http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12488#215830

colinsett, he might also have added Manning Clark's nemesis, in the history wars Geoffrey Blainey, which while we are on the subject. How could anybody ignore the "Cold War" & the history wars flowing on from there?

Soviet era proverb, "the present we know, we are doing it, the future we know, we are building it, only the past keeps changing".

"repeat the lie until it becomes the truth" Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12488#215835

Godo, excellent point, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JihQw39hyG0 some study of our constitution/federation is worth a look.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12488#215840

plantagenet, did he teach you about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Act_1986 or the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd3fH9P8394 ah Queensland horrible one day, hopeless the next. the matriarchal communist regime at its best.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12488#215843

gypsy, so true, have a look at the 2 links above.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12488#215846

Dallen, journalism today is abysmal, even worse than it was in the 1980's.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12488#215851

Evan Hadkins, true our constitution is based on musch of the "common law" preceeding it. EG, magna carta, british bill of rights, etc.

A well written piece of truth. I want my politics sexy again.

>>I want my politics sexy again.>>

Posted by AJR, Friday, 19 August 2011 4:24:09 PM

Well AJR, Craig Thomson is certainly doing his best

That's just sex Steven, AJR wants sexy.

How do you know the whores weren't sexy?

On the whole I prefer real whores to political whores.

I’ve been mentoring Australian students in HSC English for a decade now. Many of my students attend an NSW Selective school, or one of the better-respected private schools in the Hunter region, so in general they’re on the bright side. A good deal of their work involves understanding the the context of the texts set for study. They get a bit of disjointed information from their teachers, but it doesn’t stick. The reason is clear to me: they know next to nothing about history. So I spend quite a lot of time surprising them with details about their own country’s past, and whatever modern history they might need to understand a text like Ted Hughes’ ‘Your Paris’.

Most students can’t correctly guess the decade in which we fought WWI. Or WWII. Or the Cold War. Something like a quarter don’t know what the Holocaust is. I’ve asked well over 100 students if they’ve ever heard of Pol Pot — only two had an idea who he was. They don’t know anything about Stalin. They’ve never heard of the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution. The Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the American Revolution ... not covered. Most know a few basic things about Shakespeare, but hardly any know about Queen Elizabeth, the English Parliamentary System, Marlowe, Thomas Moore. Australian history doesn’t make much sense without knowledge of 20th century geopolitics, but they don’t study enough of it to notice the lack; not one in ten can say anything coherent about Federation. Most don’t know that, in olden days, we used pounds and shillings for currency instead of dollars and cents. Ancient history is relatively popular; modern history is widely recognised as indoctrination, and shunned. Quite a few have to study BladeRunner, which requires a modicum of knowledge about the world in the late 70s and early 80s -- now THAT’s ancient history. Kruschev, Breshnev, and Reagan might as well have been Pharaohs. An entire generation has missed out on history. It’s lost its critical mass, so no one misses it. Maybe when we get around to REPEATING it ...