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To be the Clever Country, we need the appropriate history curriculum

By Brian Holden - posted Tuesday, 20 April 2010


As 1999 drew to a close, I was listening to talk-back radio and the listeners where invited to call-in with their list of the most important events of the 20th century. About 10 responded to this “history test”.

Every one included the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in their list. Kennedy was just one individual, and on the day he died over 100,000 other humans died. He was not indispensable as the vice-president stepped straight into the job. In the absence of a proper education in the understanding of history, the media develops your history acumen for you.

If we understand history we can observe the evolution of man’s thinking. From this insight we can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and gain a better understanding of where we may be going.

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How not to be clever

My history instruction at school was almost entirely focused on our British heritage. We were excited by ours and the Brits’ military exploits. We were supposed to be fascinated by Australian politics - but were bored witless by it. We learned less about the USA than about Britain - even though at the time the USA was producing half of the world’s manufactured goods and consuming half of its energy. We learned almost nothing about Asia. The impression we were all left with was that white is by far the best colour.

I learned nothing on the history of the struggle of the common man to survive - when the common man was the social background of every student in the class. I learned nothing about our Indigenous people. I learned almost nothing of the history of technology - when without technology there would be no recorded history as we would still be living in caves and throwing stones at animals.

Why was I trained by the state for 10 years not to question to any depth? It was because the state believed that it cannot control a citizenry which probes too deeply. I was being mentally conditioned to get a job, to acquire a mortgage and to grimly hang onto the job to pay off the mortgage - and to support whatever war the state said was necessary for my family’s security. But such a state is automatically limiting its capacity to be clever.

Bob Hawke in his 1990 “Clever Country” speech was thinking of an increase in R & D - but not necessarily due to the efforts of the products of Australian schools. A high percentage of researchers in this country are from overseas. So, it was an increased funding for R & D that Hawke was really referring to. The man-in-the-street could be left at whatever level of clever he was at.

How to be clever

For more than 30 years Edward de Bono has been passionately and fruitlessly advocating for schools to teach children, not just the facts, but how to think outside the square. The 10 callers to the radio program would have been a representative sample of the general population. All 10 listed:

  • the coming of the computer;
  • the moon landing of 1969;
  • the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War.
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Another 10 without media-molded minds would instead have listed:

  • after 150,000 years, modern man acquired a second brain;
  • after 3.5 billion years, evolved life became captured by another gravitational field;
  • after 4.5 billion years, man and not nature contributed a new form of energy.

All that in the 20th century! I will elaborate:

The creative brain we have is about 150,000 years old. From the materials of the Earth, this brain has created another brain which can process masses of data which the creative brain cannot do. The teaming of the two brains has opened the door to future changes which will make those of the past look little more than a warm-up.

Each step leading to the Apollo 11 mission was no more important than the one before it. But, in the context of the history of life on this planet, the Apollo 8 mission was the more significant. That was the mission which first sent astronauts in orbit around our moon and then return back to Earth without a lunar landing. At some instant somewhere between the Earth and our moon, living organisms (including the microbes in the astronauts’ innards) came more under the gravitational influence of another planet than that upon which they had been evolving over the last 3.5 billion years.

Centuries from now the Cold War may even be forgotten, but what will never be forgotten is the Trinity Test. It occurred in the desert of New Mexico and the day was July 16, 1945. At precisely 5.29.45 am, we knew that man had the knowledge of the gods - as that was the moment that a form of energy was released which had never before appeared on any planet in the 4.5 billion year history our solar system. If there was any doubt in the average person’s mind that the top scientists now deserved to be the priesthood to replace the clergy of old, then this was the moment that doubt should have vanished.

“To equip students for the world in which they will live”

History will become compulsory through to year 10 from next year. This is the first honest effort made to get our future citizenry keen to work towards a better world - because this time the emphasis is observing how groups of people think. No more is the implication that we over here are better than they over there.

Nevertheless, what is being taught to the young plastic minds, which parents are forced by law to hand over to the state’s educational system, is annoyingly incomplete.

The national history curriculum (PDF 272KB) has been adopted in principle “to equip students for the world in which they will live”. For Unit 4: Australia in the Modern World (1901 - present) the draft curriculum gives the following overview:

This unit will provide an overview of the period along with depth studies which might include: Australia’s involvement in World War l, post-war migration to Australia, the civil rights movement in the United States or apartheid in South Africa compared with Indigenous rights in Australia, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the influence of globalised American culture on Australia and elsewhere, decolonisation of the Asia-Pacific and the growth of environmentalism.

That is good, but it is basically only a record of how humans negotiate with other humans. Ignored are the impacts on our culture of nuclear energy, satellites, computers, transistors, aircraft, radio waves, microwaves, medical diagnostics, medical therapeutics, contraceptives, synthetic materials, GM crops etcetera.

It is wrong to assume that some history of technology will be picked up in the science classes. Dates of discoveries and names of discoverers will be given, but technology’s role in creating society itself is the job of the historians. (The new curriculum does allow for cross-curriculum studies, say from history to science, but only when time allows - and there are concerns about the size of the history curriculum as it is.)

You have a very faulty concept of history if you don’t realise that social history is no more than a sideshow to technological history. “Technology” is defined as the use of designed tools as distinct from just using tools (as do lower primates and some birds). Social history is completely determined by the underlying technology of the times. Here are two examples:

The technical advance which most changed humanity was the creation of a sharp-edged stone by splitting a larger stone. This “designed” tool allowed man-ape to skin an animal. Prior to this tool our ancestors had to tear into an animal with their teeth - as would an hyena. The removed skin could then be wrapped around the body to keep the heat in and the sun’s rays out. That tool enabled the crossing of the line between animal and man.

However, the full description of the human genome (the genetic lineup on the human DNA molecule, and which could never have been determined without the computer) will be of equal ranking. Man will be able to reshape himself both physically and mentally, cure all organic disease and stop the ageing process. This tool will enable the crossing of the line between natural man and unnatural man.

Conclusion

The type of history being taught is critically important to ours being a clever country. And yet we still have the wrong people designing the curriculum.

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About the Author

Brian Holden has been retired since 1988. He advises that if you can keep physically and mentally active, retirement can be the best time of your life.

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