Dunno why a countries history has to impact on the world in order to be relevant to that country. It will still impact on that particular countries identity.
If they arent going to be interested in it, who will be? Its not like you have to worry about a shortage of European and US etc history being available after school, they’re the dominant stories in media by a country mile.
Otara
The proposed curriculum contains over 100 references to Aborigines and their culture and no mention of the Westminster System of Government or the Magna Carta, according to the ABC.
Surely a good old-fashioned mea culpa liberal grovel is cheaper than returning the place to the conquered. I for one am not sure the history of human expansion is much more complicated than the competent overrunning the incompetent. I suppose you could get surly and let the aborginal peoples show up and teach their own history, except that by and large they forgot to invent decent secondary education, along with a handful of other things such as flush toilets.
I’m pretty sure the modern Australian, new or old, can figure out who’s great and who’s not, and can decide which culture is worth living in and whether or not a didgeridoo ranks up there with a Steinway. You can teach whatever you want, but when the teacher trucks off for her appendectomy to a hospital instead of opting for some good old bush medicine, she’s sorta voted with her feet and tipped her hand. I have confidence in students to figure out on their own where Dali and rock painting rank relative to one another on the quality scale.
Yes of course, because we all know that it’s impossible to value individual aspects of different cultures instead of ranking each culture as an undifferentiated whole. If you choose modern technologically advanced medicine over traditional medicine, that automatically means that you have to like pianos better than digeridoos. It stands to reason.
Yessir, folks, our advanced white culture comes as a package deal, and participating in it in any way whatsoever counts as tacitly declaring that we’re fundamentally superior to those benighted darkies.
There just aren’t enough :rolleyes: in the world.
How convenient to have only a single quality scale for all forms of art, carefully calibrated to guarantee that the artistic traditions of one’s own culture will always be ranked higher than all possible “competitors”.
In 2008 Australia had the 14th highest GDP out of the 179 nations of the in the world. According to the CIA world factbook list on that same page, Australia (popn 22m) rose to #13 in 2009, passing Mexico (popn 111m).
Some pimple.
There there, I was teasing. 
The serious point that I was making is not that Australia as a contemporary state is unimportant, but rather that overall, the history of Australia is comparatively unimportant in the context of the entire chronology of world history.
Therefore, ISTM that if Martini Enfield or anyone else is worrying that Australian students don’t learn enough about history in general, then adjusting the history curriculum for Australian history in particular doesn’t seem as though it would be the best way to change that.
In relation to National Sorry Day, will they be presenting Keith Windschuttle’s research? It seems they are determined to inculcate maximum guilt to ensure people support redistribution from Europeans to Aborigines.
Interesting. Around here, in the context of debate teams and the like, the term “Resolved:” is used to introduce a topic of debate, not to identify an issue that has already been decided.
I did use the term incorrectly in a different way in my earlier post, though, because “Resolved:” is supposed to be followed by a declarative statement, not by a question.
So, for example, “Resolved: Was Kimstu being a jerk by jokingly describing Australia as a pimple on the world’s butt?” would be an incorrect formulation of a proposed debate topic, the correct form of which would be “Resolved: Kimstu was being a jerk by jokingly describing Australia as a pimple on the world’s butt.” The debate teams would then proceed to affirm or negate that declarative statement, depending on which side they’re on.
Around here, a topic being introduced for debate would be said to have been “Mooted” or simply described as a “Topic” or “Debate”. You occasionally here something described as being a “Moot point”, which means either “That’s debatable/arguable” or “It’s a pointless argument anyway”, depending on context.
Whereas here, the first statement makes no sense (You’ve decided you don’t know if he was being a jerk or not?) and the second statment says “It has been decided and agreed upon that Kimstu was indeed being a jerk by jokingly describing Australia as a pimple on the world’s butt.” 
Touche! Well played.
Back to the topic of Australian History, I suppose the debate could probably be boiled down to…
Coalition strawman of Labor’s take on Australian History:
Handwringing and guilt over subjugation over the clearly superior Noble Savage whose deep cultural history and unmatched supernatural bond with Nature wordlessly condems Whitey and his raping of the Earth and morally bankrupt greed-based society. We should be ashamed and handover everything to them, all our money and cities.
Labor strawman of Coalition’s take on Australian History:
Screw the Aboriginals, they had 40,000 years and did squat. We came here, kicked their arses and in only 200 years turned this bit of land into the world’s 15th biggest economy and one of the best places to live on Earth. Goddamn hippies are ruining it for everyone and wasting money on pointless crap.
Any takers?
At this point you may wish to revisit the idea of ceding education to the system as being a good idea. Further to this , you might want to sit down with the kids and explain the politization of the school system as you see it and give them alternate sources of history for them to compare against the school curriculum.
Beyond that , at this point in time your fighting a losing battle. The most you can do, is to be able to have the kids fire back questions that might be inconvienent as far as the system is concerned.
Declan
Your post makes it sound like the ABC had researched the point, in which case it might mean something. Actually, their report just says that this was stated by the convervative opposition education spokesman.
He knows this I assume because he had an intern go through the whole thing looking for any search terms that are associated with British history that were not in the curriculum so he could spew out this dodgy selective sound bite, so that it would be lapped up unsceptically by those inclined to believe.
Note the way the statistic has been carefully crafted. The curriculum contains “over 100 references to Aborigines and their culture”. So any reference at all to anything to do with aborigines feeds into this statistic. And what is a “reference” precisely? Heck, coming up with an arbitrary total of 100 by increasing the granularity of the count would be child’s play. I bet even the text books I was given written in the sixties would have had that many references to aborigines.
Now what has the opposition chosen to compare this to? Two very specific concepts associated with British history which don’t appear. Does he say how many references to the British and their culture appear in the curriculum (ie does he mirror his "references to Aborigines and their culture)? Hell no. Why? Because there are probably thousands!
Note the imbalance?
Reading statistics and soundbites critically is so important. Was that in the NZ curriculum?
Regardless of how you want to look at it, the point is there’s a lot of references to the Aborigines in the proposed curriculum, and realistically (and sadly) they haven’t contributed much to Australian society since Federation.
Incidentally, have you noticed how we seem to disagree on absolutely everything? It’s uncanny- I can’t think of the last time we actually had a convergent opinion on something.
Neither has Captain Cook, do you think he doesn’t deserve much mention either? Do you actually think before you post?
Plus you really aren’t getting it with the “lot of references” thing. Even if you subscribe to the complete opposite of the “black armband” view, any history of Australia is going to include aborigines and a hundred references is not a lot, even if all you do is talk about how unimportant they were (particularly if you are using creative ways to pump up the stats, which I don’t doubt the opposition would do. Do you?)
Where do you come by such blatant bullshit?
Hey, as far as I’m concerned, Colonialists don’t get bashed nearly enough. So as far as I’m concerned, this new curriculum is only a small step in the right direction.
Every White Australian kid should be made to live on a mission station for a semester, kind of analogous to how most German kids visit a KZ at some point. “Not Sorry Enough!” is my watchword.
He did “discover” (yes, I know the Dutch were here before he was, and the Aborigines before them) and/or chart at least two countries and make European settlement of them more or less possible, and in that respect has had a far bigger impact on modern Australia than the people here before he arrived.
Come on, that’s uncalled for. I don’t go around being an asshole to you, even if we do have diametrically opposing viewpoints on pretty much everything (or so it seems.)
But has he contributed much since Federation? That was the criteria you set. Not only is it a silly criteria, you haven’t thought through the implications of applying it consistently.
He does rather have the unfortunate disability of being dead, whereas there are still (fortunately) lots of Aboriginal people (and their culture) around.