With reviews underway into the national curriculum and teacher training, and $70m up for grabs to encourage more public schools to go independent, Neos Kosmos had the opportunity this week to grill the Coalition’s most combative frontbencher on his controversial reform agenda.
“The truth of our history is that there are good parts and there are parts that you would have rather had not occurred…
In this interview, Mr Pyne sheds some revealing light on his views on Greek history and language, the importance of recognising the roots of Australia’s democracy, and how the national curriculum should reflect the evolution of our national identity.
With his push to encourage greater autonomy for public schools and consign ‘political correctness’ in the classroom to history, our discussion began by exploring the minister’s views on that most fundamental aspect of Australia’s education system: what is taught to our children.
Mr Pyne, you have asked two critics of the national curriculum – former teacher and Liberal Party staffer Dr Kevin Donnelly and University of Queensland Professor Ken Wiltshire – to review what Australian schools teach. Why?
My view is that it should always be subject to review and that the important pillars of the Coalition’s approach to quality education is a robust curriculum.
I want to be sure that what we’re offering students in history, mathematics, science and English is robust and meaningful. One of the criticisms I would make of the curriculum is that it currently has three overriding themes: Australia’s place in Asia; Indigenous Australia, and sustainability, and one has to question how particularly maths lends itself to those themes.
Dr Donnelly described the history curriculum during its development as “reading like a cultural-left manifesto rather than a balanced and rational view of history”. Isn’t that observation at the heart of your concerns?
What is at the heart of our review is that we want to make sure the curriculum is telling the truth and that it is a robust, useful document.
I’ve shared the concerns of many in Australia over the last few years, [that] our history curriculum in particular, teaches a particular version of Australian history and in fact world-history, which doesn’t leave a young Australian proud of our heritage, but rather questioning whether we have not been living up to our best lights.
The truth of our history is that there are good parts and there are parts that you would have rather had not occurred, but overall it’s very important that Australians today – whether they’re Greek Australians or other background Australians – to know where we’ve come from, so we we know what kind of country we are, and where we want to go in the future.
I don’t feel there has been enough emphasis in the curriculum on western civilisation, that is of course, the society we now reflect. Most students at school would not be being taught that democracy had its heart – its beginnings – in ancient Greece.
Unless you understand that, and then understand the progress of democracy – the revolutions in England and the civil war, the Glorious Revolution, the primacy of parliament, the Magna Carta, and the Enlightenment.
Unless you know that process – from ancient Greece to modern times – how can you possibly understand why Australia has the rule of law, why we are a liberal democracy, why we gave women the vote before most other places in the world and allowed them to stand for parliament, and why we have been at the forefront of social change in the west.
Some non anglo-background Australians might suggest your wish for a greater focus on western civilisation could impose an anglocentric view of Australia’s history. What’s your response to that concern?
Western civilisation of course is not an anglocentric matter, it is deeply embedded in European civilisation. I think that criticism is a misunderstanding of history.
Many of the people that you’ve described, didn’t come to Australia as migrants because they wanted to live in a country that was the same kind of country as they’d left.
They came to Australia because they thought they would be safe, that their children would be secure, that they would be able to be in a civilisation that respected the rule of law, that allowed them to vote, that had a parliamentary democracy and a constitution that had been largely unchanged for a hundred and fourteen years.
Bill Shorten has been highly critical of your intentions for education. He’s said that you should stop trying to put your version of politics into school books. What’s your reaction?
Bill Shorten should try and take a more in-depth view of policy issues rather than his lightweight approach. When he was Minister of Education he was in favour of, for example, independent public schools. Once the union told him that he wasn’t supposed to be in favour of them, he was suddenly against them.
The problem with Bill Shorten is that he can’t rise above his background.
I want to get on with the job of introducing a robust curriculum, engaging parents more in their children’s education, addressing issues around teacher quality, and more autonomy for schools.
In 2012, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), reversed its decision on Modern Greek in the national curriculum – changing its status from an ‘Ethnic’ language to a ‘Heritage’ language. Do you support that move?
The nomenclature is never important to me. What I’m interested in is outcomes.
I’ll leave the esoteric debate as to how to describe these languages to experts. What I’m more interested in is the experience students have at school in languages, which they then might go on study at university, and teach themselves, and use with our desire to be engaged with Asia and the rest of the world.
Do you accept that teaching the languages of Australia’s traditional migrant communities should be a bedrock of language teaching in the national curriculum?
My view is that, rather than being overly prescriptive we should be encouraging schools – whether they’re Greek schools, or other language schools and also mainstream schools – to be teaching languages including Greek – as a living language – but also as an ancient language that has impacted dramatically on our own western civilisation, and our own language for that matter.
I have four children at school – ranging from Reception to Year 8 and one of the things I’ve noticed is that they do many language offerings, but they don’t do any one language in depth.
You can’t get a full experience of language simply by studying it for a term or two. I’d like to see languages develop in our curriculum so that every child has a meaningful experience of a language, because like music, language has an impact on a child’s whole development.
You have just announced a $70m fund to help more public schools go it alone. What benefits do you believe this policy can bring to the Greek Australian community?
I think the community would be grateful and pleased that the government shared their view that they should have more autonomy to operate schools that emphasise Greek culture and [the] Greek language.
We want to give them more opportunity to expand their curriculum – so that is not ‘one size fits all’ – into their schooling, so that young Australian men and women of Greek background don’t lose the understanding of their culture and language.
One of our pillars is independent public schooling and more autonomy for all schools. The more autonomy a school has, the more opportunity it has to choose its own characteristics.
Choosing [the] Greek language for example as a language to teach, and expanding the number of Australians who can teach Greek would fit neatly with the aspirations of many Greek Australians who want to make sure their culture lives on in this country.
An independent school in the public sphere in a neighbourhood with a large number of Australians from Greek backgrounds, might live by a non-government Greek school.
They might want to have more collaboration between the public school and the Greek school – to share teachers and expand Greek language into their school. The more autonomy they have, the more those opportunities can be realised.