Editorial: One man's crusader is not another man's terrorist
HISTORY may very well be written by the victors, but that is no guarantee that it will be written -- or taught -- correctly. For proof of this depressing fact, look no further than Justine Ferrari's report in yesterday's edition of The Australian which revealed that a textbook widely used in Victoria's high schools compares, in a completely relativistic and non-judgmental fashion, the European Crusaders of the Middle Ages (whose actions arguably kicked off the rebirth of Europe) with the terrorists who slammed jets into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11 and whose dream was a world plunged into a Taliban-run dark age: ''Like the Crusaders ... they were told they would go straight to heaven when they died'', states the book, referring to bin Laden's henchmen. ''Might it be fair to say that Crusaders who attacked the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem were also terrorists?'' While it is nice to see that European history still rates a mention in schools, it is also distressing to see just how much ground has been lost to education's post-modernists -- even to the point where a text that non-judgmentally presents young minds with the Osama bin Laden view of the world is being paid for with taxpayer dollars.
Bin Laden, after all, regularly complains about Crusaders modern and medieval -- even lamenting the ''tragedy of al-Andalus'', or the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 -- and ignores the fact that so-called ''Muslim'' lands in much of the world, including those fought over during the Crusades, only became Muslim-controlled through very politically incorrect processes of invasion and colonisation. Humanities Alive 2 seems more than happy to promote ignorance of these critical facts.
While bin Laden's statements are certainly valuable texts for anyone studying the geopolitics of modern terrorism, they are not the way to teach high school students medieval history. And though the Crusades have never been particularly popular with the modern educational establishment (except as a bloody cudgel with which to bash the West) they are a critically important piece of world history that clearly still resonate today. As a brief refresher, Muslim incursions into Byzantine territory went largely unremarked in the West for centuries, but the situation changed with the sacking of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre -- the historical burial place of Jesus -- in 1009 by the Caliph of Cairo. The Western response, in the form of the Crusades, was not an exercise in naked imperialism, but rather an effort to come to the aid of Christian co-religionists who were doing it tough under the Ottoman yoke. (Indeed, even after the Crusades, the Ottoman Empire's Muslim armies would come close to overrunning Europe, and were not decisively stopped until the Siege of Vienna in 1529 and another battle there in 1683.) It is critical to remember that the eastern Mediterranean had previously been held by the Byzantine empire, successor state to the Roman Empire, whose leaders in Constantinople (now Istanbul) spent years begging the Pope and western European kings for help even as they preserved the heritage of antiquity. Once in the East, Europeans rediscovered long-forgotten doctrines of the Greek philosophers (such as Aristotle, Plato and Socrates) and Roman government (articulated by countless thinkers and historians), as well as the new Arab numbering system. All these elements and more found fertile ground in a Europe looking to pick up the pieces from the Dark Ages, and they provided the fuel for the Renaissance of the 12th and 15th centuries and subsequent periods of Enlightenment and democratic revolution. Not teaching these critical elements of how Western culture -- of which Australia is a part -- came to be to students is to in a sense cheat them of their heritage. Simply casting the Crusaders as a bunch of ignorant and bloodthirsty Europeans ignores this reality.
Teachers monkeying with history to suit their own agendas is nothing new; in 2005, the president of the NSW English Teachers Association complained that instructors weren't doing enough to keep future voters from supporting John Howard. But this politicisation ignores the whole point of teaching history, which is to produce citizens who are well-grounded in events of the past so that they might better understand the world around them -- and be able to see, however hazily, into the future. If Humanities Alive 2 is any indication of what students are learning in Victoria (or the rest of Australia), it appears they will be equipped to do little more than pull their conversational weight at trendy inner-city dinner parties.
Bin Laden, after all, regularly complains about Crusaders modern and medieval -- even lamenting the ''tragedy of al-Andalus'', or the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 -- and ignores the fact that so-called ''Muslim'' lands in much of the world, including those fought over during the Crusades, only became Muslim-controlled through very politically incorrect processes of invasion and colonisation. Humanities Alive 2 seems more than happy to promote ignorance of these critical facts.
While bin Laden's statements are certainly valuable texts for anyone studying the geopolitics of modern terrorism, they are not the way to teach high school students medieval history. And though the Crusades have never been particularly popular with the modern educational establishment (except as a bloody cudgel with which to bash the West) they are a critically important piece of world history that clearly still resonate today. As a brief refresher, Muslim incursions into Byzantine territory went largely unremarked in the West for centuries, but the situation changed with the sacking of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre -- the historical burial place of Jesus -- in 1009 by the Caliph of Cairo. The Western response, in the form of the Crusades, was not an exercise in naked imperialism, but rather an effort to come to the aid of Christian co-religionists who were doing it tough under the Ottoman yoke. (Indeed, even after the Crusades, the Ottoman Empire's Muslim armies would come close to overrunning Europe, and were not decisively stopped until the Siege of Vienna in 1529 and another battle there in 1683.) It is critical to remember that the eastern Mediterranean had previously been held by the Byzantine empire, successor state to the Roman Empire, whose leaders in Constantinople (now Istanbul) spent years begging the Pope and western European kings for help even as they preserved the heritage of antiquity. Once in the East, Europeans rediscovered long-forgotten doctrines of the Greek philosophers (such as Aristotle, Plato and Socrates) and Roman government (articulated by countless thinkers and historians), as well as the new Arab numbering system. All these elements and more found fertile ground in a Europe looking to pick up the pieces from the Dark Ages, and they provided the fuel for the Renaissance of the 12th and 15th centuries and subsequent periods of Enlightenment and democratic revolution. Not teaching these critical elements of how Western culture -- of which Australia is a part -- came to be to students is to in a sense cheat them of their heritage. Simply casting the Crusaders as a bunch of ignorant and bloodthirsty Europeans ignores this reality.
Teachers monkeying with history to suit their own agendas is nothing new; in 2005, the president of the NSW English Teachers Association complained that instructors weren't doing enough to keep future voters from supporting John Howard. But this politicisation ignores the whole point of teaching history, which is to produce citizens who are well-grounded in events of the past so that they might better understand the world around them -- and be able to see, however hazily, into the future. If Humanities Alive 2 is any indication of what students are learning in Victoria (or the rest of Australia), it appears they will be equipped to do little more than pull their conversational weight at trendy inner-city dinner parties.