Universities Erasing the Past, Graduates Will Repeat History’s Mistakes: Historian

People walk past a statue of Captain James Cook stands in Sydney's Hyde Park on August 25, 2017, (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

The subject of history is now dead as a discipline and has been replaced by post-modernist theory, an expert from the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) has claimed.

Bella d’Abrera, who is the director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Project at the IPA, said that history as a discipline in Australian universities is no longer a study of the past but something that has turned into a “woke political project.”

“Modern Australia has its roots in Great Britain and the West, and so cannot be understood without an appreciation of that long arc of history,” she said. “However, with post-modernism, we are deliberately being pushed towards a society which has lost that collective memory.”

In an audit of all 791 history subjects offered across 35 Australian universities, d’Abrera found that 255 focused on identity politics—class, race, and gender (pdf).

In 2022, “gender” overtook “Indigenous issues” as the most common theme, followed by “race.”

She also found that more history subjects taught about race than democracy (86 verses 33).

Just 280 of the offered history subjects taught essential core topics, the most common being Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, The Middle Ages, and World War II, while the least common include the Russian Revolution and the American constitution.

The IPA believes 20 topics form the basis of an undergraduate degree in history, which also include topics such as the history of Christianity, Communism/Nazism, and the Renaissance.

Meanwhile, Griffith University, James Cook University, and Southern Cross University did not cover any of these 20 topics, while Charles Darwin University has stopped offering history altogether.

Should Be Taught Under Gender or Sociology Studies

D’Abrera said by deliberately “choosing to forget” the past, graduates will be prone to repeating history’s mistakes.

“Our future leaders need to be able to recognise the signs of totalitarianism, threats to our freedoms, and threats to our personal sovereignty,” she said. “The only way of doing this is to cast our eyes backwards. We cannot afford to leave history in the past.”

D’Abrera suggests that if universities want to continue offering the subjects, they should be honest about what they’re offering and move the subjects to “more suitable” departments, such as sociology or gender studies.

“Any student hoping a university education will grow their historical understanding of humanity will be greatly disappointed,” she said.

In a previous address to CPAC Australia, d’Abrera said Australian parents should learn from the Virginia state election in the United States and take action to push back on radical ideology being taught in schools.

Kevin Donnelly, the senior fellow at the Australian Catholic University’s Glynn Institute, said university institutions had been particularly affected by politically correct ideology and wokeness.

“Such is the dominance of neo-Marxist and postmodern-inspired ideology that left-of-centre academics in a range of subjects dominate departments and faculties across the English-speaking world,” he wrote in The Epoch Times.