The Profession: Some Thoughts on Western Civilisation

History is an ethical discipline, its teaching (and research) underpinned by judgments about right behaviour such as how we should best live with nature and one another. The call often heard from conservative critics that history teaching must ‘stick to the facts’ or, as in the push in Australia for the study of Western Civilisation, to ‘great books’, should be seen as an effort to insert approved political ideology into history teaching under the cover of spurious claims about ‘common tradition’ and ‘common sense’. Judgments about curriculum and pedagogy are fundamentally ‘ethical’ and ‘political’, expressing ideas about what kind of historical knowledge is most relevant to the present day and what kind of history teaching will equip students both to understand the world and to act on it in ways that increase social justice and reduce suffering and oppression. It is one thing for historians to avoid political partisanship, quite another to advocate a political neutrality that, on closer inspection, is actually an endorsement of past wrongs and their continuation into the present. In an age when democracy is under attack and the future of the planet threatened by global warming, history teaching needs to find a space between narrow political and ideological partisanship, and a dangerous ethical neutrality.