https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/05/rubbish-history-books-national-curriculum/
The National Curriculum’s Bogus History
Gross errors of fact, ideologically tinted misrepresentations of the past, the mis-identification of historical figures — welcome to the tosh being fed to schoolchildren by the educational establishment. If Johnny can’t grasp how the past shapes the present and future, blame his textbooks.
Since Christopher Pyne announced the review of the national curriculum in January this year, the national curriculum has been a topic of heated debate, and no area of the curriculum has received more attention than history.
On the one hand, proponents of the history curriculum — many of whom were directly involved in the drafting process — have accused Pyne of “politicising history” and have claimed the existing document is somehow immune to bias and is entirely objective. On the other hand, critics of the national curriculum have maintained that the existing curriculum is biased in many respects, and that it denigrates Australia’s Western heritage and reflects a distinctly socialist and materialist view of history.
While the debate rages on, Labor’s history curriculum has already been rolled out into many Australian classrooms. A number of history textbooks that closely reflect the contents of the curriculum are appearing on booklists everywhere,.
We came across the some of these textbooks while writing our critique of the national curriculum at the Institute of Public Affairs. These books contain so many outrageous statements and factual errors that they were worthy of a critique on their own.
The errors and distortions in these textbooks are not just problematic for their own sake: they reveal the fundamental ideological biases of the national curriculum itself. Most schools across Australia are now using at least one of them for Year 7 to 10 history classes. Especially popular are the Jacaranda History Alive books (or the equivalent Retroactive series in New South Wales), the Oxford Big Ideas—History books, and the Pearson History series.
We took a sample of history textbooks from all the major publishers. The sample included the Year 7 Pearson, the Year 8 Macmillan, the Year 8 Cambridge, the Year 9 Jacaranda, and the Year 10 Nelson/CENGAGE Learning. We also had a look at the Oxford Year 7, 9 and 10, because these books most closely reflect the contents of the national curriculum and were written by some of the academics who were involved in the drafting process.
Not everything about these textbooks is bad. The best of them are glossy, colourful, filled with bright and interesting images, and pleasant to leaf through. Some are much better than others. The content and quality of some sections is also excellent. Usually, they provide very good—if somewhat superficial—introductions to the two world wars, and generally they provide some excellent content on technological advances and economic changes during the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, these history books are notable for their factual errors, controversial statements and unwarranted generalisations.
Just a brief survey of the Pearson Year 7 chapter on “Ancient Rome” reveals some of the fundamental problems that pervade most of the textbooks. My short assessment of this thirty-nine-page chapter found sixty-one obvious factual errors. These errors are not statements that are debatable or contested in scholarship, although there were many of these as well; there are sixty-one factual errors that can be refuted swiftly with easily available evidence.
Some errors were as basic as confusing “BC” and “AD” or citing the wrong dates. For example, the textbook claims that the Romans built the main part of the Appian Way in 32 BC. The correct date is 312 BC, around the time Rome established control over Italy. It also says that Cicero became consul in 63 AD. The correct date is 63 BC, before the Republic collapsed. It also says in a timeline on page 222 that Caesar became consul in 50 BC and invaded “France, then Britain”. In fact, Caesar was consul in 59 BC, and after his consulship ended he led campaigns in Gaul, Germania and Britannia from 58 to 50. He returned to Italy and crossed the Rubicon in 49, thus beginning the Civil War. Once again, the chronology in the textbook is wrong.