28 July 2010
History under siege
Ehu! The Hittites beat at the fastness of our walls and would raze the city until all is dust and rubble. Say again?
Well, it appears very much that the federal body charged with concocting a national curriculum (ACARA, the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority) is intent on destroying the Victorian senior History course in order to make way for an inferior national version.
Why would they wish to do this when the Victorian course is a model of intellectual rigour?
It seems like we might be the victims of our own success with the draft document reeking of compromise. The gods forbid that a state (and there is such a one) which does not require its students to sit an external final exam should feel somehow inadequate and excluded. Perhaps we should offer courses in advanced thong throwing and be done with it.
All right, so this is unfair and faintly defamatory but we're under attack here, folks.
At present VCAA, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, offers to final year students a choice of Australian History, Renaissance Italy, and Revolutions. The last is the most demanding but paradoxically it is also the most popular.
The proposed new course divides into Ancient and Modern. Ancient is a hodge-podge of Classics and Archaeology and seems to want to marry a study of the Iliad (a work of fiction) with the admittedly exciting archaeological finds at Lake Mungo.
The Modern course is equally problematic. It begins with the title of the course itself. Modern is assumed to be the 20th century to the present day. (So the Enlightenment, for one, is cloaked in darkness.) The first part of the course is a sort of primer of the methodology that any History teacher would already have inculcated into the kids by Year 10. A case study for this unit is World War 1. But we've already 'done' WWI in Year 10. You can kiss goodbye to those budding female historians. The second part of the course treats with resistance and struggles for authority. Fine but we're entering a postmodern zone where the study becomes unproductively disconnected. The focus of the new course oscillates between the too broad and the too narrow. And you can forget about any serious study of historiography.
Where in all this is the back story, the long narrative sweep? And please don't give me that bullsh*t about all narratives being imposed. Ask any History teacher: the students are engaged by the runaway train of historical narrative to which they apply the skills of analysis and reasoning given to them TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE STORY. How difficult is this?!
The real doozy of the proposed course, though, is the token and cynical nod to the popular Revolutions course. It is relegated to a mere half semester as a prelude to the major study of Asia and Australia. Talk about a discontinuous narrative. And perhaps that is where the method in this madness resides.
The modern education bureaucrat and his accomplice the web-literate academic seem to want to mirror the current state of communications. One such (quoted in The Saturday Age, July 24) has proposed that schools should embrace social networking media for the purpose of creating a rapport with students (what, they don't speak to one another in the classroom and the schoolyard?) and be held accountable (the word transparency gets used a lot) to those parents too busy to be hands on with their child's education.
This prophet of the electronic future seems not to understand that teachers - good teachers, committed teachers - ARE TOO BUSY TEACHING to monitor and maintain a wiki or a blog or a Facebook page or (I make the sign of the holy rood as I write) a Twitter account. This is not being Luddite.
The worth of a technology is not proven simply because 500 million fools use it. (Vide online porn.) If you want a bitty virtual world, please go ahead and construct it. But don't dare come to a History teacher and ask him to explain it when the bubble world bursts.
'Winston Smith' is a lowly teacher at a well-performing secondary college in suburban Melbourne.
