History is history
Antimulticulture
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,20163973-25717,00.html
Andrew Bolt
August 18, 2006
How far our intellectual standards have fallen that this
speech of the sobbing obvious had to be made at all.
I think it was Julie Bishop, a something-or-other in the government of
what's-his-face, who said an important thing somewhere the other day.
Facts matter.
Actually, now that I check, Bishop, the federal Education Minister, opened a
summit on the teaching of history this week by declaring that history
matters.
History with facts.
And she said what once never needed saying: "History is not peace studies.
History is not social justice awareness week. Or conscious-raising about
ecological sustainability.
"History is history."
At least the Howard Government has now gathered top historians to try to
save history from the fads that have shredded its disciplines.
With luck, they will insist that history classes should have less preaching
and more teaching, and students should once more be taught the broad sweep
of history before being dragged off into the puddles of political activism
and post-modernism, where what matters is not the truth, but the attitude.
Want examples of what I mean, and what it leads to?
Hear Anne Curthoys, the Australian National University's Manning Clark
Professor of History: "Many academics in the humanities and social sciences
now reject the notion that one can objectively know the facts.
"Many take this even further, and argue that knowledge is entirely an effect
of power, that we can no longer have any concept of truth at all."
Believe it. When Professor Lyndall Ryan, head of Humanities at Newcastle
University, was outed for writing about massacres that hadn't happened.
Citing death tolls from sources that didn't exist, she had a perfect
postmodernist excuse. Two, in fact.
Excuse one: "Historians are always making up figures." Excuse two: "Two
truths are told. Is only one 'truth' correct?"
Indeed, yes, madam, if one truth contradicts the other. This is the basis of
the entire Western scientific method.
Yet, how easily this respect for truth -- and for history's vast narratives
that make sense of a million little facts -- have vanished in a swamp of
fact-less post-modernism.
Never mind, chirrip the hip. Who needs facts when we've got Google?
As Victoria University lecturer Les Terry puts it: "Rather than bemoan the
fact that many students do not know when James Cook sailed up the east coast
of Australia, the historians should acknowledge that many of today's
students are highly conversant, probably more so than those attending the
summit, with the digital rather than the dusty archive."
Clare Wright, a grant-winning post-doctoral research fellow at La Trobe
University, is the admired product of such teaching, held up in a sea of
unknowing by a pair of Google floaties.
As she blithely wrote: "There is no question that even after post-graduate
training in history, I have emerged with a shaky grasp of the facts. I am a
product of a thoroughly post-modern education, schooled to seek and
interpret a multiplicity of voices, competing narratives and diverse texts.
"The order of Australian prime ministers is beyond me; the dates of even key
events would see me flailing. But I am also a child of the Information Age.
Isn't that why God invented Google?"
Oh, dear. You too, child?
But the peril of relying on Google with only uninformed prejudice to guide
you was shown last month by Sunday Age writer Terry Lane, who fell for the
internet hoax of a fraud who had claimed to have been an American soldier in
Iraq with orders to slaughter civilians.
Asked why he had believed this preposterous fantasy, he explained: "I fell
for it because I wanted to believe it."
In a world whose history has no facts, how many will fall into that pit with
him?
--
Antimulticulture
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