Can History Succeed at School? Problems of Knowledge in the Australian History Curriculum (Report‪)‬

I recently interviewed a history teacher about his views on current changes to the Australian curriculum. His greatest hope was that it might rescue him from teaching his state history syllabus, which he described as being too 'historiographical'. By this he meant that it focused too much on issues of perspective and method in historical explanation, which in his view was not really history. It seems strange that the grounds for knowledge and the warrants for conclusions in a discipline could be seen as separate from the discipline itself, but this separation is not uncommon among historians. Historians are said to be suspicious of theory and method, and 'by instinctive inclination hostile to philosophical and methodological criticism of their work, often wishing to rely on "common sense"' (Lloyd, 1996, p. 192). As Evans (2000, p. 10) noted: Whatever the merits of these views in the practice of history, in the process of curriculum development they are an obstacle to effective curriculum design. This article considers a range of issues that arise from this relative neglect by historians of the structure and processes of their discipline. It focuses on the relations, and in many instances the gaps, between analyses of the nature of history, and the need for clear goals and explanatory frameworks for the purposes of developing a school history curriculum.