Maxim Institute Rowan Light Don't leave the past to the powerful

It’s one of those awful cliche´ s that “history is written by the winner”. Nonetheless, as the recent Chinese Communist Party crackdown on history teaching in Hong Kong shows, it’s a notion that should give us cause to reflect on how precious and precarious history education actually is.

In what is one of the more sinister aspects of the disintegration of civil liberties in Hong Kong, one pro-Beijing spokesperson threatened that teachers should remember this lesson of history: “The winner is king, the loser an outlaw”, adding that “When you lose and fail, you will be beheaded. And there’s no achieving justice by violating the law.”

Having won the fight, the Chinese Communist Party seems determined to squash all signs of dissent, even from the past. Such flagrant repression reveals something important: the Chinese Communist Party is well aware (and fearful) of the power of history. If you control history, you can shape how people see their world – including omitting the parts that are discomforting or threatening for those in positions of power.

This truth should be cause for reflection on our own precious freedoms as New Zealanders – freedoms that need to be cultivated, and not taken for granted. One way we might do this is by paying attention to our own history education.

In the next month or so, the group of historians who have been developing the new national history curriculum will release their proposed resource for public consultation.

Unlike, the people of Hong Kong, the New Zealand public will be able to have their say on how and what history should be taught in our schools.

As the Chinese Communist Party knows, rigorous history teaching can provide crucial skills and knowledge for critical thinking. Without history, we can be more easily caught up in dogmatic political narratives.

Conversely, a national curriculum that only celebrates the achievements of the nation and shies away from its failures blunts the promise of history to show what is unfamiliar, to disturb and unsettle us, and to open up new ways of thinking about the world. We shouldn’t settle for comfortable history; rather, we should expect to encounter things that challenge us and provoke arguments across the dinner tables and water coolers.

This also means thinking about the wider “ecosystem” of how we share stories of the past – the networks of civil society, such as families, communities, and museums, as well as the classroom and in textbooks. The history curriculum isn’t just something for government panels and teachers to consider: it’s something families and communities should want to engage with and take ownership of.

New Zealanders can look forward to engaging in a rigorous debate about history education. Ignorance, contrary to that other tired cliche´ , is not bliss; a failure to reflect on history just means a person parrots the narrative that those in power give them. Informed, uncomfortable debate allows these narratives be to refined and lessons from the past learned.

It’s only in being critical of our own histories that we can ensure the past is not left to the powerful.