The national curriculum debate: a call from the Boomer generation

Boomer admitted that it was not enough for teachers to merely affirm uncritically their students' histories, experiences and stories, and that to take student voices at face value was to run the risk of idealising and romanticising them.

So, Boomer said that it was for reasons of equity and social justice, for economic-political reasons and for educational reasons that he had been gradually developing a critique of the progressivism which many had worked to promote.

In 1989 Boomer admitted to having modified his views, justifying his change to his capacity “to be self-critical”. “To learn is to move on”, he said, “to change, to overthrow what once we believed”.

Similarly, it is time for much lesser lights in the curriculum arena to move on and be self critical, sufficient to ensure an objective debate on the merits of, and possible framing of, a national curriculum. And that debate must now include the community. The development of curricula that intones what our children will learn, and how it shall be taught, is far too important to be left solely in the hands of teachers.

The Senior Years Curriculum Superintendent in South Australia’s Education Department, said recently that the current SA curriculum framework was designed “by teachers for teachers” (“Curriculum chiefs hit back at ‘misinformed’ Bishop”, The Advertiser October 7 2006). That is indeed the problem. It should be designed by curriculum designers, based on community input and aspiration, for teachers to teach to our children.

The teacher’s unions of course sway in the political breeze like reeds on the river bank. While signalling abhorrence to a national curriculum in recent times, in 1993 they and the Federal Labor Government agreed to build support for the national curriculum concept into enterprise agreements. The Government at that time also moved to provide funding to professional associations which would support the national curriculum thrust. Some unions and professional associations accepted the Federal Labor offer of substantial additional funding in return for their advocacy of the nationally-developed curriculum.

Boomer insisted that it was in the interests of children that Australian society debated what constituted essential knowledge to which all Australian children were entitled and he deplored the idea that what children learned at school should be decided by a “Russian Roulette kind of offering of content”.

Boomer was right, and we should take heed of the advice of the last genuine curriculum guru, certainly in South Australia if not nationally.