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...draws attention to particular texts, discourse practices, and social practice issues
that are particularly relevant to thinking about the engineering of social change
through language and practice. In working to understand how policy and power fit
together in creating change, Fairclough (1995a, 1995b) referred to cruces tension
points as moments of crisis. These are times when things are changing or going
wrong. What is significant about these moments in time is that they provide
opportunities to deconstruct the various aspects of practices that are often time
naturalized and therefore difficult to notice. (2004, p. 176)
The countries of the examples listed below have, like Australia, engaged in these moments
where school curriculum is analysed against emerging and traditional ideas of nationhood and
national culture. Examples of the impact on school curriculum of these nation-wide debates,
and an indication of the widespread interest in the topic, can be seen in the growing quantity
of published literature on this topic, both academic and popular (for an overview of this type
of educational discourse, see van Dijk, 1993).
Two specific examples of other nations’ links of their history/culture wars to school History
curriculum are included here, in order to demonstrate the transnational context of the
Australian experience. Beginning with Canada, which in many ways is similar to Australia,
being a part of the Commonwealth of British colonial nations, Montgomery analyses
examples of racialised History textbooks taught in Canadian schools across a time period
from the 1960s to 2000. In recognising the wider transnational importance of this topic,
Montgomery writes:
While the specific focus of the paper is on Canadian history textbooks, the study is
about national mythologies in general. That is to say, my efforts are directed towards
illuminating some of the ways in which nation states, and particularly white settler
colonies such as Canada, enable the reproduction of racism in the present through
narrativizations of their past. (2005, p. 428)
He then goes on to connect school textbook content with broader issues of race present in
Canadian society within his established timeframe, for example in 1999 when education and
public debates collided. Montgomery writes of an issue not dissimilar to that experienced in
Australia at the same time. A textbook about Canada’s national history “was published...in
the midst of a volatile debate about the representation of high school Canadian history and
impassioned demands for traditional historical knowledge of the nation to take precedence
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