The Guardian 26 April, 2006
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
The dead hand and the invisible hand
There was a certain amount of furore last month in Victoria over criticism of a Year 8 High School textbook, Humanities Alive 2. Dr Barry Collett, a history lecturer at Melbourne University, denounced the textbook as "historically inaccurate" and "grossly misleading" in its depiction of the Church in the Middle Ages.
So why has a disagreement over the historical interpretation of the period of the Crusades blown up into an "issue"? The answer is the dead but still sensitive hand of the Christian Church.
The text book, you see, in attempting to make students think about the period and to make it relevant for today’s youth, looked at parallels between the "holy war" waged by the Crusaders and the similar campaign being waged by present-day Muslim terrorists.
This approach is not unique, of course. The two-part BBC series Holy Warriors that begins screening this week on the ABC also makes similar comparisons.
The BBC program notes that after the attack on September 11, 2001, US President George W Bush called for "a new crusade" against al-Qaida.
For his part, Osama Bin Laden accused Bush of behaving like Richard the Lionheart and a few in the Arab world even compared Bin Laden to Salah al-Din.
These of course were the two leaders who in the 12th century, during the Third Crusade, came to symbolise the struggle between the Empires of Christianity and Islam.
The Victorian textbook notes that the Crusaders "believed they were giving their lives for a religious cause". I also notes that at the same time, the Muslim invaders who infested Jerusalem were told "they would go straight to heaven when they died".
To the fury of Australia’s conservatives, the text-book points out for students a "moral equivalence" between the Crusaders and the September 11 terrorists: "Those who destroyed the World Trade Center are regarded as terrorists.
"Might it be fair to say that Crusaders who attacked the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem were also terrorists?" Good topic for discussion, you have to admit.
Not for those who see it as their duty to defend the moral superiority of the Christian Church, however. Dr Collett, who has inexplicably launched his attack on the text-book three years after it came out, has his own, very cleaned up interpretation of the Crusaders.
"The Crusaders felt they were intervening to stop the bloodshed that was already going on. I would tend to compare them more with Australian troops intervening in East Timor", he told the media.
But the authors of the text-book also fell foul of the Christian lobby in other areas: according to The Australian, the book "also portrays the church as a corrupt institution driven by the desire for power and which tortured and killed anyone with opposing beliefs".
That seems to me to be a reasonably accurate summing up of the Medieval Church. Dr Collett, however, has a far more benign view of the Church in the Middle Ages, describing its activities as "humane and pastoral".
According to Dr Collett (as quoted in The Australian), even those involved in the Inquisition "actually spent most of their time working with divided families rather than torturing heretics". Just social workers, apparently, if sometimes over-enthusiastic!
Mary Bluett, the Victorian President of the Australian Education Union, told The Australian that the aim of the exercise was not to teach students that there were similarities between the Crusades and September 11, but to teach them the principles of mounting an argument.
"It’s really about teaching young people to analyse the words being said, think about their response and justify their response. It’s a tool for teaching them how to advance an opinion and back it up", she said.
I am all for teaching students to analyse, but I still think the accuracy and credibility of what they are analysing is crucial to reaching an accurate analysis. But in the debate over the Victorian text book, whether the text was historically accurate ran a very poor second to the vagaries and evasions of post-modernism.
Take Michael Horsley, the Director of the Teaching Resources and Textbook Research Unit at Sydney University, who joined the debate to announce that how the text-book was used by teachers was more important than its content, which in fact he said did not matter — since "it can be interpreted in many different ways".
No wonder our education system turns out so many more lawyers and politicians than it does historians. (I know different rates of pay and job opportunities also play a part.)
Speaking of accuracy, the Victorian text-book is of course a commercial product of private enterprise. But have no fear: the President of the History Teachers’ Association of Australia, Nick Ewbank, goes further, claiming that the accuracy of commercially-produced text-books is "guaranteed by market forces"! (Isn’t that reassuring!)
He blandly asserts that "text-books which are generally regarded as poor quality won’t sell and the invisible hand of the market will operate".
So there you are: the way to judge whether a text-book is accurate is to see whether advertising, publisher’s blandishments, pricing and a sexy cover make it sell, for isn’t that what the "invisible hand of the market" is all about?