Bizarre history curriculum studies Kylie not capitalism

THE draft history curriculum released by the commonwealth government has praiseworthy features but there is much about the curriculum that I find unbalanced and in some cases quite bizarre.

An illustration of the bizarre is to be found in the Year 10 curriculum. In it, students are required to do what is called an in-depth study of one of three aspects of globalisation from 1945 to today: the options are popular culture, environmental movements or mass migration movements.

Now I read that several times and I thought: since 1945, what has been the most significant element of globalisation that has really affected the world and Australia?

Surely it has to be economic globalisation? Surely it's the fact that the spread through market forces and more open trade, of economic growth to countries such as China, India and other nations in our region, has helped liberate literally hundreds of millions from poverty?

By 2030, the majority of middle-class people in the world will live in the Asia-Pacific region. This is a historic trend and it's the greatest shift in the locus of economic power since the Industrial Revolution.

Yet as historian Greg Melleuish has pointed out, for some extraordinary reason, those who wrote this curriculum, in their infinite wisdom, believed that AC/DC and Kylie Minogue are more important to an understanding of the globalising world since 1945. And I say that with much respect to a talented entertainer.

This is in part a reflection of a modern trend to give higher priority to imparting abstract research skills than actual knowledge. But what's the use of these research skills if students have no understanding of what to look for?

In its treatment of political thought and movement in the past 100 years, the starkest evidence that the curriculum lacks prioritisation is that there is no discrete study of the rise and fall of Soviet communism. Surely the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, which finally put paid to any notion that the command-economy model could work, has been the most momentous development to touch the ebb and flow of political ideologies since the end of World War II.

There is reference to these events, but only in country-specific studies that will in no way provide the prominence and perspective they deserve and, moreover, the arrangement of the curriculum means that students will not be required to study these historic shifts.

It will not allow for analysis of the impact of other political and economic philosophies, or of other nations and their leaders, on the former Soviet system.

But then that might have invited acknowledgment of the roles of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, and I get the impression that the draftsmen of this curriculum would not have wanted that.

The curriculum is repeatedly unbalanced in the choice of subjects that have an obvious political context.

For instance, in Year 9, students are given the option of learning about the "progressive ideas and movements" of the 19th century. The ideas that feature are socialism, imperialism, nationalism, egalitarianism, Darwinism, capitalism and Chartism. Not one mention of conservatism. Not one mention of liberalism, which is extraordinary given that the Western liberal tradition is pervasive in Australia and similar countries.

In the same context students will study the reasons one key idea emerged and/or developed a following. Naturally the example suggested in the curriculum is the influence of the Industrial Revolution on socialism. Where is the counter-balancing example?

In years 11-12, one of the electives is workers' rights. Students will learn about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the influence of Chartism as well as Engels and Marx. The International Labour Organisation will be studied; so will the International Federation of Trade Unions and their methods to advance workers' rights.

Once again, where is the balance? Where is the elective inviting a detailed study of free enterprise, including the central role of private-property ownership? Surely that should be included in any balanced study of our social history. In areas such as this, the assumption of the curriculum is that wealth will always be there and scant regard need be paid to its generation.

Students can learn about the Harvester Judgment, the introduction of pensions, and workers' rights, and there can be no objection to that, but where, for example, is the reference to the decisive rejection in the late 1940s of attempts to nationalise Australia's banking system?

If successful, those moves would have fundamentally altered the direction of the post-war Australian economy. And as for the role of small business in the history of the Australian economy, not a mention.

Its coverage of modern Chinese political history inexplicably stops at 1976, two years before Deng Xiaoping introduced liberal economic reforms that would dramatically transform the country's economy, although some reference is made elsewhere to China's contemporary economic performance; once again, however, the context is wrong.

I am sure it will astonish you all to know that students will not be required to do a detailed study of the mainstream history of Australia between 1750 and 1918.

The study of Australian history is introduced into the curriculum in Year 6 but, understandably, it is of a generalised kind. The curriculum returns to Australian history in Year 9, under the heading of Making a Better World (1750-1914).

Yet, incredibly, students will not be required to study Australian history in depth for that period because such a study is offered only as an alternative to an in-depth study of an Asian country. It is not compulsory.

So, Australian school students will not be required to learn, in detail, about the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia through the federation of the colonies in 1901, without question the most important event in our national history. Need I say more?

My fear is that if this curriculum remains unamended, young Australians of the future will be denied a proper knowledge of our nation's history.

John Howard was prime minister from 1996 to 2007. This is an edited extract of the Sir Paul Hasluck Foundation inaugural lecture delivered yesterday.