Even the most hardened summit-sceptic would have to acknowledge that the calling of this week's history summit has already produced a number of positive outcomes.
First, it has exposed for all to see how the intellectual Left in Australia have no capacity at all to make a judgment about where the political "centre" might be. This failing was best demonstrated by Guy Rundle, who allocated political labels to the summit participants, in an item for the Crikey web site.
Rundle's category of "Right-activist" even managed to include former NSW Labor premier, Bob Carr. Carr may overall be on the Right of the Labor Party, but he does have Gough Whitlam as his great political hero and has conventional Left positions on issues such as climate change.
However, in Rundle's world, if you are to Rundle's right you become a Right activist. Perhaps Rundle should pause to consider how few Australians would actually be to the Left of the political centre under his definitions.
By its stated aim to return to the "essential facts, dates and events that every student should know", the summit has also brought in to the open those historians who actually wear their lack of knowledge of any historical facts as a badge of honour. Thus, La Trobe University history research fellow, Clare Wright, appeared in The Age patronising the "ordinary folks (who) take their knowledge claims extremely seriously". It may not have occurred to Wright, but the "ordinary folks" have actually worked out that acquiring "knowledge claims" (presumably this is academic jargon for facts) can actually be fun.
Wright claims virtue for being the product of "a thoroughly post-modern education, schooled to seek and interpret a multiplicity of voices, competing narratives and diverse texts". Yet, in reality, a historian who interprets history without a grasp of the facts is akin to an architect trying to design a building without any understanding of what facts actually make the building stand up.
Among all the positives the summit will produce, however, there is still some cause for concern. Speaking on ABC radio recently, Education Minister Julie Bishop said: "Australian history should be a critical part of the school curriculum, it should at least be a stand-alone subject, and compulsory to say Year 10. I think we should have a great deal of pride in our nation's history, and to ensure we have more informed citizens, they need to have a greater understanding of our nation's past".
The Minister is correct that history should be a critical part of the school curriculum, but should this be solely Australian history? There is no doubt a need to address, as Gregory Melleuish has done in the paper he has prepared for the summit, the perennial complaint about Australian history that it is not interesting because it lacks the wars, violence and revolutions of other countries.
Like Melleuish, my own historical interest has largely been focused on Australian history. But trying to prevent the Left having a walkover victory in the Australian "history wars" in the nation's classrooms, does not mean that the history of the rest of the world should be forgotten as Australian children of the 21st century take their places in an increasingly globalised environment. If a student's knowledge of World War I is confined to Gallipoli, or of World War II to Kokoda, the balance is definitely wrong.
If a student leaves an Australian secondary school with quite a detailed understanding of how the Chinese were treated on an Australian goldfield, but no appreciation of the significance of China as a country throughout history, then there is a problem. Space must be left in the history curriculum for Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc and Mao Zedong. It is surely more important to know about Napoleon Bonaparte than Edmund Barton.
He would be too modest to suggest this, but the answer may lie with one of the summit participants. If all students had, by the end of Year 10, read and learned the facts in Geoffrey Blainey's A Short History of the World, as well as his Shorter History of Australia they would at least have a reasonable starting point. For Rundle this would be outrageously "Right activist" and for Wright it would lack "multiplicity of voices", but it would leave many students much better equipped than they are today.
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