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The History Wars: now for the hard part!

By Mervyn Bendle - posted Wednesday, 23 August 2006


This outcome is not good enough, because all the government’s apparently good intentions will count for very little unless a concrete strategy is quickly developed and implemented to ensure that the basic educational infrastructure is put in place to support the promised reforms. This is especially the case with the provision of properly trained and motivated history teachers. The selection and training of such personnel involves a substantial lead time and the effects of the reforms, should they finally emerge, could easily be delayed for about four to five years.

In other words, much really hard, detailed work still needs to be done - quickly.

To fully comprehend the scale of the undertaking it must be recognised that the crisis in history education in primary and secondary schools is reflected in a similar crisis in the universities, particularly within the education faculties.

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On the very day of the summit, I was discussing its possible implications with some university students who professed a real interest in history and who were undertaking education degrees. I was told by several that they had been advised to drop all hopes of becoming history teachers because there were simply no opportunities available for them. Others said that they had been told that the SOSE area (in which history is buried) was effectively being phased out in schools in favour of other priorities.

As it is, SOSE is often taught within education faculties by people whose qualifications may not be in history, politics, sociology, or geography, but rather, for example, in law. The message that students are given by such a casual approach is that history is merely a residual area of teaching that it is not taken seriously by the system, and that offers very little chance of employment, much less a career.

This problem is magnified by the fact teacher training in Australia has been dominated for several decades by four-year Bachelor of Education degrees, which focus on a multitude of education subjects and leave little room for substantial studies in disciplines such as history (or other areas of academic study). Consequently, students are hardly likely to use up their precious allocation of elective subjects to pursue an in-depth interest in history when they can foresee little chance of actually teaching the subject, or even getting a teaching job.

Recently, there has been some movement back to the earlier system where education students can do a postgraduate teaching qualification after first completing an undergraduate degree in an academic discipline, but there is no evidence yet that this approach will produce a new generation of properly trained history teachers in the foreseeable future.

Moreover, the academic study of history is itself now commonly pursued within university schools made up of various disciplines - a tertiary version of SOSE. This is a situation largely flowing from a down-turn in student demand for non-vocational studies in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Consequently, academic staff in these areas are being laid off and there is little evidence that the system now has the capacity to train a new generation of history teachers, should the federal government’s reforms be implemented on any significant scale.

These deeply-rooted systemic problems could easily leave the federal government’s reforms dead in the water. Fortunately, there are various possible solutions, but these will require some immediate action to provide the educational infrastructure that is required if the federal government’s stated objectives are to be achieved and the battle for the hearts and minds of Australia’s future generations is to be won.

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About the Author

Mervyn Bendle is a senior lecturer in history and communication at James Cook University in Townsville.

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