RUTHFULLY YOURS

Race advocates and the media are greeting a new Government Accountability Office report on racial disparities in school discipline as a vindication of Obama administration policies. The GAO found that black students get suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students nationally, a finding consistent with previous analyses. The Obama Education and Justice Departments viewed that disproportion as proof of teacher and principal bias. Administration officials used litigation and the threatened loss of federal funding to force schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions radically in order to eliminate racial disparities in discipline. The GAO report, which implicitly rubberstamps the Obama approach, comes just as Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos is evaluating whether to rescind Obama’s school discipline directives. DeVos should go forward with that rescission: the administration’s policies were fatally flawed, as is the GAO report that attempts to justify them.

The GAO report ignores the critical question regarding disciplinary disparities: do black students in fact misbehave more than white students? The report simply assumes, without argument, that black students and white students act identically in class and proceeds to document their different rates of discipline. This assumption of equivalent school behavior is patently unjustified. According to federal data, black male teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white male teenagers of the same age (the category “white” in this homicide data includes most Hispanics; if Hispanics were removed from the white category, the homicide disparity between blacks and whites would be much higher). That higher black homicide rate indicates a failure of socialization; teen murderers of any race lack impulse control and anger-management skills. Lesser types of juvenile crime also show large racial disparities. It is fanciful to think that the lack of socialization that produces such elevated rates of criminal violence would not also affect classroom behavior. While the number of black teens committing murder is relatively small compared with their numbers at large, a very high percentage of black children—71 percent—come from the stressed-out, single-parent homes that result in elevated rates of crime.

Can you imagine a public university banning free speech and threatening arrests over flyers exposing anti-Semitism and warning about a student group funded by terrorists that promotes their propaganda?

But that’s exactly what happened to the Freedom Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis” is the Latin motto that circles the seal of the University of Texas. The University of Texas system motto is a latinized quote from the second president of the Republic of Texas, “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy.”

The University of Texas at San Antonio disgraced the motto by banning any flyers and posters from the David Horowitz Freedom Center under threat of criminal prosecution. The threatening letter from UTSA contains a “criminal trespass warning” to “the David Horowitz Freedom Center and its members”.

“You are barred and forbidden from entering or remaining on any UTSA properties. If any member of your organization returns, they are subject to arrest,” the public institution has threatened

At the University of Texas at San Antonio the guardian genius of democracy is behind bars. Its administration is protecting Hamas front groups while suppressing free speech and civil rights.

President Taylor Eighmy celebrated the unconstitutional threats of arrest against the Freedom Center. “Freedom of expression is vital to institutions of higher education, but we cannot tolerate speech that violates our freedom of expression policies,” the head of a taxpayer-funded institution warned.

Freedom of expression means something very different at the UTSA than it does everywhere else.

Many who emerge with a Bachelor of Arts degree rightly earn and confirm the poor reputation that degree now confers. They come out knowing nothing, and many plunge black into the schools, this time as teachers, to pass on nothing. It is a depressing sort of carousel.

The History Curriculum has attracted a great deal of controversy since its inception in 2013. Former Prime Minister John Howard addressed his concerns with the scope of the curriculum in Quadrant. Kevin Donnelly and Mervyn Bendle have done the same. Nonetheless, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has trundled along, barely missing a step, despite an inquiry launched by the Abbott government, forging a national curriculum largely informed by the Melbourne Declaration of 2008.

This paper will deal solely with History, and how ACARA’s curriculum has contributed to what is, in my view, a corruption of the discipline in schools. Many of the problems in the History Curriculum are to be found elsewhere; the interested reader will find plentiful examples in the English Curriculum, for instance.

I will look at two things. Largely, I will look at how we teach history at present. What we teach has been covered extensively elsewhere, so I will spend only a little time on it.

How we teach history

“We are not concerned about the narrative of events, or the retelling of history,” I have heard so many times I have lost count, “we are interested in skills.”

Thus, history teaching is not about content—a dirty word among the ACARA curriculum gurus—but is instead about skills. What good is knowledge to students? Who cares if they can recount the events of 1066, or the fall of the Roman Republic, or the Pacific Campaign? What relevance will it have to their daily lives, to their future role in the workforce? But skills: now, there’s a word we can get behind. Everybody likes skills. What could be of better utility?

We have become, even among our educated classes, a post-learning society. Ostensibly, the internet has been the vehicle of this shift in consciousness; with information on anything easily obtained, we have no need to carry it about in our own skulls any longer. Of course, information is not the same as knowledge, and without knowledge, wisdom is difficult to obtain. Sending unformed young minds to the internet for knowledge is like sending them to a sewer for fresh water. I am no longer startled by the abject lack of general knowledge among everybody under the age of fifty. Once, we might have said they knew a lot about a little, or a little about a lot; now it seems they know very little about very little. ACARA’s unwieldly response to this shift is to turn learning history into the learning of abstract skills, transferable everywhere—the best response to the interconnected world. It is, in essence, to swallow more of the same poison. The antidote is rigour, but rigour won’t be found in the utilitarian and progressive model of teaching.