Mr Howard also wants the state premiers to accept the new history guide as the basis of future teaching across the country’s schools.
It will include various topics, such as the “Emerging Nation”, which covers the period from 1850 through to Federation.
Within this framework, schools will be expected to teach students about the events that have shaped the nation.
These include the Gold Rush, the lives of early explorers such as Burke and Wills and the formation of the federation.
The guide to teaching history will also insist that students be taught indigenous history.
Mr Howard has warned that the teaching of history “had simply gone missing” from many schools.
He has promised to use the prime ministerial “bully pulpit” to ensure the schools deliver “what Australian parents want – Australian history taught not as an optional extra or an afterthought, but as a core part of every Australian child’s education”.
Thankfully we have moved on from the concept of history that saw the syllabus being confined to the rote learning of the linage of the English monarchy that I remember from my own school days , but there is no doubt that the way that history has been treated in the contemporary syllabus has done our children a great disservice. Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying, that those of us who do not study history are doomed to repeat it’s mistakes, is just as true now as it was when he enunciated it during the second world war.
John Howard is certainly right that we parents do want our children taught at least a core narrative of our nation, they need to know not only that this is one of the best and most democratic countries on earth but also just how it got to be that way. Sadly too many of the current generation of students have had only the most fleeting contact with such a narrative, thanks to the minions of the left who have believed that they have a right to inculcate our children with their own beliefs and prejudices. Thankfully the tide is turning and even the Rudd education policy has recognised that the methods and content pushed by the teaching union zealots have harmed both our children and our nation.
All that we need now is for Rudd to squeak out his usual “me TOO!!” on Australian History teaching, I expect it will take no time at all for him to claim that he was going to do so anyway…
Cheers Comrades
Filed under: Australian Politics, Education, Federal Election, World Events | Tagged: history wars
Santayana in Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense (1905) wrote:
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“
Thanks for that reference MCB
Churchill was never above borrowing what ever he needed.
Cheers