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The Forum > Article Comments > Time to ditch compulsory study of Australian history > Comments

Time to ditch compulsory study of Australian history : Comments

By Jeff Schubert, published 4/7/2007

Teaching history: there is more to the history of Australians than the history of Australia.

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Hi FrankGol, I think you and I will need to agree to disagree. Like others have said - your experience was based on that your children and your grandchildren succeeded and performed very well with a State School education. I am not denying that there are some very good schools around and that these children more than likely also have the support of their parents in their education.

My year 10 of whom I speak, well, with a lot of hard work by all of us, they all went onto year 11 and 12 and passed, despite initially coming in with extremely low literacy levels. They learnt to use the resources around them to help them succeed. These kids were great kids, they just needed to know that they could succeed despite their lack of literacy.

I speak from experience in a regional area. I speak also from the collective experience of a local highschool who abandoned their entire year 8 curriculum for 6 months, just to teach the new lot of grade 8 the basics. The feeder primary school does have a bad reputation for illiterate children.

Actually, the blame just doesn't lie at the door step of primary school teachers, it lies at the door step of government who have designed the curriculum that doesn't set goals or achievements at the end of each year level from grade 1 to grade 7. The blame also lies at Universities who fail to teach their primary school teachers,how to teach. Here again I speak of experience, I asked a friend who was in her final year of Primary School Teaching how do you teach your children to read? she said " I don't know". Her entire geography knowledge for all seven years of primary school consisted of a page and a half of A4 paper - that was it! Others in my same year of Secondary Education also asked the same question, and the answers were the same.

When we say get back to the basics, we need to get back to the basics even at University and Primary School.
Posted by zahira, Sunday, 8 July 2007 4:51:04 PM
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Zahir, I’ll give it one more shot.

I used my experience of my own children and grandchildren to make the point about what counts as evidence. You used your experience in one school in a regional area plus one high school. Oh, and “a friend” who knows nothing about teaching literacy and only a page and a half about geography. Maybe you need more intelligent friends.

You take no heed of the issue about evidence - anecdotes are strictly limited, and swapping anecdotes gets us nowhere near the truth in assessing a whole school system (presuming it's truth you are interested in).

That’s why I used the evidence from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/58/60/34624460.pdf) which examined more than half a million students aged 15, from 41 countries including 12 500 randomly selected Australian students from 321 schools around Australia.

The Australian students came out exceptionally well on all measures of the four literacies: mathematical, scientific, reading and problem solving.

Why do you ignore that evidence and continue with yet more personal anecdotes?

Why do you carry on with this caricature of Australian schools while totally ignoring the solid evidence that Australian education is in very good shape?

Why this fetish for going back to the basics? Why not forward with the fundamentals?
Posted by FrankGol, Sunday, 8 July 2007 8:42:37 PM
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Hi FrankGol, You talk about going forward with fundamentals or back to basics. It is one of same thing, the fundamentals of anyone's education is Maths, English, Science, History, Geography.

To use some of the evidence to which you refer. The PISA study noted Students in a metropolitan area performed at a significantly higher level than students in a provincial city,who in turn performed at a significantly higher level than students in rural areas. ESCS and computer resources in the home were positively related to mathematical literacy. there still exists a distinct advantage for those students with higher socioeconomic backgrounds.

This is a comment from The Hon. CHRISTINE ROBERTSON Hansard 2005 where she commented . I remember my considerable shock when I discovered that the New England region as a whole—the New England health region, which includes the electorates of Barwon, Northern Tablelands and Tamworth—had one of the lowest literacy rates in the State

Hansard 2 March 2006 Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES Referring to the PISA study noted: Students attending schools in outer regional areas and remote and very remote parts of Australia achieved lower results than students attending schools in major cities and inner regional areas.

So, if the children have parental support, have the economic means to support their education and the basics are taught, they will succeed.
Posted by zahira, Sunday, 8 July 2007 10:10:56 PM
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zahira

I think we might be getting somewhere. You’ve moved some distance away from excessive blaming of teachers, children and their families. And you’ve moved away from your earlier abusive descriptions like the “abject failure of the current process that has the audacity to call itself education”. Maybe you’ll move further and agree that we should be resourcing schools better to do more of the excellent things many of them do now.

On locational disadvantage. All large-scale educational testing will show variations across regions and across social groupings such as low/high income families; English/non-English speaking backgrounds; urban/rural; etc. This should not be surprising. After all, the very concept of average – and below and above average – is a statistical construct. People are sometimes alarmed to find that a school or region or country is “below average”. By definition, 49% of any sample must be below average. We just don’t like it when one of our schools (or one of our children) is in that category.

The questions then should be:
(a) when is the level of difference among groups not tolerable? and
(b) if we are unhappy with the level of difference, what should we do about it?

For decades Federal Governments (of both persuasions) have provided additional resources for rural and isolated schools (and for other disadvantaged groups). Not all the interventions have succeeded, but many have, and we need to continue to search for better answers and better programs (e.g. broadband and other forms of telematic delivery of curricula).

In the meantime, let’s praise the thousands teachers who teach really well and help those who aren’t as good as they might be to do better. Australian education is in generally good shape – but could get better – and teachers and children don’t need to be bashed up with over-the-top condemnation.
Posted by FrankGol, Monday, 9 July 2007 5:29:54 PM
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Since when does Donald Bradman have anything relevant to do with Australian history? He was a sportsman and then a stock broker, so that studies of his cricketing prowess should be found in sporting books, not history books.
Australian history should be an essential part of every Australian's education. There are many obvious reasons that I could give for this, best summarised by simply stating that we need to know what sort of country we're living in, but one often overlooked benefit is to allow people to understand the environment we live in. In this modern age of climate change, global warming, salinity and water shortages, our historical inability to comprehend that most of us are Europeans trying to live a European lifestyle in a harsh Australian environment has created many serious problems. Ditching Australian history in our schools will make our current problems even worse.
Posted by Bernie Masters, Wednesday, 11 July 2007 6:24:05 PM
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Dear FrankGol, You present as "evidence" one study and also anecdotal evidence of your family. Yet, you chose to ignore other evidence of a now retired practicing teacher, and that of others.

I have never suggested that funds be reduced in schools, in fact I would love to see the day that Secondary Classes are reduced to 20 students maximum, I would love to see the day that students who have learning challenges get the support they need throughout all their education.

Like I've said before, you cannot build a great building on zero foundations. We all learnt to walk by crawling first and then some few tentative steps; Primary School is all about foundations. History for example, is not just about Australian History, it's about the history of those who have gone before us.

Like wiser people than you and I have said, if we fail to teach History then we fail to learn the lessons of the past. If we fail to learn the lessons of the past, how then can we build a successful, productive, inclusive future?
Posted by zahira, Wednesday, 11 July 2007 11:58:37 PM
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