http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12488#215904

donkeygod, http://www.rense.com/general32/americ.htm have a good look at #17, "soften the curriculum" is PC, new speak for dumbing down.

they have also taken out "civics" classes which used to teach a little about democracy voting etc.

most especially law degrees leave a lot to be desired.

Donkeygod,
I would agree with you based on my experiences with teenage children and their friends.

There are teenagers that have never heard of The Beetles. While they may have seen an episode of Star Wars, they have no concept that over 100 million people died last century in wars.

While they may demand that the latest blockbuster movie is in 3D, they have no concept of black and white silent movies, and no concept of a world without mobile phones.

I am not totally certain that history will ever repeat itself exactly, but it is important for the young to realise that many things don’t just happen, but have developed over time.

Our constitution and political processes have also evolved after trial and error processes that have been going on for centuries.

I would think a one year compulsory modern history course for all students, possible in grade 10 or grade 11.

The greatest problem then is trying to find unbiased, objective, non-feminist type teachers to teach history.

unbiased, objective, non-feminist type teachers to teach history.
vanna,
You'd need to start changing teachers' education first up. I found that the law actually forces authors to alter facts as they'd otherwise infringe on copyrights or plagiarism. How many times can one incident be described accurately in different words if an author is not allowed to quote someone else's, similar statement ? Theses are a typical example. People write a thesis on a subject that many others have already described yet if more than three words are the same they cop accusation of plagiarism. It's no wonder history gradually changes.

Individual

In academic writing, like a thesis or journal article, the rules are that you can use anybody's words as long as you 'reference' them. That means you provide the reader with enough information so that they can find the original source of the words - or the idea.

So you need to put the name of the person who's words you are using next to the information in the text, and then at the end of the document, you give the reader all the information about where they can find the original words or idea.

The idea is that knowledge and understanding are developed over time and each person doing a thesis is supposed to add a bit more to the information available. So you actually need to use, that is to refer to, the existing knowledge and then add something new or argue for a different way of interpreting the existing knowledge.

Mollydukes,
I know what you mean but unfortunately, mainly due to ego & self-importance many academic historians tend to ever so slightly invent history which gradually deteriorate the truth & in time amounts to serious distortion if not straight out lies.
Then there is the funding factor. Not few academic historians have been funded handsomely to write an indigenous's community history & the funding depended on the favouring of the underdog version which was necessary to subscribe to the Guilt industry burgeoning towards the end of the 20th century.

I tend to agree with mollydukes, vanna and individual. But the problem isn’t difficulty finding the information; what’s changed is that it’s now impossible to collate it.

Just a few decades back, all schools taught history from an approved texts, generally written expressly for schools. There’d be one for Ancient History, another for European or maybe 20th century history, another for Australian history. Boring, for the most part, overly general, but they endeavoured to deal with history as the ‘story’ of a relevant time or place. Understanding of our Australian customs, values, and forms of government depends on the ‘story’ of what’s basically a Western culture. Our society has evolved from in essential Judeo-Christian milieu, through the political watershed of the Magna Carta, and into 19th century capitalism. Understanding our history, civics, and law depends on HOW that evolution occurred.

Sometime in mid-80s, though, ‘multiculturalism‘ put an end to that view of history. The ‘story‘ of Europe excludes Asia and the Middle East, hence it ‘discriminates’ against people of Asian and Middle-Eastern ancestry. Australian history ‘discriminates’ against Indigenous peoples. Christianity is essential to understanding Western history, but teaching enough of it to make our history comprehensible constitutes discrimination against adherents of other religions and atheists. For a time, Boards of Study tried to broaden ‘history’ to include Asia and the Middle East, but the result was shallow coverage of all regions. Academics tried to work up a ‘comparative religion’ syllabus, but ... no joy.

We don’t teach history today because it’s all too hard. Never mind that our law, forms of government, customs, language, values and derive from a wholly Western tradition. Never mind that China, Japan, Iran and Turkey don’t teach Western history. We can’t tell the story of how Australian beliefs evolved because it’s now morally wrong to teach OUR heritage to the exclusion of other worthy cultures. Since the history syllabus can’t treat all cultures, religions, values and forms of government equally and impartially, we can’t teach any history at all. Instead, we study ‘identity’, ‘belonging’, and anodyne ‘values’ instead.