Tony Taylor: Changes are needed if history is to live up to the billing of a core subject
[Tony Taylor is an associate professor at the faculty of education, Monash University.]
It was George W. Bush who best summed it up in one of his wonderfully barmy quotes. "I think we agree," he asserted cheerfully, "that the past is over."
He may not have intended it to come out quite that way, but the comment accurately summarises the attitude of a significant number of educators towards history - a discipline that has rarely been out of the news over the past decade.
Since the 1970s, there has been a prevailing orthodoxy in curriculum design, and in faculties of education, that history has no special attributes. It has been commonly regarded as a regressive, elitist throwback to the days of humanities domination in senior school years.
Furthermore, the argument ran, it was non-functional, it lacked contemporary relevance and it concerned itself with an uncritical study of great events and great people.
Malcolm Skilbeck set this unhealthy trend in motion with a "courageous" speech to the inaugural annual conference of the History Teachers Association of Australia in 1976. He declared - confidently, if inaccurately - that "historical understanding, by contrast with knowledge of the classics, does not depend on the mastery of esoteric skills.
"Given some interest, a minimum level of literacy (which presupposes a very minimal capacity for rational thought) and application, anyone can understand history."
How wrong can they all have been, these critics of history, whose ideology lingers even today, these pioneering purveyors of those narrow mantras of what constitutes functionality, relevance and the socially critical. Their view of history seems to be based on how they were taught (badly) in the 1960s?
They sat in their history classes, learning about one damned thing after another, long before the advent of the Schools History Project in the UK in the 1970s, with its emphasis on use of evidence, explanatory open-endedness and in-depth studies. And well before the growth of social history, indigenous history, public history and feminist historiography as major forces in university history departments.
This was also prior to the work of North American history educators Sam Wineburg (on historical thinking), Peter Seixas (on historical consciousness, a different thing) and Keith Barton (on history education and national identity) that showed that school history does have unique and complex attributes - and that it cannot be left to founder as a minor and disparaged element in the curriculum, often taught by general-purpose teachers who may well think that history is just knowledge about the past....
Read entire article at The Age
It was George W. Bush who best summed it up in one of his wonderfully barmy quotes. "I think we agree," he asserted cheerfully, "that the past is over."
He may not have intended it to come out quite that way, but the comment accurately summarises the attitude of a significant number of educators towards history - a discipline that has rarely been out of the news over the past decade.
Since the 1970s, there has been a prevailing orthodoxy in curriculum design, and in faculties of education, that history has no special attributes. It has been commonly regarded as a regressive, elitist throwback to the days of humanities domination in senior school years.
Furthermore, the argument ran, it was non-functional, it lacked contemporary relevance and it concerned itself with an uncritical study of great events and great people.
Malcolm Skilbeck set this unhealthy trend in motion with a "courageous" speech to the inaugural annual conference of the History Teachers Association of Australia in 1976. He declared - confidently, if inaccurately - that "historical understanding, by contrast with knowledge of the classics, does not depend on the mastery of esoteric skills.
"Given some interest, a minimum level of literacy (which presupposes a very minimal capacity for rational thought) and application, anyone can understand history."
How wrong can they all have been, these critics of history, whose ideology lingers even today, these pioneering purveyors of those narrow mantras of what constitutes functionality, relevance and the socially critical. Their view of history seems to be based on how they were taught (badly) in the 1960s?
They sat in their history classes, learning about one damned thing after another, long before the advent of the Schools History Project in the UK in the 1970s, with its emphasis on use of evidence, explanatory open-endedness and in-depth studies. And well before the growth of social history, indigenous history, public history and feminist historiography as major forces in university history departments.
This was also prior to the work of North American history educators Sam Wineburg (on historical thinking), Peter Seixas (on historical consciousness, a different thing) and Keith Barton (on history education and national identity) that showed that school history does have unique and complex attributes - and that it cannot be left to founder as a minor and disparaged element in the curriculum, often taught by general-purpose teachers who may well think that history is just knowledge about the past....