In this post, I mainly want to set out some of the most common criticisms of disciplinary approaches to secondary school History. In doing so, I am aiming to summarise the positions as best and fairly as I can even though I cannot discuss any in great length. I also acknowledge that some might suspect that I have straw-manned certain positions given that I have already suggested that I think it is useful to have at least some disciplinary element within the secondary curriculum.
I should say from the outset that I am sympathetic to the concerns encapsulated in some of these criticisms (or in some cases questions rather than outright criticisms) and I think most should be taken seriously even though I do not find them ultimately convincing. Dumping some historical thinking material into a curriculum and assuming that there will be no issues implementing it at scale would be more than naïve. I also think, both from argument and experience, that many of the ideas below are realistic concerns rooted in actual issues and difficulties with teaching History in a compulsory secondary system. Many have been raised by people committed to teaching History who want it to flourish as a subject and many have been raised by people who also believe that disciplinary History has some place within school curriculum (but that it has perhaps become too dominant).
It would be foolish to think that the following are the only ways in which people have raised concerns about including disciplinary ideas in secondary History. The list is not comprehensive but I do think it represents a variety of practical and more theoretical concerns that commonly arise in discussions about History education. I have organised these roughly so that the earlier questions are more practical and the later ones more theoretical. They are:
Has there been an uncritical acceptance of historical thinking and disciplinary history?
Has disciplinary history helped or just added complexity that makes teaching History harder and History less enjoyable for students?
Is disciplinary History irreconcilable with ‘heritage’, ‘tradition’ and ‘patriotic’ approaches to History?
Is it too ambitious and complex for most students in secondary schools?
Is it too reductive?
Does disciplinary History take attention away from things that many students enjoy?
Does it distract from important discussions about the content we include in our curriculums?
It disciplinary History based on an essentially Eurocentric epistemology?
Does disciplinary History really help students deal with the social problems they confront in the 21st century?
It may now be obvious that I also do not plan to address the broader idea that has been and still is popular in some places: that History is best taught in schools as part of a larger interdisciplinary endeavour. I am assuming here that History is (and in most settings is probably best) taught as a separate subject.
My discussion of most of these will have an Australian (and NSW) focus but many of these questions have been raised and discussed in other contexts too. I will try to briefly introduce each of these in turn.
a. Has there been an uncritical acceptance of historical thinking and disciplinary History?
One complaint about the disciplinary approach to History education in Australia is that it has become more popular without thinking clearly enough about the challenges it entails or the potential problems it might cause. One version of this criticism is that, in a rush to foreground the disciplinary, other crucial aspects of History education are minimised or even lost.
Robert Thorp and Anders Persson, for example, have written:
‘In its ambition to avoid history education based on the reproduction of unchallenged narratives, the model of historical thinking discussed here, runs the risk of advocating what could become equally fixed models and methods of how to think historically ... In its zealousness to oppose unreflected history culture ... content knowledge seems almost to have been reduced to a means by which we may practice and develop various skills ...’
(Robert Thorp and Anders Persson, ‘On Historical Thinking and the History Educational Challenge’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52.8, 2020, p. 898)
Put simply, there is no guarantee that disciplinary History is a vibrant approach (it can become static) and it could privilege ‘skills’ over ‘knowledge’.
Neither of those concerns are unfounded and it is not hard to imagine either of these situations in the real world. I have certainly heard it said that: ‘what students learn matters less than how they learn to think’ (or something similar). I do not agree with that sentiment, but there are also those who overstate its prevalence and/or influence as though content or knowledge is not (and has not been for some time) treated seriously in discussions about History education or in History classrooms because of an allegedly ubiquitous influence of ‘progressive education’ and ‘inquiry’ or ‘discovery’ learning. Though there is a complex story to be told here, HSC examinations have basically prevented that reality from becoming true in NSW. In addition, one of the main architects of the original Australian National Curriculum, the late Professor Stuart Macintyre, was confident enough to claim that:
Students need both to know history and practise it. Factual knowledge is essential to historical thinking. Without knowledge of chronology, geography, institutional arrangements, material circumstances and belief systems, no student project on a past period — however well intended — will afford understanding. Accordingly, a complementary objective of school history must be to provide students with this knowledge.
(Stuart Macintyre, ‘The Challenge for History in the National Curriculum’, Keynote Address at the Australian Curriculum Studies Association (Canberra), 2 October 2009, p. 10)
Claims like this from influential historians and History teachers appear to have been reasonably consistent for decades and, I would argue, have been acted on albeit with varying degrees of success.
That is certainly not to suggest that the concerns are unfounded. In the very least, they demonstrate the importance of reflecting critically on any model/theory/approach that becomes influential in History education (or education more broadly for that matter).
b. Has it helped or just added complexity that makes teaching History harder and History less enjoyable for students?
One key challenge of modern curriculums, at least in Australia, seems to be their ballooning complexity. If you remain in education long enough, it seems like new curriculum layers get added every few years. In NSW, we had outcomes introduced in the 1990s followed by civics and citizenship and life skills. We then had cross-curriculum priorities made more prominent with the National Curriculum in the 2000s-2010s.
The disciplinary ideas, most obviously represented in the History curriculum in Australia and NSW as ‘concepts and skills’, have also been an addition. One could easily argue, however, that they are not additional content demands but rather a more specific identification of what better History teachers were probably already doing. It is, nevertheless, easy to see how they might be seen as extra content requirements, particularly by non-specialists.
This broad concern may have particular bite when one considers that many teachers are required to teach out of their field of subject expertise. This is not uncommon in schools, especially in HSIE or SOSE faculties that might manage a wide range of humanities subjects where teachers are required to take a range of classes such as History, Geography, Economics, Legal Studies, Society and Culture and more. Certainly, attempting to teach History as a unique discipline for this teacher is challenging, just as teaching Legal Studies might be for a History specialist.
In different contexts, the more explicit reference to what are sometimes described (misleadingly) simply as ‘skills’ (as though they are content-free), has been blamed for the decline in the number of students taking History courses in Australia. It is difficult to prove or disprove these kinds of (usually) sensational claims with any great confidence. However, because we have clear examples in some states where the number of senior History enrolments have remained steady and even increased while these disciplinary skills and concepts have been made more explicit in the curriculum, it does seem to be a limited explanation for falling numbers. That story is also far more complex than is often made out.
c. Does disciplinary History run contrary to ‘heritage’, ‘tradition’ and ‘patriotic’ approaches to History
Though rarely framed as a specific critique of disciplinary approaches to History (mainly I think because the critics are often unaware of what that is), many who argue that school History should be more an exercise in preserving and transmitting a cultural heritage at least implicitly have difficulty accepting that disciplinary History is appropriate for school children. The essence of the problem appears to be that disciplinary History generally requires the past to be explored through a range of perspectives and/or interpretations and some of these are critical of aspects of cultural heritage.
We saw a ‘hard version’ of this in recent years when the former federal Education Minister, Alan Tudge, created something of a media furor by claiming that if the draft update to the History component of the National Curriculum were implemented it would lead students to ‘hate’ their country. He raised concerns about the presence of (and in his incorrect formulation, preoccupation with) the notion of ‘contestability’ in the History curriculum because he claimed that it required students to question Anzac Day (which it did not). If nothing else, it was a supremely uninformed reading of the draft such that I sometimes wonder how closely he had read the document. It is unfortunate that what is a genuine concern for many people (including some teachers) was presented in such an adversarial manner with the use of oddly cherry-picked words from the draft syllabus. This kind of public rhetoric almost always makes rich and constructive discussion about the History curriculum difficult.
There are ‘softer’ and more constructive versions of this concern sometimes offered by those who also support a disciplinary element in the school curriculum. The late Professor Stuart Macintyre, who was central to the development of the original History content in the National Curriculum, made the case for school History to play a nation-building role – that it should help students makes sense of their nation and give them a broad understanding of the national community as well as providing them with some exposure to disciplinary ideas. Even though he is often presented as a one-dimensional figure from the Australian left, he has made several arguments about the school History curriculum that are often championed by conservative commentators too (though they seem to rarely admit this). While Macintyre stopped short of saying that school History should force students to be proud of their country, he did argue that it should give them ‘a familiarity with the national story, so that they can appreciate its values and binding traditions’ [1].
More politically conservative commentators too have demonstrated that we need not be forced into a decision choose either a ‘heritage’ curriculum or a ‘disciplinary’ curriculum. Perhaps the best example of this was the Guide to Teaching Australian History promoted by John Howard in 2007 which took a chronology (heritage?) approach to content but also suggested that History be explored through a range of critical perspectives and other disciplinary features. Though the amount of content in this document was unworkable and one could easily quibble with the specific items included on the menu, it was hardly a call to return to a simplistic, uncontested narrative of the nation.
Discussions that seem to pit ‘heritage’ and ‘disciplinary’ paradigms against each other seem to miss much of the complexity in debates about History education as though one need to choose between the two. Most teachers and commentators probably tend to think that both are important but are likely to lay the emphasis on different aspects of the ‘heritage’ and different aspects of the ‘discipline’. In that space there is, I would argue, much healthy debate to be had.
d. Is disciplinary History too ambitious? Is it too complex for most students in secondary schools?
If we take the 1972 Schools Council History Project (SCHP) as the beginning of a more conscious and concerted attempt to make disciplinary ideas in school History explicit, an immediate concern at the time was that this was simply too ambitious and this is a view that still has currency. This argument claims that students are either uninterested in the disciplinary ideas (perhaps because they are not interested in attending university or some similar reason) or that they are not really capable of grappling maturely with them.
In the context of the SCHP’s emergence in England, the prominent historian Sir Geoffrey Elton was one outspoken commentator supporting this kind of position – though his views were broad and complex reaching far beyond this particular issue and his writing on school History is worth exploring. In his chapter for New Movements in the Study and Teaching of History (1970), for example, he wrote that: ‘Studying historical problems in the manner of a budding researcher [mainly] attracts the budding researcher’ [2]. In other words, disciplinary History may appeal to the most interested and the most able students but it is unlikely to resonate widely beyond the ‘budding researchers’. He went on to suggest that the disciplinary ideas are probably best left to the universities. ‘Let the schools feed the imagination, enlarge mental capacity, and lay the foundations of universal sympathy’, he wrote, and ‘we [that is the professors] shall soon enough, at the university, attend to the search for truth and the promotion of precise analytical thought’ [3].
Though Elton had many other things to say about school History, these particular concerns have been challenged by decades of excellent teaching. If one marks the HSC examination of any History subject in NSW, for example, it is abundantly clear that many students, not just the most capable, can grapple with disciplinary ideas. No one, I would think, expects this to be demonstrated at an Honours-level complexity by the end of secondary school but that does not mean that a meaningful start cannot be made.
Elton’s framing of this is also open to question from other perspectives. Some have claimed, for example, that it is difficult to draw a sharp distinction between the content and the disciplinary. Christine Counsell touched on this problem when she wrote:
‘Some might say, “surely in school history, we can just teach the facts and leave disciplinary understanding until later?” But that would be both impossible and dangerous. For while many individual facts are known incontrovertibly, even to juxtapose two facts is to create a story. The interpretive process is brought to bear in the very generalizations we make, in the facts selected or ignored in each story. To leave children ignorant of how that interpretative process works, both the legitimate reasons why respectable accounts will vary and be provisional and the pernicious reasons for deliberately deceptive stories, would be irresponsible. Even if we could somehow find an objective, neutral collection of facts, a convenient canon on which everyone agreed, the idea that we might fool students until they were, say, 16, and do the difficult stuff later, is dangerous. Only a minority of students will study history post-16. The task facing a modern education system in a democracy is to ensure that no one leaves schools unaware that any story is a set of choices and carries a message, witting or unwitting’.
(Christine Counsell, ‘History’ in Sehgal Cuthbert, A and Standish, A (eds.) What Should Schools Teach? Disciplines, Subjects and the Pursuit of Truth (2nd Ed), UCL Press, London, 2021, p. 156)
There is also the problem that if we wait until university to try to introduce some disciplinary thinking into History, most students will never be systematically exposed to it and that may not be ideal.
The broad concern, and even Elton’s specific expression of it, still warrants some consideration. Ramming disciplinary ideas into History teaching in an unintelligent and clumsy manner could easily do more harm than good. It is not easy to ‘get right’ and it could also be introduced too early (what most 12-year-olds would be comfortable grappling with will obviously differ from high-achieving senior students and that needs to be considered). Perhaps what is needed, is a clear sense of how disciplinary History might be adapted for school contexts so that it is clear to practitioners and the public how this draws on, but is not the same as, what might be required at a university level. I think many effective teachers already have a sense of this, but it is rarely communicated publicly (and would probably be difficult to do so effectively).
e. Is disciplinary history too reductive?
An interesting alternative to the concerns raised by Elton above is the idea that perhaps ‘historical thinking’ and other attempts to capture something of the History discipline for school students can only be reductive. Anyone with a basic level of understanding of History’s own history would know that everything is up for grabs – notions of time, conceptions of truth and so on. Historians have different, and often radically different, approaches to their work so how could we ever distill the discipline down to something realistic in a school setting? On this point, Alex Ford has written:
‘In reality, the ‘discipline’ of history is a maelstrom of competing groups, individuals and ideas. From his perspective as a Jewish historian, Bloch (1992), for instance, referred to the historical discipline as ‘the guild’, conjuring up not just images of dedicated craftsmen, but of competing power groups, contested methods, protectionism and petty self-interestedness ... Unlike the sciences, which lend towards the identification of universal truths, history seeks better and better understanding of the variety of human experience through time. This is, by definition, fractal, and trends to infinite variation, just like life itself.'
(Alex Ford, ‘Why is “powerful knowledge” failing to forge a path to the future of history education?’, History Education Research Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2022, p. 10)
It is a challenging thought.
I would argue that this is an important concern but that it can also become unproductive. Most of what we do in schools is some form of reduction and synthesis of more complex ideas. Take even the basic substantive content that we teach, for example, when we teach an eight-week topic on the Middle Ages in Year 8. What we cover, the kinds of claims we often have to make to render the story digestible would probably be considered reductive to a professional historian. But we know this and we’re open about it when we can be. We also try to highlight the complexity where we can. I’d imagine that most History teachers also rarely pretend that these topics and the content we teach are anything more than an introduction to a much more complex era or issue. Why can’t we experiment with this ‘acceptable simplification’ with the discipline too? [4].
f. Does disciplinary History take attention away from things that many students enjoy?
Curriculum time is limited and perhaps focusing on disciplinary ideas robs teachers and students of valuable time to explore other history-related issues that we/they might find more enjoyable or rewarding. Setting aside the larger and more complex question of the degree to which perceived or potential interest and reward should drive curriculum planning, this is an important issue to consider.
One possible version of this critique might suggest that History curriculum should be structured, to at least some degree, around questions, issues, topics and themes that reach students in their contemporary contexts. History has the best potential to come alive, it might be suggested, when it allows students to explore contemporary problems and questions including modern political concerns such as climate change, race relations and problems/challenges of democracy. Put simply, History should be immediately relevant.
This is difficult to achieve at scale, particularly in the context of school systems that include large exit examinations (such as the HSC in NSW). To develop any manageable consistency, these systems require some kind of structured curriculum and these are complicated to produce. Even if we succeeded in making one iteration of a History curriculum highly relevant to students in one year, there is no guarantee it would remain relevant for very long. To take one simple example, when Russia recently expanded its invasion of Ukraine, lots of people wondered why Australian students knew little about the region and whether this should be foregrounded. Then, other conflicts erupted and now there was concern that students were not across these other parts of the world. How could a curriculum ever keep up with this?
There are also significant questions about what makes History relevant. Surely it is more complex than what is often proposed: lining up curriculum content with current events and issues (though that might have its place). Also, there is no reason why disciplinary ways of thinking might not be made highly relevant to students across many different contexts (learning to argue about causation and evidence seems to be quite relevant and transferable, for example). In fact, a lot of the literature around historical thinking and disciplinary work would claim that it is this aspect of History, as much as the narratives and facts, that can benefit students beyond the classroom [5].
Another version of this question rightly reminds us that an over-emphasis on disciplinary ideas could also be damaging. Deb Hull from the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria, for example, has defended the disciplinary aspirations of school History but also raised the concern that too much attention to these matters (such as debating interpretations) might sideline what is considered by some to be a universal phenomenon of the human experience: a love of stories. Mainly considering History in the middle years of secondary school, she wrote:
‘In History we know that storytelling must be balanced by learning activities that expose the complexity and contestability of historical knowledge. History is more than story. It is also science, analysis and critical thinking, and it is dangerous without them. While we might choose to start by telling students a compelling story, we always want to end with them critiquing it. However, if the study of History in the Middle Years, becomes more critique than story, do we risk losing the neurological, psychological, human heart of our discipline?’
(Deb Hull ‘Storytelling in History Teaching’, Agora, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2020, p. 5)
It is a reasonable and important concern with a long tradition that reflects aspects of Elton’s ideas from the 1970s outlined above: that ‘Studying historical problems in the manner of a budding researcher attracts the budding researcher’ implying, I think, that students, especially younger students, could become disinterested or left behind. As she also writes: ‘A great storyteller can win a student over to History for life. We neglect this advantage at our peril’ [6].
There are also a few ideas here that I think are worth reflecting on (and some of which Deb Hull explores in her article which I commend to anyone thinking about these issues). First, is it the case that stories will be a safe haven of student interest? There are obviously plenty of brilliant stories in History that have wide appeal and help capture students’ attention. There are also many stories that students find boring and tedious – particularly in specific topics or areas of content that are repeated more frequently across the curriculum. From my experience, I would argue that one thing that can liven up these more banal aspects of a curriculum is some debate, contest or controversy (without going overboard). Perhaps it is obvious, but I think it is worth stating: stories executed poorly are likely to be no more enticing or useful than disciplinary work executed poorly and, knowing Deb, I am almost certain that she would agree.
Second, I wonder whether stories and critique have more in common than they are often given credit for. It is entirely possible, for example, to tell fascinating stories about ‘critique’ (or stories that lead to critique) and fascinating alternative stories that are critique in History. Consider the following:
Famous debates between historians (Reynolds and Windschuttle for instance).
Revolutionary new insights into the past that have been made by explorers, scientists, historians and others (stories about finding new evidence that lead to new interpretations or open up new controversies).
Examining rebellious literature from dissidents with exceptional stories that challenge dominant interpretations of a period.
Stories, evidence and interpretations that challenge popular myths.
Are these critique or story? They seem to be mixing both as many good historians often do. Sometimes we teach the story first and then do the critique. Sometimes the story is the critique.
So, it would seem to me that there are fruitful questions in all of this, particularly in asking how a balance of story and disciplinary work might be achieved – perhaps it is not even really a question of balance but both playing their own intelligent role in the teaching process What does this balance or integration look like in different topics that we commonly teach and at different stages of secondary school? How have successful teachers managed this balance in real life? More discussion around this could be highly beneficial for the teaching of History in Australia.
The last point that is worth noting here is that this may be one area in which curriculums and syllabuses need to be flexible. Rather than mandating exactly where and how disciplinary ideas must be engaged with, keeping this open to schools and teachers should allow them to calibrate the balance that works best in their context (this is currently what the NSW curriculum essentially does). And, without overdoing the ‘context thing’, it still seems fair to expect that in some schools doing complex historiographical work with a Year 8 class may not be a reasonable objective whereas in others it may be.
g. Does disciplinary History distract from important discussions about the content we include in our curriculums?
This question has been asked in many different contexts and is often raised by some who advocate the importance of disciplinary ideas. It emphasises the fact that it is entirely possible to get the disciplinary dimensions ‘right’ even when significant problems may exist with the substantive content in a curriculum.
An example of this might be a curriculum in which there are clear and reasonable disciplinary features, but the content has a narrow focus (such as only national history). Another might be a curriculum in which the disciplinary elements are reasonable but the content far too dense or complex for the students it is designed for. In Australia, we have some examples of this including the 1995 NSW 7-10 History curriculum released under the Labor Premier Bob Carr and the Guide to Teaching Australian History released by the Liberal Prime Minister John Howard in 2007. Both of these framed school History through its unique disciplinary lens but both contained content that was simply far too ambitious. It is a good reminder that no side of Australian politics has a monopoly over unsatisfactory History curriculum.
In sum, considerations of the disciplinary issues in a History curriculum should not overwhelm important conversations about the substantive content that students should learn. Greg Melleuish captured this well when he called on those designing History curriculum to consider what represents Australia’s ‘significant past’ [7]. Though the concept he outlines has long been familiar with teachers and curriculum designers, it is important to revisit periodically: what content should Australian students be exposed to? What chronologies, themes, events and people? Disciplinary thinking might be able to assist in answering this, but it is unlikely to resolve it.
The work of Kay Traille (e.g. Hearing Their Voices: Teaching History to Students of Color published in 2019) and the website ‘Another History is Possible’ also explore some of these ideas from other perspectives. They demonstrate that a myopic focus on doing good disciplinary History with students can easily leave many other issues unaddressed so it cannot be divorced from other ethical considerations and other considerations of the substantive content that students explore. One important implication of their work is to remind us that disciplinary matters can never be completely divorced from other discussions when it comes to History education.
h. Is disciplinary History essentially Eurocentric?
More recently, at least from what I can tell, some people have also questioned the epistemological basis of common ‘models’ of disciplinary History by claiming that they appear to be heavily (or solely) influenced by European/western ideas. These include core issues in History such as time, notions of evidence and truth and rationality. Although there is probably much variation in their views, the general critique seems to be essentially that the professional academic discipline of History that these models try to capture for schools is essentially a western construct based on western epistemologies. This, many argue, can be marginalising for students of different cultures. This would probably be conceived by many as a kind of postcolonial critique of disciplinary History.
Bryan Smith, for example, has argued that:
‘Disciplined history specifically engages in an “imperialism of categories” whereby thedisciplinary approach exercises a hegemony that all but disavows other forms of knowing’ … ‘Opening up conversations of the past in our classroom to be inclusive of the epistemological diversity of the past’s very construction allows for a pedagogical practice that is attentive to the multiple entry points into the past.’
(Bryan Smith, ‘The disciplined winds blow from the West: The forgotten epistemic inheritance of historical thinking’, Historical Encounters, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2020, p. 24 and p. 28)
This is a difficult criticism to respond to though it is certainly not universally accepted. Some might challenge the premise of the critique asking whether it is really accurate to say that the kind of historical thinking often presented in school curriculums is easy to categorise as simply ‘western’. Jorn Rusen’s edited volume Western Historical Thinking: An Intellectual Debate (1999), would be an interesting place to begin thinking about this. The concern, legitimate as it is, may also rest on an assumption that teachers uncritically implement historical thinking in classrooms and do not raise concerns about disciplinary ideas including periodisation, evidence and what Smith calls ‘epistemological diversity’. I know for a fact that many actually do this, but I do not have any evidence beyond the anecdotal to make any claims about the scale of this.
i. Does disciplinary History really help students deal with the social problems they confront in the 21st century?
This concern has been raised more recently by scholars such as Samantha Cutrara and Matilda Keynes. Cutrara, for example, argues that there is a ‘civics crisis’ in education and that the disciplinary approach to History cannot address it [8]. In fact, she claims that the disciplinary approach to History: ‘... prohibits history from being used as a tool of possibility and transformation’ [9]. She goes on to add that:
‘... this shift in focus [to disciplinary History] ensures that we avoid directly talking about the power that is imbedded in who and what are important for and in the nation, and instead focuses on the methodology that legitimises this importance’.
Cutrara, Samantha, ‘To Placate or Provoke? A Critical Review of the Disciplines Approach to History Curriculum’, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2009, p. 93
And directly states that:
‘I argue that rather than provoking and challenging how we come to know ourselves and others in the world, this approach to history curriculum maintains a neoliberal ethic of separation and surveillance in our “modern experience” and in doing so placates the learning of difficult knowledges, knowledges that will allow us to understand and connect with others, in our study of the past’.
Cutrara, Samantha, ‘To Placate or Provoke? A Critical Review of the Disciplines Approach to History Curriculum’, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2009, pp. 86-87
If I have understood this correctly, and there is a reasonable chance that I have not, she is essentially arguing that disciplinary History acts to replicate and even propel problematic features of modern society rather than disrupt them.
Writing in an Australian context, Matilda Keynes has asked whether disciplinary History helps or hinders in the search for reconciliation, truth-telling and peacebuilding. She notes that: ‘A key premise at stake [in debates about History teaching] is whether history education has the capacity to positively change society and create peaceful relations, or whether it simply reflects or reinforces an already existing social situation’ [10].
Keynes’s conclusions are complex and she does not dismiss the positive contributions that disciplinary History might make to the lives of many students or its practical role in helping to shape a cohesive curriculum for large-scale education systems. She does, however, argue that it may exacerbate other problems. For example, she writes:
Disciplinary history education in its current form would likely hinder reconciliation and truth-telling efforts. This is because the seemingly benign character of disciplinary history education conveys temporal logics which have problematic effects in settler societies. Disciplinary history education cannot accommodate Indigenous and other persisting, and thus dissident, temporal knowledges within the temporal schema of historical thinking. This is an altogether different issue than merely increasing Indigenous and minority representation within a history lesson, curricula or textbook. In fact, the temporal logics of historical thinking reinforce nation-building agendas by policing divergent temporal claims that would threaten state sovereignty’.
Matilda Keynes, ‘History Education for Transitional Justice? Challenges, Limitations and Possibilities for Settler Colonial Australia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, No. 13, 2019, pp. 131
The article is both a fascinating and challenging read and its arguments are not easily discarded. That is not, however, to say that they should be accepted uncritically. I am uncertain, for example, that disciplinary ‘cannot accommodate’ other epistemologies as Keynes appears to suggest here. There is, in fact, discussion around this very issue. For example, Fredrik Alven has explored the possibility of ‘third order’ concepts as a possible way forward though he was not writing directly with Australian complexities in mind.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the critiques put forward by Cutrara and Keynes is that they challenge other common perceptions of school History. If my condensed summary of the History of History education in Australia in Part 1 of this blog post is close to accurate, there have been two dominant claims made about what History contributes of value to a student’s civic awareness: 1. Traditionally it was that they learned and imbibed a sense of patriotic pride (connected to the British empire or the nation); and, 2. Through historical thinking (or ‘thinking like a historian’) they learned to work critically with History and could thus participate in public discussions about the past more consciously. The critique of scholars such as Cutrara and Keynes appears to be that both of these claims are not entirely satisfactory.
Though I think the term has been wildly misused in discussions about education in recent years, many would consider these ideas to be an expression of a more progressive educational outlook. To the extent that they challenge older notions of what might make History a valued subject in schools, that seems reasonable.
Conclusion
How do we begin to make sense of these questions and critiques raised about disciplinary History? This list is not even comprehensive, and yet it might already seem overwhelming.
The begin with, the brief outline presented here demonstrated clearly that criticisms of disciplinary History are not limited to conservative or progressive political outlooks. In a more specifically educational context, disciplinary History also does not necessarily fit comfortably within a progressive or traditional frame of pedagogy though it could be used to express and support either depending on how it is approached.
This does not, however, mean that disciplinary History is the neutral or ‘common-sense’ ground in the storm of debate about History education. In fact, what I think some of the criticisms and questions reveal is that disciplinary History’s character and quality are highly dependent on other factors such as the substantive content it engages with, the pedagogical approaches of the individual teacher, what else students do in the broader curriculum and more. Disciplinary History is not a Leviathan that forces teachers to work in one specific frame; it is one potential feature of the History curriculum that actively interacts with many others and perhaps that has been underplayed in some discussions.
Though it does run the danger of oversimplifying the many complexities I have hopefully begun to identify, I would tentatively suggest that the criticisms of disciplinary History can be grouped into three broad categories: the patriotic, the practical and the progressives (three ‘p’s). Perhaps this is the teacher in me coming out, but I have tried to organise these in the table below. It does not capture everything, but it at least could become a useful tool to open up discussions about this issue.
Patriotic | Practical | Progressive |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
Endnotes
[1] Quoted in Paul Kiem, ‘Mandating the Past: School History’ in Ashton, P and Hamilton, P (eds) The Australian History Industry, North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2022, p. 50
[2] Geoffrey Elton, ‘What Sort of School History Should We Teach?’ in Martin Ballard (ed.) New Movements in the Study and Teaching of History, London: Temple Smith, 1970, p. 224 and p. 224
[3] Geoffrey Elton, ‘What Sort of School History Should We Teach?’ in Martin Ballard (ed.) New Movements in the Study and Teaching of History, London: Temple Smith, 1970, p. 224 and p. 230
[4] Alex Ford, ‘Why is “powerful knowledge” failing to forge a path to the future of history education?’, History Education Research Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2022, p. 10
[5] See, for example, the work of Michael Young or Arthur Chapman (ed) Knowing History in Schools ...
[6] Deb Hull ‘Storytelling in History Teaching’, Agora, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2020, p. 3
[7] Greg Melleuish, Australian Intellectuals: Their Strange History and Pathological Tendencies, Ballan: Connor Court Publishing, 2013, p. 58 (the entire section dedicated to the National Curriculum History in the third chapter entitled 'History in Australia' is worth reading, see pp. 52 – 60)
[8] Samantha Cutrara, ‘To Placate or Provoke? A Critical Review of the Disciplines Approach to History Curriculum’, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2009, p. 91
[9] Samantha Cutrara, ‘To Placate or Provoke? A Critical Review of the Disciplines Approach to History Curriculum’, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2009, p. 93
[10] Matilda Keynes, ‘History Education for Transitional Justice? Challenges, Limitations and Possibilities for Settler Colonial Australia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, No. 13, 2019, p. 122