verging_on_random

The history wars

August 21, 2006 on 8:45 am | In Uncategorized |

The forces of reaction, otherwise known as the Howard Government, keep finding new ways to try to take Australia back to the 1950s. Well actually they’re not “new” ways, they’re the Government’s obsessive apeing of everything that happens in the USA, which Howard seems to regard as a kind of heaven on earth to which all other countries should aspire. Well George W Bush, the self-proclaimed leader of the ‘free’ world, wouldn’t argue.

But to history. The federal government is threatening to make its preferred history syllabus compulsory in public schools, by withholding funds from states that don’t go along with its views. Only public schools of course, private schools can apparently be trusted to teach history correctly. But public schools have to be rigorously disciplined to stop mad radicals like Peter Beattie taking over the curriculum and turning all the kids into wild-eyed revolutionaries who think that some of the things done in the past were, you know, like wrong.

The government’s objectives are clear: kids should be taught Australian history as a series of dates and Great Men (oh OK, we can accommodate a few token women I suppose … tennis players and swimmers and the like). These events and people are to be turned into a humungous good news story that validates our current society and makes us out to be pretty much the bestest country in the whole world, always excepting our great and powerful friend the US of A.

It’s exactly the history I was taught 50 years ago, except that in those days it was Great Britain that was the nation we were taught to love and admire. It’s completely consistent with other Howard Government school initiatives such as encouraging mindless jingoism with rituals like singing the national anthem and saluting the flag every morning, and over-riding state year 12 English curriculums with its own, based on “quality” literature like Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters. God forbid that kids should be encouraged in English classes to think critically about the stuff they actually read and watch, like web sites and movies. Much better to make them learn to hate serious literature because that way they won’t read it when they grow up and will therefore not be exposed to dangerous ideas.

The education agenda is just one of the many fronts on which the Howard Government is relentlessly trying to roll back the social changes of the last 50 years. They are not original ideas of course, the government is merely following its American idols. Getting rid of ‘post-modernism’ in schools, forcing women back into their ‘proper’ roles (i.e. subordinate to men), demonising Muslims, bashing gays, opposing stem cell research, removing civil liberties in the name of the War On Terror, we copied all these things from the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party. I don’t think Howard can bring himself to adopt Bush’s scary “I am doing God’s will” public line but there are others waiting to take his place who wouldn’t hesitate …. Abbott the mad monk for one.

I find it all extremely weird and I can only conclude that they get away with it because so many people have simply stopped taking any interest in what governments do. Well if Howard stuffs up this terrifyingly dangerous double game he’s playing with Indonesia, and finds himself forced by public opinion to take a belligerent approach to the world’s biggest Muslim nation right on our doorstep, Australians will wake up to the fact that letting governments be run by people obsessed with ideology and ‘values’ has very nasty practical consequences.