Teaching pride in our democracy

School students in years 6 and 10 are not completely clueless about Australia’s history and civic institutions. But they come close. New results from the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority show well over half do not meet specified knowledge requirements. And understanding is at its lowest ebb since testing started in 2004.

This is very bad and a problem that goes way beyond young people neither knowing nor caring who signs a bill into law. ACARA presents the usual explanation for every curriculum fail – that teachers need more time and support. Plus a parliamentary inquiry into civics and citizenship education has just reported that more needs to be done to provide resources and opportunities to learn about Australian values – although funding for students to visit Canberra may not be the best way. Question time in the lower house is not always parliamentary democracy at its best.

Nor is there anything wrong with the content of existing tests, as far as they go. As the Australian Historical Association said in a submission to the parliamentary inquiry, young people need to know “the practices and institutions … of our particular form of government”. But we need to go further to help students, and aspiring immigrants for that matter, understand the foundations of our democracy.

Without belief in the ideal of Australia, loyalties will gradually degrade and be replaced by commitment to family, friends, faith and allegiances based on ancient hatreds that have no place here – there is nothing Australian about anti-Semitic violence. Nor is there any sense in the ideological blather of “settler colonialism” that teaches students that everybody who is not Indigenous is an intruder in their birth or freely chosen land.

All of us have the right to be proud of Australia as a continent and as the embodiment of democracy. As the historians put it, “civics education needs to include an appreciation and understanding of democracy in the wider sense: as a system built on literally millions of actions by ordinary citizens in their daily lives”.

It must never be taken for granted: “Democracy has been made through popular struggle, resistance and sacrifice … if it is not valued and protected, it can also be unmade.”