Australian History turned into drivel

Textbook case of making our past a blame game

SCHOOL'S back. That means pressing uniforms, searching for the elusive school tie, scraping out last December's lunch from the bottom of the school bag and covering a new batch of textbooks.

And, after last week's address by the Prime Minister, wondering what all the fuss is about when it comes to teaching our children about Australian history. So on Sunday I picked up a brand new history text book for first year high-school students.

And, there, in chapter nine, under the heading of Australia 1788-1900: Colonisation and Contact are more than 30 pages devoted to the politics of shame. So this is what all the fuss is about.

Students learning about the colonisation of Australia are given a black and white portrait, so to speak. Black is good. White is bad. The textbook quotes a speech by Pat Dodson to describe the idyllic way Aboriginal Australians lived at the time "white invasion is just about to occur".

"About three days in every week would be devoted to gathering your food," he says. "Hunting, collecting - a bit less in places of plenty, a bit more in the hard country. The rest of your time would be spent socialising, or in religious observances of different kinds." There is a "rich and complicated legal system" and the "children are more deeply loved than perhaps any children on earth".

Then, into this world comes the "white invader. Their first act is to say the land is terra nullius, that no one owns the land, that it is not used ... Thus begins the Australian Civil War." And that war continues to this day, Dodson says.

The author of the text is on Dodson's side, complaining that "the myth of terra nullius" has been "left out of the history books". It is bad enough that this account is factually inaccurate. Terra nullius is not in the history books because, as Michael Connor has shown in his book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, it was a recent concoction. A bogus legal theory propounded to justify political objectives in securing Aboriginal land rights.

But even worse than the promotion of this legal mythology is the continued peddling of the romance of the noble savage. A pre-1788 utopia where much of the week is spent chatting among friends, bowing before spirits and loving children.

Even for an alpha male such as Dodson, this is a stretch. One would have thought that, in between recounting the sense of community and sharing - and the bucolic pleasures that filled daily life before "the invasion" - students would also be told of the less sharing side to tribal life - the inter-tribal violence or the brutal treatment of women.

But there is no rounding out of history here. Just a one-sided Disneyfication - more Fantasia than Mickey Mouse - of the noble savage. This is not just a dumbing down of history. This is ideology - inculcating a sense of shame in young students about Western civilisation.

There is no mention of British colonisation contributing anything much to Australia - no mention of civilised society or the rule of law. Instead, all the talk is of dark forces reaching Australian shores: forces that are individualistic and compebreastive and concerned with material gain. There are sneering references to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Charles Darwin - as examples of Europeans who believed in the "superiority" of Western civilisation, over, say the hunter-gatherer existence of local indigenous people. Reading the text is like learning about Darwin's evolutionary theory in reverse gear. Progress is rather nasty and a source of embarrbuttment to the authors.

Last week, when John Howard criticised the way history is taught to Australian children, all he sought was some balance. Acknowledge the injustices to indigenous people, but also recognise the "great and enduring heritage of Western civilisation", he said. But the education commandos pounced. We've moved on from the PM's old-fashioned ideas of teaching, they complained. We're teaching children "more sophisticated historical skills, like using historical sources appropriately, questioning those sources, analysing and interpreting, looking at perspectives and interpretations", the NSW Board of Studies history inspector, Jennifer Lawless, said.

But if critical thinking is the aim, schoolchildren need critical information. They need to learn that historian Lyndall Ryan admitted that "historians are always making up figures" when she was challenged by Keith Windschuttle - author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - for inflating the number of Aborigines end by white men. Instead, students are given a one-sided version that shuns critical analysis. This is history pressed into the service of progressive politics, imbuing students with political agendas, rather than encouraging genuine learning.

We know it is all about politics because the teachers unions have told us so. Last year Pat Byrne, the Australian teachers' union president crowed about the fact that progressive educators "had succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities".

And she said those "conservatives" - presumably people such as Howard who are calling for a more balanced approach to teaching - "have a lot of work to undo the progressive curriculum". An audacious admission. And who can forget the less triumphant, but no less political, observation from Wayne Sawyer, a former chairman of the NSW Board of Studies English curriculum committee. He admonished teachers after the last federal election for failing to produce a more "questioning, critical generation" of students because they were now voting for Howard.

Brazen politicking is evident in how students are taught to read. In the politically charged nether world of academe sits Brian Cambourne, buttociate professor of education at the University of Wollongong. He is one of the driving forces behind the whole language approach to literacy where children are expected to learn to read by being immersed in literature rather than learning the sounds that make up the words.

He has spoken openly about the whole language philosophy as "literacy for social equity and social justice". He regards literacy as innately political and language as simply a tool used by those interested in power and wealth. He says politicians criticise his philosophy because they "have become aware of just how threatening a school system which produced thousands of highly critically literate students might be to the current ways of power and wealth distributed in our society".

Indeed, Cambourne admits his educational philosophy is thick with his political views.

"Most of the work I do is based on the political prejudices I have and these must of course impact on what I research, and how and why I teach the way I do," he says.

So, as you finish covering your child's school books, flick through them to see what all the fuss is about. There are many fine teachers trying to do their best with second-rate materials. But at least there is agreement on one point: there is much work to be done in undoing the progressive curriculum foisted on Australian schoolchildren.

JANET ALBRECHTSEN