The study of history in schools is not dead yet, but unlike Monty Python’s be-plagued peasant, it is not about to go for brisk walk.
Analysing what they describe as a crisis, Rebecca Cairns and Kerri Anne Garrard (both Deakin U) warn, “we are likely to see senior secondary history enrolments dwindling in some contexts or languishing at best.”
It’s bad news for history in universities, which Martin Crotty warned in 2024 was a discipline in decline.
They analyse enrolments in ancient and modern history subjects in the States and Territories, reporting they are mostly “stable or on the downward trend” and certainly not commensurate with growth in Y12 numbers.
But their comprehensive analysis of complex data sets over 30 years does show that since Australian Curriculum Senior Secondary History started in 2012, its proportion of Y12 students, “has dropped relatively quickly, after a long period of consistency.”
“If this overall pattern continues, we may see less than 10% of Year 12 students studying a history subject within a decade,” they warn. Which creates the possibility that “even if units are not officially discontinued by curriculum authorities, shrinking class sizes may lead to history being retired in contexts at the micro level.” And this raises “curriculum justice” questions, where State school students do not have access to courses that private schools with the resources to teach small classes can offer.
Theirs is not just another deploreathon at the way the humanities are undervalued. Instead, Cairns and Garrard argue student perspectives of history need to be “contextualized within a wider subject marketplace and neoliberal paradigm at a time when young people feel increasingly pessimistic about their futures.”
So what is to be done? They propose:
- Listening and responding to students both on curriculum and assessment structures and “the complex issues and conditions young people face when making decisions about their futures”
- Understanding times have changed. “in decades gone by, history enjoyed very high enrolments because it was seen as a core subject within a model of schooling that privileged academic pathways for the social and economic elite”
And responding accordingly. “This might mean asking: what matters for history education as we face an unwinding global order, democratic backsliding, the new realities of the climate crisis, the technological disruption of a fourth industrial revolution, inequitable wealth distribution, polarized societies and fracturing social cohesion?” Also investigating “multiple dimensions of history education and curriculum across primary and secondary settings and into higher education.”
It is a trek the academics would surely take if only to slow the decline in UGs continuing history from school.
As Martin Crotty and colleagues reported in 2023, history EFTS fell by 23% 2016-2022. “We need to acknowledge this, face up to it, and do what we can to reverse what is now a well-established trend,” he wrote the following year. If schools send universities ever-fewer undergraduates, the trend could become an end.