The NSW History Syllabus has recently undergone its biggest overhaul in over a decade. Much of the content from the 2012, and currently taught, iteration has carried over into the new syllabus. However, the reform has resulted in fairly large structural and pedagogical changes, as well as additional mandated content and studies regarding civics and democracy. Pushing for the teaching of history skills and concepts, in order for students to emulate the work of professional historians, the move toward higher content prescription and skills-based learning is based on the NSW Education Standards Authority’s (NESA) aim to ensure syllabuses “are steeped in evidence, not ideology.” But why does all this matter?
History education has long been a site of ideological contestation for the political elite in Australia. With its potential to mobilise collective memory through selecting, interpreting and presenting specific versions of the past, the teaching of history has direct implications on the development of a nation, and thus is subject to much political scrutiny as this allows for control of the master narrative of a national history. To imagine who we are, and want to be, we have to first imagine who we were. Decades-long ‘history wars’ over what histories, and whose histories, should be taught in schools reached an apex during the Keating and Howard years.
Debates over teaching settler colonial frontier violence resulted in former Prime Minister John Howard’s popularisation of the term ‘Black Armband’, referring to a view of Australian history that seemingly overemphasised the mistreatment and disenfranchisement of First Nations peoples at the expense of developing national pride in students. The establishment of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) — the body which now develops national curriculum — in 2008 has been studied as a settlement of this debate, with each new version of the national history curriculum pushing the focus on increasing students’ historical awareness while also developing students’ disciplinary competencies. The matter of how the national curriculum is implemented in each state, however, is up to the regulatory curriculum authorities in each.
Debates around the teaching of history in schools reignite every few years, manifesting in public outrage as to what is taught, and not taught, especially within spheres of world and national histories. The new NSW History Syllabus has mandated several areas of study, from studies of Asia to First Nations experience of colonisation to the Holocaust. And already, there is much praise about the inclusions.
However, there is an irony in prescribing and mandating content and it purports that there are certain histories that are deemed more useful than others. Of course, curriculum cannot teach everything, but the process of picking and choosing the content to be taught does have ideological implications, despite the claims that the Syllabus develops skills. There will always be absence. For example, while it is important and necessary to teach the impacts of colonisation on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities, and develop understanding of their continued resistance, there is a lack of content around pre-colonisation Indigenous histories and cultures. Similarly, most of the studies of Asia are framed around experiences of colonisation and imperialism, framing that what is important to know about the histories of Asian cultures are to do with their relations to the West.
Though the Syllabus pushes for the teaching of disciplinary skills in ‘doing’ history — such as rigorous source analysis and critical consideration of historical perspectives — this focus surmounts that the aim of history is to develop rational and logical methods of understanding the past legitimising the importance of methodology over directly contending with the intersection between politics and history. While methodology is important to the work of professional historians, the discipline of history discipline does also regulate what kind of questions can and should be asked within historical inquiry, with these questions never being neutral. Though teaching History through its disciplinary skills is seen by the Syllabus as a logical and rational way to move students away from memorisation of dates and events, this approach does also fail to consider that history, the past, and the ways in which we contend with them, are not always rational or logical, nor should they be taught as such.
All this to say that the teaching of history has a real impact on how identity, personal and national, is developed. And history is not a neutral discipline. The content of the incoming NSW History Syllabus, while broader than previous iterations, is still limited in scope. How this will impact students is now left to be seen.
