Changes to Australia’s new national curriculum to elevate Australia’s Christian and Western Heritage are a “band-aid fix”, according to free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).
The IPA says the “addition of a few words about Western Civilisation” is “simply window dressing” and “does nothing to fix the fundamental problems of the National Curriculum”.
Dr Bella d’Abrera, Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the IPA, says it is imperative that the “ideologically driven cross-curriculum priorities” are taken out of the curriculum altogether, along with the highly divisive Critical Race Theory which has been embedded into the original draft.
“While a curriculum will always be ideological in some way or another because in the basic sense, an ideology is the lens through which we understand the world, the fact is that by calling ‘Sustainability’, ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures’, and ‘Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia’, priorities, the National Curriculum’s designers were consciously prioritising them over everything else in the curriculum,” Dr d’Abrera told The Educator.
“By insisting that these three current themes be embedded into all subjects, the curriculum’s authors have deliberately prioritised ideology over knowledge, and they have done so with the full understanding that this particular ideology would come to dominate and define Australian education. This damages Australian students because in short, they end up knowing less.”
Dr d’Abrera said the cross-curriculum priorities also “serve no other purpose than to overcrowd an already crowded curriculum”.
“They are shoe-horned into every learning area with complete disregard for the actual subject matter,” she said.
“Critical Race theory claims that the defining principle of the structure of Western societies is race, that ‘whiteness’ is the dominant system of power, and that racial inequality is present in every aspect of our lives. There is nothing that is not potentially racist, underpinning the notion that white people have ‘White guilt’ and ‘Inherited guilt’ which they are obliged to overcome.”
However, Dr David Roy, a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, said there is very good reason that the cross-curriculum priorities were added, and that is because they were not being addressed in the European centric curriculum.
"Australia is in the Asia-Pacific, has the oldest, ongoing culture through First Nations people and is one of the countries, most susceptible to the negative aspects of human impact on the environment," Dr Roy told The Educator.
"We need to engage with these knowledges across the curriculum if we are to have a future population that can lead and engage with all without discrimination. Ignorance is what leads to conflict."
Dr Roy said that as for Critical Race Theory being an ideological basis of the Australian Curriculum; he, his colleagues, and several Year 12 students he spoke to "audibly laughed".
"The Australian Curriculum is white, male, and Christian in creation; and still in the majority of content and assessment," he said.
"It must be stated that it is ideologically siloed individuals that tend more to be fearful of Critical Race Theory, feminism and indeed any lens that challenges us to look at knowledge and society through the viewpoint of the marginalised and disadvantaged as it challenges the inherent hegemony power structures."
Dr Roy said the education system should want its school students to do better than the generations before them, and to treat others with equity, equality, and respect.
"As tokenistic as some of the priorities are currently delivered and presented in the Australian Curriculum, surely it is better than the terra nullius of knowledge that has been previously the case, along with ignoring the rich Asia-Pacific knowledges of our closest neighbours and major trading partners," he said.
"We should embrace Australia and it’s rich history and place in the world rather than keep it subservient to a past colonial servitude."