Does this sound familiar?
“And yet what does Gove offer? That students learn about history ‘in the right way.’ This is problematic. History is problematic. Who is Gove, or any politician for that matter, to say what history is and what it isn’t?
While he acknowledges that there is no unchallenged consensus on the First World War, or in any part of history, Gove is unwilling to free the teaching and study of history from the ideological pawn it has become in British curriculum.Furthermore, Gove’s sweeping changes to the way history has been taught in England has not been met favourably. While he claimed his revision to curriculum had been met well by top academics, this view was trounced wholly by historian Simon Schama, who disowned Gove’s history agenda as something produced by ‘people who never sat and taught in a classroom.’ Gove’s history was tokenistic, claimed Schama, and indicative of someone who was too focused on ‘white males and how Britain influenced the world’ rather than anything contrary.
Gove has effectively denounced the teaching of history by teachers, and their methodology for doing so, while offering a narrow,
pugilistic revision of the past that supports his own perspective. Hardly the ‘open debate’ that Gove pretends to desire. ”
Craig Hildebrand-Burke.
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When Christopher Pyne announced that the “the Truth” should be taught in History, one can’t help but infer that he may think that what’s being taught is somehow, not the truth. As Mulder and Scully found, the truth may be “out there”, but it’s not always what people want to believe. Part of Pyne’s Truth, of course, is the glory of the Western tradition.and Anzac Day. Kids today apparently don’t know enough about Anzac Day.
But does the Truth also include what a great Prime Minister Bob Menzies was. He sold our iron ore to the Japanese, and they returned it in the form of bombs and bullets. Or what a mess Whitlam made of our country by introducing universal health care. Something Pyne’s mates intend to fix.
Or indeed, how should the Truth about the children overboard be taught? Or the WMDs that were the reason for the Iraq war?
Or the truth that Pyne has appointed two reactionaries to head his review?
