Australian ‘History Wars’: The Contested Purpose of History in the Curriculum

Abstract

This chapter reports in some detail the responses of teachers to interview questions about what they value in their history teaching. It sets the teachers’ accounts against the broader public debates about history in Australia, and the political decision-making that mandated history as a new core subject (and later led to the commissioning of a further review of that subject). The teachers particularly value historical methods, which they see as having broad foundational value for students as critically literate citizens, and as workers able to assess evidence and communicate well. They are concerned where new frameworks overload content so that it becomes mere memorisation and check-list work; or where it appears their main role is to enforce a particular story or values. For history there is a significant difference of emphasis in how the subject is seen at the big policy level and at the professional and practitioner level. The overall content framework for history is shown to be a difficult, divisive and distinctive issue for school curriculum, and not one that can be simply derived from the discipline itself. Similarly student engagement is seen to be important to historical learning but under pressure from the demand to balance coverage within limited time allowance for this subject.