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It contains commitments to the kind of Australian society that I believe in and have
always believed in. It contains a commitment to some common Australian values
which are held by Australians, irrespective of whether their ancestors came from the
British Isles, Europe, the Middle East or Asia. Whatever the rights and wrongs and
the contributions of different people and different attitudes in the Australian
community, it comes at a time when it is appropriate and in the national interest to
send a clear and unambiguous signal, particularly to the nations of our region but
not only to the nations of our region, of the kind of society we are. It is put forward to
this parliament by the government and I trust also by the opposition not in any sense
of apology, not in any self-conscious sense, but as a simple, direct and unambiguous
statement of certain values and principles. (Howard, 1996a, p. 6156, emphasis
added)
Returning now to again focus more specifically on school curriculum as ‘common sense’,
Young provides a succinct summary of Gramsci’s work on commonsense and education,
writing:
Examples such as ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, creation and propagation of knowledge (or
in contemporary terms ‘teaching’ and ‘research’), and what he [Gramsci] calls the
‘laws of scholarship’ and the ‘limits of scientific research’ are all unexamined parts
of the framework within which most formal education takes place. The second aspect
relates to his distinction between ‘common sense’ and ‘philosophy’ in which he sees
that some people’s common sense becomes formally recognised as philosophy, and
other people’s does not, depending on their access to certain institutional
contexts....sociologists should raise the wider question of the relation between school
knowledge and commonsense knowledge, of how, as Gramsci suggests, knowledge
available to certain groups becomes ‘school knowledge’ or ‘educational’ and that
available to others does not. (1971, p. 28)
Commonsense in education is understood by Gitlin as being “…a catchall phrase that refers
to dominant discourses, the broad-based circulating value systems that often move across
multiple contexts and local discourse, the specific contextual normative systems found in a
particular locale” (2006, p. 171). This is a topic that has also been covered by educators from
discipline areas outside of History in contemporary Australia. As broached in Appendix A:
Contexts Wayne Sawyer, then President of the Australian Association for the Teaching of
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