Winter 2004

Talking History

Who was Edmund Barton, and who cares?

Australian history— and the way it is taught—are hot topics for politicians, parents and educators, but students continue to regard the subject as boring, reports ANNA CLARK in her overview of the status of history teaching at home and abroad.

It is a strange paradox that for all the controversy surrounding the study of Australian history today, history as a school subject is often labelled ‘boring’. And it’s a label that seems to have stuck.

Jacqualine Hollingworth, the education officer at the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria, argues that it’s a perception of content as much as anything else. ‘Revolutions and Renaissance histories have got sex and violence’, she says. ‘Revolutions has got Robespierre, Renaissance has got Lucrezia Borgia, and Australia’s got bloody Deakin.’

The Director of the National Centre for History Education at Monash University, Associate Professor Tony Taylor, speaks in similar terms. ‘You tell the students they can do Burke and Wills for the 15th time or Hitler and Stalin. There’s no contest.’

For such a maligned subject, Australian history generates a lot of unease. It seems hardly out of the headlines as commentators fight over whose version of what past Australia should be remembering. Questions about how to teach this history also attract considerable attention.

That students have been ‘dropping Australian history in droves’ now reads as a truism. ‘They aren’t studying history like we once did—you can barely find it in the curriculum’, seems oft-repeated. The general perception has been that the teaching of history, and Australian history in particular, is under threat.

Anxiety over Australian history education is not new. Examiners’ reports from the 1970s in Victoria describe the same concerns about students’ understanding of the past as media reports do today. Two-thirds of candidates had ‘substantial difficulties in understanding basic concepts and in presenting relevant, accountable answers’, read one account from 1972. The reasons given also have a familiar ring: ‘poor school reading resources’, ‘poor teaching techniques’ and students’ ‘misconceptions of the demands of the subject’ all contributed to mixed results in the university entrance exams.

In the 1990s, research revealing low levels of ‘historical literacy’ culminated in a massive government effort to increase the civic and historical understanding of students in Australia. The realisation that only 18 per cent of young people knew who Edmund Barton was led to the national ad campaign before the Centenary of Federation that asked: ‘What country would forget the name of its first Prime Minister?’

Civics and citizenship education was accordingly promoted in national education statements and State curricula. The Federal Government committed $29 million between 1997 and 2001 to the Discovering Democracy program and the kits were sent out to all schools across the country in an attempt to raise awareness about Australian politics and history.

In New South Wales, the research so worried Premier Bob Carr that he strengthened the mandatory Australian history syllabus, completing it with a compulsory exam on Australian politics and history at the end of year 10.

Concern overseas has been just as pronounced. After the publication in 1997 of damning reports about Canadian young people’s historical knowledge, a Toronto broadsheet, the Globe and Mail, opined ‘it is not students but Canadian history courses in our high schools that have failed. And it is that failure we as a nation cannot afford’. In 2001, a survey of students in Britain found that two-thirds were not familiar with World War I, and some thought that Hitler was Britain’s prime minister during World War II.

Internationally and in Australia, such results are worrying for good reason. It is commonly understood that history is critical for learning the lessons of the past. History gives context—it enables students to think about where they come from, and the ideas and institutions (good and bad) that have made Australia what it is.

The connection between civics and history also helps to explain community fears that students will not become learned, capable citizens, and that an inadequate history education in fact threatens the ongoing health of civic public life. The question about what our children know can be grounded in an anxiety not only for their future, but also the nation’s.

What do students think? Their comments about the state of history have a familiar ring. Unlike the concern expressed by their parents and educators, the stereotype of Australian history for students is that it’s repetitive and uninteresting.

In a 1975 survey, a Victorian student said that they had ‘wasted too much time learning Australian history, about which there is very little of interest to learn. It is time we faced this fact instead of trying to pretend that Australia has had a very interesting history.’

Nearly 20 years later, some of the responses in Christine Halse’s research into the state of history in NSW secondary schools match this sentiment about Australian history teaching.

‘We did Australian history in years 3 to 9,’ complained one student. ‘It was boring. I would rather watch paint dry.’

The National Inquiry into School History, conducted recently by Tony Taylor, backs up such student feelings. ‘Australian history in schools is characterised by lack of continuity, topic repetition and lack of coherence,’ he concluded. ‘It seems generally unpopular with students.’

While there is a perception that students should be taking more ‘interesting’ and ‘relevant’ subjects such as legal studies, business management or psychology, anxiety expressed over the state of Australian history in schools suggests that the subject is indeed relevant. The question remains how to transfer some of this wider interest in historical engagement into the classroom.

The importance placed on history’s role in society and education means that many people feel that they, and their children, have a real investment in the past. Australian history syllabuses and teaching documents—unlike most other subjects—repeatedly cause controversy.

Debates about what to teach have continued to erupt over the past 15 years. During the Bicentenary, shifts in curriculum emphases to include Indigenous perspectives were criticised by some for being overly negative at a time when some felt that Australia should be celebrating its heritage. More recently, debate over the use of the word ‘invasion’ to describe European colonisation has aroused considerable tension and unease.

This dispute has echoed across the country, each State experiencing its own struggle over the language of Australian history syllabuses. Concern over teaching Australia’s past is reflected in wider, heavily politicised debates over Australian history, such as the ‘history wars’ or the ‘black armband’ debate.

It is more than simply a political concern. Such debates encompass questions about how Australian history should be taught, as well as what to teach. Discussion in the 1970s about whether to teach history as a discrete discipline or within an integrated subject such as social studies remains contentious to this day, as debates over Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE) attest.

So is the answer a Bob Carr-style history syllabus, with prescribed expectations of student knowledge of Australian history?

While numbers in the compulsory New South Wales syllabus are obviously high, the syllabus has come under criticism for being too full of facts; for rushing students through a curriculum and then expecting them to regurgitate key names and dates in the exam at the end. In fact, after disappointing student results and criticism from students and teachers that it was ‘boring’, the syllabus has just been rewritten.

Clearly there is a need in schools for big historical questions, questions that are engaging the public about Australian history today. The anxiety evident in these discussions about the past shows that people aren’t just talking about what happened, but about history itself. And it’s a matter of translating this interest into an educational context.

Anna Clark is doing a PhD in history at the University of Melbourne, looking at debates about teaching Australian history in schools.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au