Steyn on History Education

Mark Steyn wrote a piece on Australia's former prime minister John Howard this past December in which he comments briefly on the problems with history curriculum in that country (and in Western Civilization).

.... At his 2006 education summit, Howard called for "a root and branch renewal of Australian history in our schools, with a restoration of narrative instead of what I labelled the 'fragmented stew of themes and issues"'.

As he explained at the Quadrant 50th anniversary celebration: "This is about ensuring children are actually taught their national inheritance." The absence of "narrative" and an "inheritance" is a big part of the reason that British subjects born and bred blow up the London Tube, why young Canadian Muslims with no memory of living in any other society plot to behead their own prime minister.

You can't assimilate immigrants and minorities unless you give them something to assimilate to. It's one thing to teach children their history "warts and all", quite another to obsess on the warts at the expense of all else. The West's demographic weakness is merely the physical embodiment of a broader loss of civilisational confidence. Australia should never have had a "department of immigration and multicultural affairs", but, given that it did, Howard was right to rename it the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Government should promote citizenship, not multiculturalism....

I encourage you to read the entire article in which he also tackles the threats of global jihadism and compares Howard to Blair & Bush.

As a historian, I do not shrink away from discussing the "warts" of history, but I agree with Steyn that we shouldn't lose sight of the grand narratives. We need to shift the balance away from the narratives of individual identity and re-emphasize broad national and cultural unifiers.

hat tip: Thanks for Noticing Me