syllabus and, true to her word, she sharply criticised a 1990 draft history syllabus paper for not containing enough Thatcher-approved facts, while containing too many Thatcher-disapproved ideas about historical skills and understanding.
Not only did she refuse to approve the draft but she, the conservative press and various new-right think tanks then put intense pressure on her own education department to come up with a more acceptable syllabus.
After much haggling, the final report was published in mid-1990 and, according to prominent conservative writer Robert Skidelsky, the final draft showed that "the days of skills-based history are over". He was wrong, of course. In 1990, Thatcher was thrown out of office by her own party, making her a historical "fact", and skills and understanding eventually crept back into a revised, moderate and much less politicised curriculum.
Not to be outdone, the US followed suit and indulged in its own bout of attempted political interference in a notorious episode that gave rise to the phrase " history wars ". These began when a set of national history standards (a recommended but voluntary syllabus) was published in 1994 to be met with ferocious opposition from a vocal minority of right-wing populist politicians, academics and media commentators led by Lynne Cheney, an influential neoconservative figure and wife of the egregious Dick.
The US debate sprang in part from the PC culture wars that had polarised US public opinion in the late 1980s and early 1990s, causing considerable controversy in the national press. High-profile radical-right commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy, politicians including Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, as well as such media celebrities as Charlton Heston, joined in concerted right-wing attacks, smearing those associated with the standards as warped, leftist indoctrinators. The debate raged for 18months, losing momentum after a revised version of the standards was published in April 1996.
If any of this sounds familiar to Australians it might be because, as we have recently seen, there is a common pattern to it all. The process is this: It is generally the neoconservative side of partisan politics that, in a projectionist way, still sees history as a battleground for the hearts and minds of school students but which itself is keen to smear, interfere and impose.
This is because many neoconservative politicians and commentators are suspicious of what they see as a radicalised teaching profession led by revolutionary curriculum designers who are keen to influence an intellectually passive and credulous student population.
Part of that equation is the belief that there is an immutable, factually objective historical truth out there that needs to be captured, brought into the classroom and drummed into student heads. This naive and simplistic analysis is totally evidence-free.
My own experience in almost a decade of involvement of history education policy at a national and international level - as a visitor to hundreds of Australian (and overseas) primary and secondary schools and as a recent part-time teacher in a rural high school - tells me this:
First, history teachers are far from universally radical. It is the case that most of the teachers I have worked with closely since 1999 were either mildly conservative, centrist or slightly to the left of centre moderates and all were thoroughly professional. Indeed, the last time I came across an unashamed classroom Marxist was way back in 1968, in Battersea in Britain.
Second, the curriculum officials with whom I have worked in every state and territory have been, without exception, heavily overworked but painstakingly scrupulous colleagues whose only interest has been improving student learning and supporting good teaching: I detected no Maoists.
Third, anyone who believes that our classrooms are inhabited by gullible students who are easily taken in by leftist history teachers needs to talk this over with the students instead of indulging in unsupported slights on the intelligence of our children and gratuitous slanders against our teachers.
Finally, those who pronounce that history is mainly about "objective" facts, as Margaret Thatcher once did, are simply talking about their own approved facts and should immediately go back to school to study some real history.
That was the tale of traditionalist conservative intervention. Now, an account of outmoded academic post-structuralist discourse that discounts school history as a regressive, elitist discipline in a repressive school system - well, that is quite another story altogether.
Tony Taylor was director of the National Centre for History Education (2001-2007) and is now involved in the National Curriculum Board's school history deliberations.
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