New history curriculum is failing our students
Narrowly written, clumsily implemented, and sorely lacking in diversity and inclusion, the new history curriculum has now been in circulation in schools for more than a year.
Teething problems were inevitable, but there are already signs that more serious rot is setting in, and that major intervention is needed to protect the importance of history from a curriculum that is undermining faith in the discipline, especially among students.
Anecdotally, the present curriculum is turning students away from the subject because they do not see themselves as part of that history, and because the curriculum insists that they view the past in a strangely narrow and ideologicallyshaped way.
Part of the problem lies with the curriculum’s innocuous-sounding “Big Ideas”. These amount to an attempt to smuggle elements of now largelydebunked critical race theory into the curriculum, with history being depicted primarily as a story of the exercise and abuse of power. At its crudest, people are reduced to either villains or victims. Such an approach is as unsophisticated as it is misleading.
The “Big Ideas” leave an even bigger void. Students are encouraged not so much to discover the past as much as made to feel responsible for it. There is an undercurrent of obligation and even guilt running through the present curriculum, in which making amends for real or presumed wrongs in history is an implicit requirement for the present generation.
It is at this point – where history is used for extra-historical purposes – that the discipline mutates into a form of propaganda. Rather than discovering and accounting for the past, history is now demanding students’ repentance, with no apparent chance of redemption.
The result is that instead of a past infused with vigour, we now have a history on life-support. Its pulse is weak, and it is kept alive only through the apparatus of compulsion.
We need a curriculum which develops in students an appetite for history that grows with the eating.
It has to arouse deep curiosity, to invigorate all students about a past that they are personally connected to, and where they can see memory and materiality merging.
At its best, students will discover how history is a part of the architecture of their identity, and the more that they explore the past, the more robust and richly marbled that identity becomes. History – for all its troubled and chafing elements – is not something we should be taught to break free from.
It is hubris to believe that we are somehow more enlightened than our predecessors, and therefore need to elevate ourselves from their actions, while at the same time eternally atoning for them. We certainly cannot amputate ourselves from the past. It is an inheritance we have to contend with rather than shun in order to understand our purpose, function, and place in the world.
Almost as troubling as the ideological orientation of the curriculum is the mass of topics it omits: feminist history; environmental history; immigrant history; industrial relations history; religious history; foreign affairs history; military history; economic history; political history; disabilities history; and numerous other categories.
A purported national history curriculum that excludes so many of the groups and ideas that comprise the nation creates a foundational myth that is myopic in its outlook and disturbing for its denial of diversity. Cumulatively, it amounts to an undermining of our national memory.
Of course, we have to be careful not to swerve too far in the other direction. There is always the risk that history gets reduced to a cadaverous lump of dates and facts, with no context or relevance.
But as it stands, the present history curriculum could potentially prove even more damaging to the discipline, and offputting to those compelled to endure it.
The solution to all these problems, as far as the Ministry of Education concerned, is a “refresh”. However this sort of cosmetic adjustment fools few in the profession.
No amount of semantic panelbeating will address the fundamental deficiencies with the current curriculum. Instead, courageous decision-making is required. Emphasis needs to be placed on inclusivity, diversity, nuance, the removal of ideological orientation, and a host of other technical aspects of the discipline that the curriculum’s creators either overlooked or were unaware of in the first place.
And above all, students need to feel that this is their history, their inheritance, and a history that has shaped just about everything they experience in their world. Otherwise, history, in the form the curriculum currently conjures it, will become increasingly tedious and irrelevant – the polar opposite to our engrossing and vital national story.