Christopher Pyne: curriculum must focus on Anzac Day and western history
Education minister wants to remove 'partisan bias' as part of national curriculum review
The Abbott government is set to trigger a new battle over Australia’s culture and history as it launches a review of the national curriculum with a goal of removing “partisan bias”.
The education minister, Christopher Pyne, says the review will address concerns about the history curriculum “not recognising the legacy of western civilisation and not giving important events in Australia's history and culture the prominence they deserve, such as Anzac Day”. He also wants the curriculum to “celebrate Australia”.
One of the two people appointed to lead the review, the conservative education commentator Kevin Donnelly, recently attacked the curriculum for “uncritically promoting diversity” and undervaluing western civilisation and “the significance of Judeo-Christian values to our institutions and way of life”. Donnelly, a former chief of staff to the Liberal minister Kevin Andrews, wrote Why Our Schools are Failing in 2004 and established a think-tank,the Education Standards Institute, in 2008.
The other appointee, the public policy academic Ken Wiltshire, is the JD Story professor of public administration at the University of Queensland business school. He previously oversaw a review of the Queensland curriculum for the Goss Labor government in the mid-1990s.
Wiltshire wrote an article after the 2010 election suggesting the balance-of-power independents should support the Coalition. In July 2013 he criticised the Labor government’s handling of school funding reforms as a “disgrace”, adding he hoped Tony Abbott would “recognise the soundness of the Gonski blueprint but devise a better approach to funding it”.
The Australian Education Union, Labor and the Greens have condemned the curriculum review as being about ideology and politics rather than education.
The opposition education spokeswoman, Kate Ellis, said the move was a farcical distraction from the Abbott government’s failure to fully implement genuine needs-based school funding reforms.
“What Christopher Pyne has claimed today is that in six months two individuals can do a better job of coming up with a national curriculum than in five years academic experts from all around Australia working collaboratively achieved,” Ellis said.
“What the Abbott government has said today is that they believe that there was bias in the curriculum that was devised by an independent body, so to address that they’re going to appoint a former Liberal staffer. This is a joke.”
Pyne said he was confident Donnelly and Wiltshire would bring a balanced approach to the curriculum review. “Everyone’s been to school; everyone’s an expert in education one way or the other,” he said in Adelaide.
“It’s not possible to appoint anybody to review the national curriculum who doesn’t have a view on education. The important point is to appoint people who are going to bring an intelligent and considered approach to the review and both Kevin and Ken have a long history and experience in education.”
Pyne said one of the criticisms of the curriculum was that it had “not sold or talked about the benefits of western civilisation in our society” and he would be surprised if the review did not trigger criticism from people who had another view.
Asked whether he believed the curriculum was too left leaning, Pyne said he wanted the curriculum to be a “robust and worthwhile document” that embraced knowledge and did not “try and be all things to all people”.
“I also want the curriculum to celebrate Australia, and for students when they have finished school to know where we’ve come from as a nation, because unless we know why we are the kind of country we are today we can’t possibly know where we want to go in the future. There are two aspects to Australia’s history that are paramount. First of course is our Indigenous history, because for thousands of years Indigenous Australians have lived on this continent. The second aspect of our history is our beginnings as a colony and therefore our western civilisation, which is why we are the kind of country we are today,” he said.
Pyne said students should be taught "the truth about the way we've treated Indigenous Australians" but also the "the truth about the benefits of western civilisation".
The acting deputy president of the New South Wales Teachers Federation, Denis Fitzgerald, said the quick rewriting of a school curriculum was the sort of action adopted by authoritarian governments.
“If we saw an announcement from another government seeking to sweep aside the existing curriculum, claim there was not the right sort of politics in that curriculum and then appoint two trusted mates to do a six-month review to overturn that curriculum, we would regard that as worrying and bizarre, reckless, and it’s something that authoritarian governments do. Australia’s children deserve better.”
The acting leader of the Greens, Richard Di Natale, described Pyne as "a very paranoid individual" who thought the national curriculum was "all part of some huge conspiracy".
"He has a perception of left-wing bias in the curriculum because we don't do enough to teach young kids about the foundations of western civilisation … and what's his response to perceived left-wing bias? Put in some of your right-wing cronies,” Di Natale said in Melbourne.
Ellis said it was important to constantly review the curriculum, but an independent body – the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) – was in place to do that.
“What we do know is that we have a body that has been set up and has worked with every state and territory government of every different political persuasion,” Ellis said.
Pyne told Fairfax Media in September the agency was “not the final arbiter on everything that is good in education”. ACARA issued a statement at the time saying the curriculum for English, mathematics, science, history and geography had been ''signed off by all state and territory ministers''.
Pyne said on Friday the agency would manage any changes to the curriculum arising out of the review “and any costs about changing the curriculum will be met within the current budgets of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority”.
The mid-year budget update flagged $20m in funding cuts from ACARA over the next four years as part of an Abbott government plan to absorb some of its functions into the Department of Education.
Donnelly, fronting the media with Pyne for the curriculum review announcement, said it was a "great honour" to be appointed to the review and vowed to act in a consultative way. Donnelly pointed out he had worked as a teacher for 18 years and described himself as a "curriculum nerd".
Pyne said he was hoping to receive a report from the review team in May or June and he would work with state and territory education ministers seeking agreement to implement the recommendations in time for the 2015 school year.
"It's too important to delay, so we don't want to have any political bickering over this issue because that will slow down the process of getting the best curriculum possible for our students," he said.
Pyne acknowledged teachers liked "certainty". He said they had embraced the national curriculum and invested their own time, money and effort implementing it, but he argued the review was not about throwing out the entire document.
In November, Donnelly said the national curriculum inspired by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard provided “further evidence of the cultural-left nature of Australia’s education establishment”.
“Every subject has to be taught through environmental, indigenous and Asian perspectives where new-age, 21st-century generic skills and competencies undermine academic content,” he said. “Instead of acknowledging that direct instruction, championed by Noel Pearson and endorsed by the US study ‘project follow through’, is the most effective way to teach the national curriculum also embraces an inquiry-based, child-centred view of learning.”
He said: “The draft civics and citizenship curriculum airbrushes Christianity from the nation’s civic life and institutions and adopts a postmodern, subjective definition of citizenship, one where ‘citizenship means different things to people at different times and depending on personal perspectives, their social situation and where they live’.
“The history curriculum, in addition to uncritically promoting diversity and difference instead of what binds as a community and a nation, undervalues western civilisation and the significance of Judeo-Christian values to our institutions and way of life.”
Donnelly has previously argued it is wrong for teachers in the classroom “to introduce students to sensitive sexual matters about which most parents might be concerned and that the wider community might find unacceptable”.
“Welcome to the gender wars! Since the mid- to late '70s, much of the education debate has centred on the supposed disadvantage suffered by migrants, working-class kids and women. More recently, gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people have become the new victim group,” he wrote in March 2005.
“Forgotten is that many parents would consider the sexual practices of GLBT people unnatural and that most parents would prefer their children to form a relationship with somebody of the opposite sex,” he wrote.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/christopher-pyne-curriculum-must-focus-on-anzac-day-and...
