Here we have, courtesy of Tony Abbott, the conservatives' problem with modern history teaching, in a nutshell:
"I think (the curriculum) needs to be history that pays credit where it's due."
It should be, in other words, about praising the goodies and damning the baddies.
The problem for Tony is that most individuals, groups and nations that were - in certain respects - goodies, were also - in other respects - baddies. Humans seem to work that way. And unless you're planning to gloss over the detail and simply declare that, say, Britain was, over all, a force for good in the world and therefore any of the completely disastrous things it did simply don't matter and shouldn't be considered, you are going to have to mention them. (Which is exactly the "western-bashing" that Tony's culture warriors then complain about.)
Seriously, what is the relevance of "paying credit" to the imparting of historical fact? Doesn't the very notion - particularly the idea that the curriculum itself should be making judgment calls on who is good and who is bad - distort history? Ought we be teaching hagiography, or WHAT HAPPENED and WHY? If you're teaching goodies and baddies, you're keeping students from understanding historical figures as real people with both qualities and faults. You are keeping them from identifying with anyone from the past, and are thereby keeping them from learning any real lessons from it.
The other thing about Tony's call for more of a focus on the direct history of our particular institutions (he implies it's about "us" as people but since only a minority of us are descended from the English, that's clearly offensively inaccurate) - and I'm not kidding, he's quoted as calling for history to "start with the history of the Jews, then move on to the Greeks and Romans, then the history of Britain" - is that if followed it would leave students thoroughly ignorant of large parts of the modern world that will be vitally important in coming years.
He sounds like he's calling for a nationalist form of history that gives students the idea of us as a proud, distinct people, battling our way through history against villains from all other nations in the world, and that utterly fails to consider how our neighbours see the world. That makes us feel good about ourselves (the minority of us descended from the English, anyway) but prepares us not at all for dealing with the many completely different backgrounds of the nations in our region.
Oh well, why should we bother considering them? Tony dismisses them as "important, but..." And he's right, we're much better off teaching our kids that they're only a secondary consideration. That couldn't possibly come back to bite us on the backside in twenty years.
Nationalist history teaching fosters mistrust and lack of understanding of other people. It's the same sort of thing that we complain about when Japan heavily edits the second world war in its history text books, or when China uses its history curriculum to indoctrinate a generation into angrily believing that the West has been keeping them down. None of this will lead to peace and co-operation when these people grow up.
We owe our kids the respect to teach them history fairly and objectively, with all sides presented, and leave it up to them to decide what they make of it all. Give them the information, and they can decide where credit is due.
While we're here, I also thought Tony Abbott's professed love for British history was ironic, given that the government of which he was recently a part displayed such contempt for English traditions such as the rule of law (see Nauru) or even the Westminster system of government (eg its politicisation of the public service). Maybe he's actually calling for a more limited discussion of English history than I at first assumed.
