The Australian History Summit, which will take place today in Canberra, is an initiative designed to strengthen the place and maintain the integrity of Australian history in the school curriculum. It is long overdue.
Its genesis lies in the Prime Minister's Australia Day address earlier this year, at which he warned that young people would be at risk of "being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history".
The Prime Minister's speech was almost instantly attacked by critics claiming that the type of history he would like to impose was triumphalist, old-fashioned and boring. His proposed focus on names and dates would come at the expense of students learning to "understand".
Furthermore, it was suggested that the old critics of modern history teaching were behind the times and needed to embrace the new approaches being taught in schools.
Well, far from being an old critic, I graduated from high school a little over 16 years ago, when many of these new approaches were just starting to come into vogue.
The history education I received at school during this time as a result can only be described as a patchy, incoherent, terrible mess.
The role of women in our colonial past was explored in some detail, but how Australia became a nation during federation was barely touched on.
Not only was there no studying of the ancient Greeks, there was not even any acknowledgment of World War II.
The end result of my formal school education was to indeed feel "disinherited" from my community, not to mention angry and betrayed by the education system that allowed this to happen.
However, in spite of this, I can probably count myself lucky that I was educated when I was. The tales regularly coming from schools now point to the teaching of history going even further downhill since this time, ruining the education of countless children. Thus, it is important that the teaching of history in schools be remedied as soon as possible.
Contrary to the claims made by advocates of the new approach to history teaching, a structured narrative with the learning of names and dates is not boring, irrelevant, or a substitute for understanding.
Rather, it is necessary to put what is being learned into a broader context and hence allow the actual goal of understanding to take place.
It is also critically important to ensure that students gain an appreciation of where as a society we have come from. Every school student should gain an appreciation of the growth and development of Western civilisation, from the Greeks and Romans, the rise of Christendom, the enlightenment, the gradual growth of freedom and democracy, and a comprehensive history of Australia both pre- and post-settlement.
Many history teachers will undoubtedly disagree that the teaching of Western civilisation should have a privileged position in the curriculum.
However, the reality is that Australia is a Western nation in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we should not be ashamed of this fact as many left-wing teachers and commentators seem to believe.
One of the major problems with history teaching today is that too few students actually have a proper appreciation of what an extraordinary and unique achievement the modern West, and Australia as a part of it, actually is. Instead, they are all too frequently uncritically taught that their cultural inheritance is a story of shame, murder, and colonial oppression.
The reality, however, is that Australia and the broader West have a proud, although not unblemished history, that has nonetheless culminated in societies with levels of freedom, prosperity, and human rights not even remotely parallelled elsewhere in human history. Very few of those who attack the alleged superiority of Western culture, never mind a privileged position for it in the curriculum, would themselves ever want to live in anything other than a modern liberal democratic nation like Australia.
In short, such people are hypocrites.
This is not to suggest that we should uncritically teach a merely triumphalist form of history. The story of Australia and the West is far from perfect -- in common with the rest of the world it is a story of mistakes, of terrible periods of bloodshed, mayhem, murder and oppression -- all of this should also be taught, warts and all. However, it is also important to keep a sense of perspective.
In spite of the blacker parts of our history, we are incredibly fortunate to be living in a society where we actually have the freedom to acknowledge those mistakes and to try to correct them -- something most people living in our world still do not have at present.
This is also not to suggest that other areas of history, such as that relating to other nations and cultures, or even particular themes within our own culture, should not be taught.
But the teaching of these other areas of history should not come at the cost of neglecting the core narrative of Western society and Australia's part in it, which is what's happening at the moment. Given current world events, it is more important than ever that all Australians get at least a basic grounding in their own civilisational heritage and what a unique and valuable achievement it has been, even if it's not a perfect one.
If our future generations do not see it as something valuable and even, if necessary, worth fighting for, we may in the end run the risk of losing it.
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