Professor Melanie Oppenheimer,president of the Australian Historical Association,the peak national body for historians,said there was a “very strong belief” among historians that Mr Tudge’s comments were not helping the debate.
“He is playing politics with Australian children. It is unhelpful what he is doing,” Professor Oppenheimer,the chair of history at Flinders University,said.
“History is meant to be an accurate reflection of the past and not everything that happens in the past is rosy and happy. He’s asking us to present something that’s just not true.
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“We want children to leave school being able to understand their past and understand where they’ve come from in all the complexity.”
Mr Tudge said although he had not seen the latest version of the draft curriculum,he had been briefed on some revisions,and his assessment overall was that it had “gone from an F to a C,but Australian students deserve an A plus.”
He welcomed some changes,including more emphasis on phonics in the English curriculum,the reintroduction of teaching timetables in Year 3 mathematics rather than Year 4,and the inclusion of references to Australia’s Christian heritage. But he repeated his push for the history curriculum to be overhauled.