Advantages And Disadvantages Of Australian Curriculum

In 1999, following the debate on the state of the history curriculum between historians Stuart Macintyre and John Hirst, the federal government issued a national enquiry into the teaching of history in Australian schools. Thus resulted in Prime Minister John Howard initiating the overhaul of the Australian school curriculum. In order to make a national curriculum that modelled of New South Wales syllabus. This is due to the fact that in the rest of the country “history was an all but invisible subject, inadequately subsumed within a generic and controversial approach to social education known as Studies of Society and Environment”. This essay will examine the emergence and changes of the Australian national curriculum in order to examine the advantages and disadvantages of such a system.
Firstly, it must be acknowledged that a potential drawback of a national curriculum is the fact that politicians could shape the curriculum to embed their own ideals, rather than considering what students are interested in. According to Taylor, history is the subject “that …show more content…
Previously, it may have been a struggle for a student who has moved to a different state to adjust to a different curriculum. For example, imagine that a year 8 student living in Victoria is learning about the industrial revolution in a school in Victoria. Then for some reason or another the student moves to Queensland and instead of the industrial revolution his year eight class is studying ancient China. Consequently having a shared curriculum could make it easier for students to apply for universities in other states, and in turn for universities to tailor their courses when they can rely on income students to have a shared knowledge of history. Which can be used as a consistent foundation for students to build on and explore which areas of history they enjoy once they get to