Don’t know much about history, and that’s a problem

THIS week it was decreed that facts and figures are becoming a thing of the past in our education system. But without them we end up in worlds of political hurt, writes James Morrow.

AN INTERESTING news item out of Canberra popped up in my newsfeed Thursday night.

According to the article on the ABCwebsite, facts don’t matter anymore.

Now if this dispatch had been filed out of Parliament House, I, like most Australians, would have thought: What else is new?

But it wasn’t a group of MPs questioning the general two-ness of one plus one. Rather, it was the boffins behind the ACT’s education system.

Or as the school system’s acting school improvement director Kris Willis put it: “Facts and figures once held as paramount in classrooms, and knowing facts and figures, is no longer relevant in today’s society.”

How very modern. Who among us doesn’t look forward to driving over a bridge in a few decades’ time knowing it might have been designed by young Canberran engineer untroubled by the facts and figures surrounding tension and compression?

Instead, said Willis — who was announcing something called the “Future of Education Strategy” — the key to learning today consists of a buzzword bingo of staff diversity, schools as “community hubs”, and of course more data collection.

To say this was an odd thing for an educator to suggest is an understatement. It’s akin to Qantas putting it out there that instead of flying everyone should just get together on Skype and look at pictures of pretty places on the internet.

Worse, it risks creating a generation of students with a puddle-deep knowledge of the world and no shared sense of who we are.

Not focusing on facts risks creating a generation of students with a puddle-deep knowledge of the world and no shared sense of who we are. (Pic: supplied)

After all, it was only because of our collective historical literacy — knowledge of facts and figures — that the country took a sharp collective intake of breath when Senator Fraser Anning dropping the phrase “final solution” to propose an immigration plebiscite.

Facts like: those are the words that Adolf Hitler used that led to the murder of the figure of six million Jews.

Nor is it just Nazism we need knowledge of.

If today the Holocaust at least gets some mention in the classroom, the crimes of communism and the disasters of its close cousin socialism are barely touched on at all.

It was sad, if not surprising, when a survey by the Centre for Independent Studies found earlier this year that 58 per cent of Australian Millennials have a positive view of socialism, with the university-educated being even more favourably disposed to the idea.

And no wonder.

A search of the Australian Curriculum website results in thousands of hits for “cultural diversity” but precious few for “Cultural Revolution”.

Every school term brings tales of principals pushing political agendas in classrooms or assembly halls.

Last year the head of the NSW Teachers’ Federation outed himself as a fan of the American Marxist, Howard Zinn.

Learning uncomfortable truths might not always feel good, but it’s necessary. (Pic: supplied)

Meanwhile, the essential fact of socialism remains untaught: At the end of the day, you wind up eating your dog and using the currency for toilet paper.

Don’t believe me? Look at Venezuela.

Or as Nathaniel Hawthorne noted at the start of his novel of Puritan America, The Scarlet Letter, everyone who wants to build a Utopia must first set up a cemetery and a jail.

(No, this does not mean that a socialised medical programs or welfare safety nets mean we are all one wrong word away from the gulag. It does mean that once an economy goes socialist, misery and thwarted lives are not far away. And don’t even start suggesting that “it’s just never been implemented right”.)

With our schools, according to every international measure, floundering, our education establishment has for any number of reasons chosen to double-down on fads and technologies instead of proven yet derided techniques like phonics and “chalk and talk” instruction.

But it’s a funny thing when the same sorts of right-on progressive people who lament that the US president lives, to them, in a world untroubled by facts are so keen to see hard knowledge expelled from our schools.

Perhaps they’re hoping that, untroubled by facts, the next generation of school leavers will be easily swayed to remake politics and society in their teachers’ preferred image.

If you know your history, that’s a pretty dangerous assumption.

James Morrow is opinion editor of The Daily Telegraph.

@pwafork