Australia

There is an interesting article by E. J. Dionne Jr. over at Working for Change on the current Australian Prime Minister, John Howard.

It concerns a current move by the Prime Minister to examine how history is taught. Apparently history has been combined into a generic social sciences course (also covering economics, geography, sociology, psychology and so on and so forth). Like Dionne I think the Prime Minister has a point. I would argue that students should take both history and also get exposed to these other fields, but that you shouldn't short change one in favor of the other.

That said I don't find Dionne completely convincing in his suggestion that this model might be valuable to American Conservatives. I don't think it would. For one thing today's conservatives aren't interested in building collations with Democrats - they are interested in defeating them.