Pressure is mounting on the body developing a new national curriculum as politicians and interest groups try to frame changes introduced in a draft (including the inclusion of more Indigenous culture and problem-solving) as “woke activists” teaching children to “hate Australia”.
In mid-2020, the federal and state education ministers commissioned a review for “refining, realigning and decluttering” the content of the curriculum for preschool to year 10.
The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) produced a draft with a number of changes, including: teaching mathematics that prioritised problem-solving; introducing digital literacy education earlier on; and, in what was always set to draw attention, including more First Nations culture while replacing references to “Christian heritage” with terms such as “secular” or “multi-faith” to reflect Australia’s diversity.
While the independent statutory body only stopped accepting submissions about the draft late last week, there’s already signs that the proposed curriculum faces an uphill battle to approval.
Early on, federal Education Minister Alan Tudge signposted his potential opposition to the draft curriculum’s framing Australia’s racial and religious history.
“We have an opportunity to enrich the history curriculum with more emphasis on Indigenous history and Indigenous perspectives. This would be a positive development and build on the progress already made on this dimension,” he said shortly after the draft was released.
“But as our greatest historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has said, it should not come at the expense of the teaching of classical and western civilisations and how Australia came to be a free, liberal democracy.”
While this was always likely to be a hot topic, given Australian mainstream political culture’s inability to reckon with our colonial history, another factor has also played a part: the global right’s newfound obsession with critical race theory.
Conservatives are now pushing to ban the “teaching” of the esoteric academic theory in schools around the world, including in Australia. In late June, government senators joined with One Nation to pass Pauline Hanson’s motion “rejecting” critical race theory from the national curriculum. (Critical race theory is not taught in schools currently, nor does it feature in the draft curriculum).
Passing a senate motion is only ceremonial but that didn’t stop Hanson and One Nation celebrating the defeat of critical race theory on social media. This motion was picked up by right-wing publications around the world, including Breitbart, the influential alt-right publication once helmed by Steve Bannon.
This appeared to have an impact. Soon after the motion, Tudge harshened his opposition to the curriculum. He told Chris Kenny on Sky News Australia on June 24 that he was concerned that the curriculum presents a “negative view of our history”.
“I think students should come out of schooling having learned our history in an accurate manner and to have pride of country coming out of it, a love of country coming out of it, whereas you’d almost have the opposite view by reading the draft history curriculum. In the 84 pages, there’s barely a positive thing said about our country,” Tudge said.
The case against the national curriculum also became a focus of conservative and religious groups.
On June 10, the Institute of Public Affairs and right-wing lobby group Advance Australia released a document called “Activism via education: 7 ways the new Australian curriculum will impact your kids”, which calls it “anti-Australian ideology” promoted by “faceless bureaucrats and university academics”.
These groups led the charge, laying out the arguments that were picked up by Hanson, Tudge and other opponents to the changes.
They even went so far as to target individual ACARA members for their views. Advance Australia posted a graphic to Facebook on July 2 featuring an ACARA advisory board member’s 2015 tweet that said “this country is born of racism”. The image is captioned: “Meet another one of the activists on ACARA’s Indigenous advisory board for the National Curriculum… They want your kids to hate Australia.”
Christian groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby and FamilyVoice Australia have both campaigned against the new curriculum, directing their members to make submissions opposing a new national curriculum that “fundamentally redefines Australia”.
Even good faith criticisms of the curriculum have been weaponised. After the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute said they had “considerable concern” about how maths was to be taught, Sky News’ Peta Credlin said this was proof that the review had been “hijacked by activists”.
ACARA is now preparing a document that must be approved by consensus between state and federal education ministers before being rolled out — approval that may be hard to obtain while teaching an honest version of Australia’s history is being framed as negative.
What do you think? Is the national curriculum being “hijacked”, or are interest groups hijacking the curriculum’s natural evolution? Write to letters@crikey.com.au and don’t forget to include your full name if you’d like to be considered for publication.
I’ve just had a look at the Year 10 draft History outline. It looks and sounds awfully like the course I taught to Year 10 in NSW secondary schools through the 1970’s: a very good course covering Australia’s development in and reaction to the world as it progressed through the 20th century These clowns are erecting their own false idea of what’s in the document and then opposing it. Hanson’s crap comes direct from GOP rubbish in the USA. She has never been capable of original thought.
Probably came with the NRA package deal Hanson bought …..
Pauline Hanson and One Nation slammed over talks with NRA, James Ashby and Steve Dickson claim they were set up..ABC March 2019
What that headline should have read was that Ashby and Dickson set up the NRA meeting.
The secret recordings of the pair reveal they wanted millions of dollars in political donations from America’s National Rifle Association (NRA) and discussed softening One Nation policies on gun ownership as they tried to secure the funding.
The vision was broadcast as part of an undercover Al Jazeera investigation which involved setting up a fake gun lobby group called Gun Rights Australia headed by a fake gun rights advocate, Rodger Muller.
Ashby said party leader Pauline Hanson was unwell and unable to respond to media inquiries, despite calls from politicians for her to reveal what she knew about the meetings.
In one of the recordings, Mr Dickson was recorded telling representatives of Koch Industries that One Nation could “change the voting system” if the party had more funding.
In a separate recording, Mr Ashby and Mr Dickson discussed wanting up to $20 million from the US lobby groups.
Morrison was again unable to confirm if the Coalition would preference One Nation last at the federal election.
or even capable of reading, it seems.
Indeed, but they can count money and Ashby can fly a plane and do other things apparently according to Sliper.
Shorten:
“One Nation is a dangerous circus … they are extremists, they’ve been caught out being extremists,” he said.
“I think it was a betrayal of the Australian political system, what are these right-wing extremists thinking?”
In a statement, One Nation claimed Al Jazeera was meddling in the upcoming federal election
Oh boy, it’s time for History Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo. I look forward to all the misquotes and misreadings of the history curriculum to support whatever issues the LNP and their ilk want to push.
“I think students should come out of schooling having … pride of country coming out of it …” Tudge said.
i don’t get it – how can anyone be proud (or ashamed) of stuff that happened before they were born? – however, i am ashamed of what we’re doing now, seeking to absolve past injustices and trying to stop the our kids from learning the truth
It’s a race to the bottom of the cesspit between Liberals, One Nation and Nationals, for the Trump like voter.
Aussie “uber alles”perhaps?
It’s because their view is that schooling should result in nice little patriot bots who vote for them.
and march off obediently to die/get maimed in their stupid, pointless wars.
Isn’t Anzac Day about pride in what Australians of an earlier generation did? Leave aside the jingo-isation of Anzac by John Howard, we can still feel proud what they did – can’t we? I’m proud of what my father did before I was born – what’s wrong or misplaced about that?
agreed And we didn’t win at Gallipoli
No. ANZAC Day is a commemoration of a failed war and how the forces of Australia and New Zealand fought side by side to make the world safe for greedy capitalists.
I come from a family of farmers. They weren’t allowed to sign up to go to war. Should I be less proud of them because they don’t have a national day?
That is how you might view Anzac Day now. But the earliest Anzac Days, the earliest vision of the Australian War Memorial and the imaginings for our future in the light of Australia’s participation in WW1 as a whole (see Bean’s 1919 book “In your hands Australians”) are what I was referring to.
Anzac Day was largely manufactured by elite right-wing groups. It supplanted a popular labour holiday, and turned what was once a day of worker celebration and costuming etc into a sombre elite-led funeral for imperial cannon fodder
Nonsense! It may have been transformed by the Howard government, but that happened after decades of ex-servicemen and women gathering with comrades and marching and commemorating in cities and towns across Australia. Anzac Day was – once – a grass-roots Australian commemoration.
The woman released from prison far too early
All the armchair “experts” with barrows to push come sneaking out of the undergrowth. Meanwhile, people with actual ex-ertise in the area (you know, like teachers and academics) get lambasted for anything they say.
Apart from having (presumably) attended school once upon a time, what expertise do Credlin, Tudge, Hanson and the others actually HAVE?
What I have learnt over the years as a teacher is the fact that people have themselves attended schools makes people believe they are readily justified in telling teachers how to do their job.
Are you suggesting that “teachers and academics” should be beyond criticism from anyone who is not also a teacher or academic?
Abuse and stupidity is not criticism. “Critical Race Theory” isn’t taught and isn’t going to be taught in our schools.
Are you suggesting that our country wasn’t founded on racism? How does that gel with the White Australia Policy? How does that gel with the theft of land and the theft of children because they’re our first people?
Racism is a relatively recent term and was not around when “our country was founded”. For example, it does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary published in full in 1933. So your analysis is using the terminology of today to judge the attitudes of the past – always fraught, especially when unacknowledged.