Unfortunately, there still seems a decided mindset even among our Online historians - to forget about our colonial history from the First Landing, which also includes our First Landing in WA in 1829.

Has corporate culturisation already taken over our historical agenda, part of which includes Howard's apparent desire to shape our history as it suits the political agenda - especially concerning our Aborigines?

If you don't know your history,you do not understand where you came from or treasure the values which gave you prosperity.How can you also know in which direction you should be headed?

If I emigrated to Iran and wanted to become a citizen,it is an imperitive that I should know the history that has moulded their present psyche.

This article has no legs.

All,

I am not anti-Australian history per se – but its “compulsory” (and I emphasis this word!) study takes time away from learning the history of others, and putting the history of Australia in context of the world of people. There is a limit in any school about the time spent on history studies.

Rather than having a mob of robots nodding at each other about Australian history, let’s mix the pot with a variety of knowledge and views about the basic universal nature of the human psyche – and including in this, Australian history – and have a dialogue. I think that I am not too far away from some of the views already expressed.

Jeff

I find it interesting that this is only being said now, since the government has instituted reforms in this area - long overdue, about the utterly bizarre method that history was being taught it.

Now that HSC students have to study articles by Keith Windschuttle couldn't have anything to do with this could it?

This is ridiculous. There are places in the western suburbs where white kids are bashed on sight. You bet we need more history, more pride, in what makes this place so great.

Leftist academics who up until very recently have written outrageous curiculums for history teaching that Australia is a racist society and the like, need to be hauled before the courts.

It is such sentiment that the racists from ethnic communities have latched onto, adding to their already severe racism (just look at their marriage practices for crying out loud, or if that don't make you see it look to their youth gangs based on ethnicity that bash Anglo's for sport) of Anglo's.

We need to teach not only Australian history, but western history, for it is the values of the enlightenment that we inherited from Europe that makes this place great.

What are you afraid of? You've hogged the pulpit for over thirty years, spewing your bile about slaughtering Aboriginals, colonising the planet, yet don't want to hear such arguments being smashed by the likes of Windschuttle?

If your views are so right why not hear the other side?

Cowards! But moreover, nihilistic elitist bigots.

Jeff, you said:

'Melleuish’s call for a “real debate about the teaching of history in schools” makes a lot of sense.'

Should be, 'a real debate about Teaching in schools.'

I have without question learnt more in the last year from the internet than from all the school years combined.

Students should be taught How to learn and think, not What to learn and think.

School was a massive waste of time, which I am now trying to make up for. I found school to be a humiliating and degrading experience that stifled personal development.

The abject failure of the current process that has the audacity to call itself education, is only further highlighted by the "dumbing down" again of the curriculum by removing History.

The current lot of students leaving Primary School are entering Secondary School, largely functionally illiterate in English, Maths, Science Geography and History. With this illiteracy, they in effect have become "learning disabled", as the students cannot comprehend, let alone progress without the basics upon which Secondary Education depends. They can draw pretty pictures, but that's about it. One cannot build a house without decent foundations, this is the purpose of Primary School, to build the solid foundations upon which a successful scholar can be developed.

We need to go back to the basics of a solid foundation of education, English, Maths, Science, History and Geography, then when the students have a solid foundation, they then can achieve their full and complete potential.