stoush.net

Liam, I agree. The relevance of history is completely lost within a boring syllabus.

prepares for tirade from EP about evil lefty history teachers

Evil lefty history teachers are not to be trusted. Books, that’s where it’s at! I love reading about history*. Can’t get enough of it.

But I’m hardly typical. I don’t know how to get the majority of kids interested. Possibly the only course is to force-feed them the basics and hope they’ll eventually take an interest in later life.

• Must include wars to be interesting.

to administer to the two young women with whom I shared the bus the smacks in the back of the head they so richly deserve

Then you are a supporter of corporal punishment in schools? It does seem that the only way to get through to some people is to give em a good whack eh?

…

Engaaging the youth with history? Well what do you expect with the present curriculum? It is a farce with its obsession with technique and indoctrinating with left-wing liberal principles. Furthermore, I think more Irish history needs to be taught as their is a frustration with courses that almost entirely ignore the history of our largest minority. Irish history is more interesting anyway with its comical stuff-ups, heros, betrayals etc. Daniel O’Connell was around a 100 years before Mahatme Ghandi and he is ignored. Michael Collins is not given the historical prominence he deserves. 20th century history just mostly followed 19th century history in Ireland and this is almost completely ignores.

Irish history is about an independence movement in a very small part of the world. It doesn’t even have the cold war and strategic economic involvement that the Arab-Isreali conflict has. When it crossed that line (in terms of german collaboration) it is covered in schools.

Even 50 years ago the population of India was such that changes there are of great importance. From today’s perspective they are the worlds biggest democracy and one of our most important trading partners.

Also we do live in the Asia Pacific region and have moved (somewhat) out of the European Outpost mentality. We should learn about our region before indulging in Irish history!

I’m not a supporter of any kind of corporal punishment by teachers or staff. By peers, friends, and comrades of the same age, though, there’s far less of a power aspect, and a caring tap on the back of the cranium, delivered with the open hand and the words ‘wake up to yerself’ might often be beneficial to a lot of kids.
I know it would have done wonders for a 15-year old Liam.
…
As to the teaching of war history and the Fenian struggle, I have no comment to make except to ask… what do you both think turns kids off establishment history at the moment?

Personally I think the focus on Australian history in high school bores the shit out of alot of people. It’s not even the interesting aspects of Australian history, it’s just conscription and the wars. The most interestng book on Australian history I’ve read was Leviathan by John Birmingham.

It’s been thirty years since I studied history in high school, so I really have no idea what the current curriculum might be.

I think a good teacher can make a great deal of difference to any course. Just for the record, my history teacher was an Irish immigrant, and brought some personal history with tales of his experience of the various terrorist bombings at the time. He was a bit of a lefty, too. For that matter, one of my English teachers was a World War II pilot, which I thought was pretty cool.

Apart from better teachers, I don’t know of any other way to increase interest. That’s why I support the “force-feed ‘em while they’re young, and hope they catch an interest later” approach.

I agree with Patrick, in one instance at least. That is, the most engaging aspect of history to me was story and myth, and learning about the way life was lead, muck and all. Perhaps they should teach Australian History out of The Fatal Shore :S

I also remember being very keen on a lump in Turkey called Catal Huyuk for a large period of my junior school years, because each level excavated revealed a massive amount of cool information, and I was obsessed with the idea that you could just randomly decide to dig at a big hilly lump and you’d find all sorts of bits of the past, including spooky metal instruments THAT NOBODY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE. I was equally intrigued recently to read about some remnants of an Australian aboriginal eel-farm complete with stone housing structure that had been uncovered in WA. It strikes me that one thing we’re lacking in Australia is this sort of underlump connection with our past, other than a sort of mid-80’s obsession with aboriginal rock paintings that proved to be less marketable than modern canvas versions. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to visit archeological sites in Australia as part of the syllabus?

I’m currently travelling in SE Asia and have met many young travelers in Cambodia and Laos who know nothing at all about the recent history of these two countries. A pair of Aussies I met knew nothing about the Khmer Rouge.

When I was sitting my HSC ten years ago, our modern history syllabus consisted of JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Seriously. In year ten we had done a rough survey of white Australian history.

I’d agree with the comments above about Australians needing to learn about their region. Why not a 2 unit history course on SE Asia since WWII? It’s a history that had a very strong relationship with the present, and would be far more useful than regurgitated colonial mythology or American pop history. Don’t those commie teachers understand this?

Irish history is the nucleous of modern history. Ghandi was a mimicker who got alot of undeserved media attention for precedents that O’Connell had taught and set a hundred years before(namely that racism was not on). Irish history is imperative, there are over 100 million people who claim Irish descent throughout the world from Latin America to South Africa to Australia to USA. There are many more who have it and do not realise. Most of them were either sent over as SLAVES or fled from the oppression. Not to mention the genocide of the famine forced on by the English where Irish population was halved. Again who do you think was one of the main pushers of the anti-slavery bills. But for O’Connell, Ghandi would have been enslaved and noone would have heard his whining(tree in the empty forest).

How can possibly try to demean Celtic history? What do we have already? slavery, genocide, diaspora, peaceful co-existence and peaceful means of protest? Want more? Michael Collins developed methods copied a hundred times over. Che Guevara was raised on the stories of the Irish rebels.(yes he was half-Celtic, well really full Celt because the other half was Basque)

And these things happenned to the ancestors of so many Australians and are for the most part ignored.

PS We learnt about Khmer Rouge but it was a waste of time, no Khmer Rouge had ever had much to do with Australia. More people were killed in the Anglo genocide of Ireland(where many Australians have ancestors) than by the Khmer Rouge. It is silly to even try to belittle Gaelic history.

I think that “regurgitated colonial mythology” is a left-wing way of deriding the real Australian history that should be taught in every school.

Teaching children that frauds like “the stolen generation” by way of forcing them to watch works of pure fiction like Rabbit Proof Fence is cheating the next generation. Today’s kids will need to unlearn much of what they have been taught.

Leviathan is a book I’d recommend to anybody interested in Australian history or the city of Sydney. But with the significant caveat that Birmingham takes a lot of liberties with the truth. It’s interesting and historically based, but it’s no more an accurate reflection of Australian urban life than Neighbours is.
This is getting to be an interesting thread on the what and why of high school history. My own opinion is that it doesn’t really matter at all what the subject matter is, it’s the methodology and the classroom dynamics that matter to getting people interested in the past. It doesn’t matter whether they’re studying the Irish diaspora or South East Asian colonialism or the myriad crimes of Stalin, the point is that they’re encouraged to develop questioning skills that they can apply to everything they read.
And as Evil rightly says, a lot depends on skilled, charismatic teachers. Let’s pay them more.

Patrick - who is demeaning celtic history? It is about making Australians understand their region and making the syllabus relevant.

The Khmer Rouge is of great importance to Australia, both historically and now. Australia oversaw their first post-KR ballot. Australian diplomats arranged many of the peace talks between the warring factions. Australia continues to be a major benefactor to the Cambodian govt.

It would be a crying shame if we were to ignore our own role in regional events to once again celebrate our celtic roots. Sure, fit as much in as you can but you must prioritise.

Studying Indochina in Yr 11 and the Arab-Isreali conflict in Yr 12 (as Rabin was assasinated in the holiday break so we switched after a class vote) were two of the best experieces I had in high school education.

EP, you’re right. I forgot the mandatory remark about the left wing teaching conspiracy. I’ll throw one in next time. And what is this about Rabbit Proof Fence? Earlier you said that you have no idea what is being taught today, and now you are suggesting that you do. Which is it? Either way, the only film I watched at school was about JFK and it bored me to tears.

I stand by my suggestion that Australian history is regurgitated - it is a formulaic representation of a bunch of carefully selected national myths and historical events that form part of the popular consciousness anyway. You don’t need to complete your HSC in order to know about ANZAC, Eureka, Ned Kelly, and so on. Classroom time is limited, so surely we can come up with something more useful than a rehash of what we ahave all heard about somewhere else. I’d suggest that regional modern history would be a good place to start.

But I doubt this will ever occur because of the central role that national history plays in the legitimation of the modern state. (Yeah, reading a bit of anthropology at the moment. Sorry.) More likely we will continue to hear calls for more Aussie history, not less, and an insistence that it be the version that the government - and you, EP - already knows by heart. No one will let Aussie history fall off the syllabus, but while it remains there it is taking up space that could be used more productively.

Regional modern history???

The Viet minh copied the Irish.

The Chinese copied the Irish.

The Indonesians copied the Irish.

The Indians copied the Irish.

The Philipines were an American colony.

The New Zealanders were Irish.

This is the systematic racism directed against Celts by the education system.

I see your point, Patrick. Ahem.

Where was the first armed nationalist Marxist revolution?

Dublin 1916 (do not count Paris commune because it was not nationalist)

Who threw out the colonists first?

Michael Collins and the IRA

It is more than likely if it had not occurred in Ireland it would never have happenned anywhere in the world.

Not that I am particuarly for Marxist nationalism, it is just one of the most influential trends of twentieth century history.

Now you talk of regional modern history when it all started in Ireland? It is quite obvious that the easiest manner to understand Modern Regional history is to understand Ireland.

It is systematic racism as well as ignorance that it is not taught more, and that it is relatively unknown compared to modern regional history.

Alot of Australians are Australian Celts and they are not taught their history by the education system.

Ned Kelly should be taught. Not only was he a victim of racism and police harassment, he and his three mates almost started a revolution in Northern Victoria. Do not forget that they were about to take on 300 policemen and their plan may have succeeded but their hearts. This would have amounted to civil war if it had occurred.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/TheJerilderieLetter

A good read.

Patrick, I’ve made your comment hyperlink work.

You can also have a look at one or two of the pages of the Jerilderie Letter in the original here, or the full version here, or if you’re really feeling confident, you could submit a stack slip at the State Library of Victoria and see what happens.

I agree completely on the importance of Irish history. James Connolly is a figure in particular that I have a massive amount of respect for.

Having said that, not everything happened first in Ireland. I understand that the honour of the first major colony to throw away their oppressors shackes is the Dutch in their revolution in the late 1500s against Spanish rule, although it is argued that it was as much about religion as about colonialism. There were of course quasi nationalist and similar uprisings in the Middle Ages (eg the Hundred Years War by the French against English invasion, the Scottish struggle against English rule that eventually led to victory in the Battle of Bannockburn in the early 1300s).

The first in the modern era is the USA (The American Revolution). The first successful non white uprising againt colonial rule was Haiti (1803).

As for the strategy of passive non-violent resistance to oppression, indeed Daniel O’Connell was a pioneer and influential in this with the Land League. But we should not forget his contemporaries in the Chartists and their monster petitions that eventually led to full electoral reform in Britain, or the work of the abolitionists against the Slave Trade and slavery in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and their colleagues in the US and the European continent in the early to mid 1800s. The abolitionist ‘Underground Railway’ in the US was directly breaking the law as slaves were considered property, and the action of helping slaves run away and hiding them in the ‘free’ north before smuggling them to Canada and freedom broke the law, infamously upheld in the ‘Dred Scott’ US Supreme Court case. It was in this context, I understand, that Henry David Thoreau wrote his classic works on passive non violent civil disobedience that was an influence on Martin Luther King Jr in the 20th century.

History has a lot to offer, and I think Cicero’s warning is important: ‘Those that do not know history are condemned to repeat it’. At first I thought it was a warning about studying History in High School, but eventually I got its more powerful message. Teachers deserve better pay and conditions - my teachers were fantastic (yes, I went to a public school) and I owe a lot to them. We cannot underestimate their role in opening minds to analysis and knowledge. Treating them shoddily only invites them to give up, or go overseas.

“The Philipines were an American colony”

• Not to be precious, but it is “Philippines”. They were a Chinese, Japanese and Spanish Colony. The place and people never truly recovered from years of colonial rule.

I meant to include “as well as American”.

Nobody cares what is studied in year 11+12 history because nobody who is serious about their education studies it. History is scaled down an awful amount in TER scores so nobody who is in their right mind would take it. Additionally, there are no University courses that have history as a prerequisite.

The people who aren’t going on to Uni are studying P.E., Woodwork and Metalwork anyway.

The other key thing about history is that there is no learning process involved. It is simply a case of reading and memorisation. In that respect you can learn a lot more history from reading Wikipedia than you can from sitting in a classroom forced to read a book at the same speed as your illiterate classmates.

It is a lot more difficult to learn things like Calculus or Chemistry on your own.

“Why would you bother studying history? You know, if it’s history, it’s fucken’ over already, who cares?”

Quite. Much like the future really.

It’s not just history that is lost to the bogans, but subjects like Maths+English have jobs that require them, but kids understand that no matter how retarded those subjects are, and how boring the teacher is, they need to get through it to get a job. History is discarded, because it’s just as boring and retarded, but no burgerflipper needs to know the finer points of WWI.

I think it’s a wider problem, in that the value of education is perceived to be too low, because of the generally myopic view of young people that a little money now is better than a lot of money when your forty. /teen mode on/ Because, like, you’re so totally old, and probably would spend it on stuff like doilies, and not on jack daniels. Like my parents are totally rolling in it and they won’t buy me any alcohol. That’s like so unfair! It’s child abuse! /thank god that’s over/

What I think is the root cause is not that class sizes are too large, or that the curriculum is too left/right/green/purple, but that the role of the teacher has been misunderstood by policy makers, and by teachers themselves. The current model is that a child enters the school system knowing nothing useful. The teacher tells the student some knowledge, and the student memorises this. Afterwards, the student tells the teacher what he remembered, in an exam. If the student remembered enough of the curriculam, he is considered educated. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

This misses out on the diversity of learning styles in a classroom. The old system of remedial/normal/advanced subjects was an attempt to address this, but it just turned into a method of advertising acheivement to the playground. The remedial kids got bashed for being retards, the advanced kids got bashed for being nerds, and the normal kids got bashed for consistency.

I think the way to do it is break it up into learning styles, rather than test scores, so that kids that do best with, say, being given a concept that is then drilled down through are in the same class, while the children that learn best by being given various small problems that can be abstracted upon to give a more general concept are in another class. In this situation, a teachers role is to find out how a child learns best, and adapt their teaching to the common learning style of their class.

I think another big problem is that the curriculums specify what should be learned, and never a word on why, other than ‘it is important that students have a good understanding of (insert the curriculum setting committee’s favorite topics here)’. If the maths curriculums had something like: Algebra’s utility will be demonstrated using real life situtations involving unknown quantities. This isn’t “word problems” but more: “We’ve just been asked to help the refuelling system on a freight ship. The captain wants to know how much fuel he has to buy. What do we we need to know so we can work it out?” And after prompting the students, they might come up with how long the voyage is, how much fuel the engines burn, how much fuel is needed to dock the ship, and embark, and so on. Then the problem could be extended to have the engine burn different amounts of fuel for different speeds, so the captain might have to solve an equation to work out what the least amount of fuel to buy is, and how fast the voyage should be, and so on.

Then again, I’ve never been a teacher, so I suspect they already know how to get children interested, but The System stops them.

As far as a new history course goes, I am a hundred percent behind you.

Some people say school history is irrelevant and it is mostly true.

In primamy school I remember very little except being taught that Australians historically were racist towards the Chingonese(SE Asians). This seemed a little absurd because I had a rudimentary knowledge of WWII(having recieved AJP Taylor’s version as a 6 year old gift), it was the Asians(Japanese) who had threatened to invade us and so it made sense to be very defensive. These also taught about the terrible things done to the aborigines of Australia but the teaching entirely lacked context. It criminally neglected anti-Irish racism except as a vague mention from memory of Ned Kelly. It was in retrospect a left-wing liberal brainwash instituted by teachers who are too stupid to teach history properly. I also vaguely remember when I was very young about the ANZACs but I do not even remember being told the contextual differences between the ANZACS and the Turks(namely the ANZACs wer Aussies and the Turks were enemies). Instead I remember being brainwashed about a medivac man named Simpson with his donkey where we were instructed to draw the him and deify him generally. Deify? no exalt is a better word as we all know that God and NSW teachers do not mix.

In the compulsory component of history, there was a little more about anti-Celtic racism but it was mentioned as similiar to what later ethnics faced(Political prisoners being used as slaves apparently is what the average immigrant has found).

As for modern history at a HSC level, I was turned off straight away by the “Jack the Ripper” component which was meant to teach how to critically analyse history and evidence. THIS WAS THE OBSESSION WITH PROCESS. In order to pass, one had to include as much course material as possible no matter how irrelevant it was to the question being asked. One also had to use a silly method of critical analysis that was a waste of time.

Needless to say I was disillusioned that we were doing Vietnam(inclusive of Cambodia) instead of Ireland, which was really I suppose very reasonable since my teacher was an American Nam vet.

History was a farce overall as I do not remember ever being taught any of my history, just a NAIVE left wing liberal version of history that attacked my culture.

Needless to say, they also tried to indoctrinate us to play soccer at a primary school level as part of the assault on Australian Celtic culture. But I would have none of that obviously.

If anything needs to be fixed in the education system to make history more engaging, it needs to be the end of ignorant ” library teacher’s version of history “. It is not surprising that kids are so alienated from it when it is such nonsense. I mean how could any parent who knew what was taught seriously tell their kid to be serious about it, because it is your history and the history of Australia and is important?
And if parents do not respect a history that counts Australian achievements through anti-discrimination laws, how will kids ever respect history?

pmo