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invades school curriculum” (Lane, 2006, n.p.) running as a headline before contextualising
the topic within the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) religious studies syllabus. Added
to the mix of reported education woes is the assertion that pre-service teachers lack sufficient
literacy and numeracy skills to teach effectively, with some news reports citing overseas
research (rather than local research) in order to make this assertion (see, for example, Elite
uni students not up to scratch, 2006, p. 11) reporting “the English review...shows teenagers
are securing places at top universities without even being able to use an apostrophe.” This
overview, albeit brief, demonstrates the sustained public and media interest for a diverse
range of topics related to schooling, particularly in the timeframe 2006-2008; which in turn
demonstrates the diversity of views related to this topic.
A1.11 Conclusion
This overview has aimed to provide a synopsis of the debates within the history/culture wars
and to link those debates, where appropriate, to the school context particularly in Queensland.
The research, then, that forms this dissertation than can be seen within a particular
contemporary context, one that is directly influenced by the history/culture wars particularly
in the period between 1993 and 2007, which then acts as a contextual screen to describe
history curriculum in Queensland schools across selected time periods of the twentieth
century. Therefore, in order to situate the research of this dissertation within a commonly
understood context, it has been necessary to establish an overview of the featured and
significant debates of this ongoing ideological struggle.
Despite claims made by Ferrari that “hidden ideologues” (2009, n.p.) control education and
have made changes in secret, it is asserted here that, despite the binaries often created and
sustained by writers in newspapers such as The Australian, it is encouraging that the press has
brought these issues to the attention of the general public, and in doing so has raised the
profile of school curriculum and other educational issues. Doing so provides parents and
community members not only up-to-date information about the development of curriculum
debates, but also provides an outlet for discussion and airing of opinions through, for
examples, letters to the editor pages and in more recent times, posting comments on online
news sites.
It is asserted here that criticisms and controversies of the SOSE curriculum (as a component
of the history/culture wars) drive an oppositional approach to the debate, creating an
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