The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Review Authority is failing the national interest test

Our education system needs to reinforce our successful cultural values, and give our youngest generations the skill and knowledge they need to continue Australia's success and security.

The current curriculum, and its proposed successor, do not fulfil these requirements.

Neither of the current nor proposed curricula fulfil the role of preparing good well-rounded citizens with basic academic and cultural knowledge, productive attitudes, and problem-solving skills.

Both curricula tend to usurp the role of parents in providing children with moral and ethical direction, and that tendency is increasing. The curriculum is loaded with ideologically laden assumptions.

The cross-curricula priorities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Culture; Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia; and Sustainability are arbitrarily chosen, superfluous to most areas of study, and reinforce ideological, not educational, values.

In particular, ATSI Histories and Culture units takes up disproportionate space in already crowded curricula, imparts little useful knowledge.

I've had an interest in Aboriginal cultures for decades, but it has never taught me much about the current world, except that if you don't keep up you won't be able to keep hold of your country.

To understand how the modern world operates, knowing about the agrarian societies of Europe and Asia, and their successor societies through to the present, is much more important.

The ATSI curriculum also encourages racism. For example, in analysing the writing of Aboriginal writers, they are treated as Aborigines first, and writers second. Instead of asking how they write, the curriculum asks how they write as an Aborigine, as though this is all they are.

It is a curious way to analyse literature which has tended to be analysed for universals. We don't read Shakespear to understand Elizabethan England, but the human condition.

Shylock's impassioned plea to be treated on his own merits "Hath not a Jew eyes?", "If you prick us do we not bleed", resonates because it is timeless, and because the person of Shakespeare disappears into it.

That in itself is a rebuttal of the presumption that we should read writers as representative of class, sex or race.