In a time when people’s lives can be tossed into turmoil for the sake of political manoeuvring it is easy to forget to worry about the politicisation of education. While the promotion of Australian history can seem innocuous when compared to the erosion of our civil liberties, it is what children are taught that will dictate our future. The current trend is to shove Australian history into the classroom and down the throats of students. Educational commentators may claim that the rise of postmodernism is killing history, but it is the political hijacking of history that is stifling the minds of tomorrow.
In the great nationalist push to teach more Australian history (and remember, Aboriginal people don’t factor into most politicians’ definition of Australia), we have forgotten why it is we bother to learn history in the first place. We draw on all of human experience so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to make sense of the world we live in. Learning about post-war suburbanisation will help us to understand why we live where we do; learning about post-war decolonisation will help us to understand why Third World citizens live the way they do. However, the political demands placed on the curriculum displace this ultimate goal of understanding.
Essentially, I could have left school without ever being taught about Hitler. Strange to think of a world not scarred by his actions, yet that is the world that some students live in. The Mandatory* Australian history course creates citizens who are oblivious to the world around them.
When we finally did learn about the Holocaust, it was only as a footnote the role of Australia in World War II. It was covered by exactly five sentences in the four pages on the treatment of Australian POWs in Japanese camps. It was mentioned simply to give a context of civilian deaths to the lives of Australian soldiers.
This state of affairs is disturbing. We need to worry when the suffering of POWs at the hands of the Japanese is made more significant than the genocide of six million people. We need to worry when the teaching of history is used as a political football rather than for true education. History is now simply another tool to create jingoist nationals, who think that the most important event of the Twentieth Century was Federation. Countries may be islands but their people should not. We are producing insular Australian citizens, not the well informed global citizens we can and should be.
Although history is interesting for its own sake, it is not simply a dry academic pursuit. It is essential for understanding the world we live in today. The current dominant Australian history, perverted by political interests, leaves the leaders of tomorrow woefully unprepared for our globalised world. We learn history to learn from the mistakes of the past, let’s not make the mistake of killing it.
*as in detention
This article by Ellen Hardy of North Sydney Girls High School from was the Year 11/12 Winner in What Matters? 2007—a writing competition, run by The Whitlam Institute, that gives year 5-12 students in NSW and ACT a chance to say what matters in society today. For more information go to: http://www.whitlam.org/whitlam/index.php
