[naturalman1975]

I teach in Victoria, Australia, and things aren't identical to the way they are in the US (not that they are identical across the US either, of course) but there are enough similarities in what goes on in our education systems and the issues that arise, that we do deal with a lot of the same issues. In my state, in Grades 11 and 12, the last two years of what you'd call high school (we use the term secondary school) are pretty heavily regulated because a common standard is applied to determine whether or not students get to go to university and what options they have in terms of university study. So I am quite limited at that level in what I can teach - there are four semesters over the two years, and each semester only has two or three choices for what we're supposed to teach. At my school, we have selected (and I agree with the selections, although the final decision was not mine - I'm number two in my department) Twentieth Century History for the first two units, and Revolutions for the second two units (we study The American Revolution and The French Revolution - the Chinese and Russian Revolutions are both options as well). The people who wrote the curriculum guidance tend to be left wing, but speaking as a conservative, I actually do think they do a decent job of maintaining a fairly neutral position in these topics, which is part of why I choose them - some of the other choices are much more biased to the left. We do get to choose our own textbooks, but finding a suitable core text is often difficult - we have a fairly limited choice. We supplement it, however, with a lot of material drawn from other sources, and have virtually full control over that (we'd be expected to listen to parental objections if any were raised, but it's never happened).

This system has been in place now for about twenty three years - to begin with, it was very biased to the left, but over time with governments from both left and right in power, the bias is less - and with care, you can keep away from most of what is there.

In the two years before these two years (Grades 9 and 10), while we have curriculum guidelines from the state, as a private school, we don't have to follow them. All we really use it for is broad topic outlines - so in Grade 9, we study European and Australian history from 1750-1918 (and the First World War in some detail), and in Grade 10, mid twentieth century history. We also do units on Ancient History (Sumer, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome) in Grade 9 and Medieval history (primarily English, but with some Europe and the Crusades) in Grade 10, but that's outside the curriculum guidelines. It means our students do quite a bit more work than the curriculum requires - but certainly not more than they can handle with effort and diligence.

We also intergrate to some extent with other subjects - all boys have to take at least one year of Latin, and those who continue it beyond that point have it interacting with their Roman history studies, for example. We'd probably do more of that if the History teachers (including me) remembered more of our own Latin - but I only did it as a schoolboy myself and it's been a long time since I was a schoolboy now.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Thank you for such a thorough response. I’ve heard somewhere in the distant past that Australia tends to run about 40 years behind the USA in terms of social norms. Whoever said that may have been totally uninformed for all I know, but I do tend to think of Australia as less advanced in a good way when it comes to leftist thought and practice.

I trust you are not unaware that public schools in the USA in certain places are obsessed with psychology at early ages as opposed to the more straightforward matters that should attend to an educated population. What I mean is, we have areas where it is impossible to fire teachers who think it is more important to know how to put a condom on a cucumber than it is to know who George Washington is, and what he stands for.