There is absolutely no doubt that post modern, apologist nonsense has dominated history classrooms far more than 'conservative history' in the past two decades. Is it any wonder that students get confused with the post modern line that 'nothing our parents knew was correct and there are no answers to what we don't know'?

History has suffered because of the ideologically driven campaign waged by the left. Instead of an objective, discussion based approach to history the left has force fed students a dictatorial and apologist diatribe. This has forced students to believe more in the warm and fuzzy history of old. In effect the lefts historical campaign has back fired because students are sick of hearing only about Australia's bad news.

I cannot understand why the 'ANZAC legend' or Banjo Patterson for example have to be denegrated in order to broach subjects like indigenous history or feminism. To me parallels can be drawn with left wing educationalists ditching phonetics in reading classes or geography becoming more about map reading than global awareness. The left has shown through such 'educational improvements' that they are more inclined to force feeding their views than actually improving education in general.

History should be a collection of facts open to interpretation by all, not a collection of ideologies, not propoganda, and definately not cover ups.

Teaching history and telling the truth depends on which side of the fence you are on, due to those people being subjective from the information provider to the publisher to the teacher.

Howard say sorry, it is much easier to say sorry on behalf of others than for your wrongs. I mean, if we cant have the backbone to say sorry for putting an entire race over a barrel, we are not the Australian nation we think we are.

And we were not founded, we were pinched, like most other countries but i would rather the english than others at that time.

Facts only makes history history, not belief encoaching.

I am perhaps one of the few people on this forum actually young enough to remember their history classes. But thinking about it now, I really can't remember any 'white people are evil, black people are great' style teaching. We definitely were not taught that colonisation was invasion. But we were taught that it was probably illegal (terra nullius etc). We were not taught that white people enslaved and tortured black people. But we were taught that a lot of Aboriginal people were killed by white people, see the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

But you know what? I do agree with Dr. Donnelly that there are problems with the teaching of history. It seems that history as taught in high school is everything that happened more than 50 years ago. As a result events that much more directly impact on our lives are never discussed. My history classes ended in World War II. All the amazing events that followed, the Cold War, the Sexual Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Fall of Communism etc. etc. are nowhere to be seen in classrooms. My greatest personal disappointment is that I know nothing about the Aboriginal Civil Rights Movement. How did Aboriginals go from not being counted as people, to getting the vote and other rights? Sadly, thanks to American TV, I know far more about that country, than I do about my own.

I wonder if Kevin ever reflects on the fact that his "common sense" version of what education is and what it should be doesn't seem to match the vision of the vast majority of teachers, principals and education academics in this country.

Rather than hiding behind the somewhat juvenile assertion that anyone who disagrees with him must be a left wing lunatic, surely it is time for Dr Donnelly to actually engage with some of us who have devoted their working lives to the education of young people and the teachers who teach them.

While I don't doubt that having been Chief of Staff to a Howard government minister is an excellent qualification for sustained attack of the educational vision of everyone from the teachers at the local primary school to the Australian Council of Deans of Education, most Australians aren't fooled, and know that it takes more than a career as a public servant and a PhD from LaTrobe to make you an authority on education.

I would have thought that questioning a point of view would have been integral to any study of history. Postmodernism is about acknowledging that there is no one history but a whole raft of histories. And the Who that writes the history determines what goes into that history. Is Kevin Donnelly seriously suggesting that the Howard/Windschuttle/ Donnelly view of history is not coloured by their own ideology? Is he seriously suggesting that theirs is an objective study of history? Everyone, Howard, Windschuttle, Reynolds all bring their own biases to bear in their study of history. To see how history has changed in my lifetime I grew studying a history in which Aboriginal people had been written out of the story completely. The study of history demands that we examine and test each of these histories. Postmodernism is a tool for doing just that. The problem with the Donnelly thesis is that there appears to be only one history: his. The problem with his thesis is that rather than history, his might more appropriately be termed mythology built around the bronzed Anzac, mateship and the flag. The problem with myths is that they often don't stand up to the rigour of historical scrutiny.

Barney

I think children should be taught very little history. The less the better. We don't live in the past and it seems we never learn from it either. Let it be a subject of choice for adults.

There is totally no evidence that children benfit from it as a subject.

Of course a little so that they can join the dots, but that should be it.