PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 629 



The consciousness of a growing Australian nationality is widely 

 evident, and there are sufficient proofs that national identity is 

 recognised, not only by University professors and pressmen, but 

 by politicians and the world at large. 



National self-consciousness has been largely the inevitable pro- 

 duct of circumstances, the result of national experiences driving 

 home to the minds of thinkers certain facts of national impor- 

 tance. But it is only experiences fraught with some intense 

 emotion, involving some national joy or suffering, which can bring 

 home to the unthinking person a sense of national existence or 

 national responsibility. Australia has rarely been troubled with 

 any general catastrophe, and there has been little quickening of 

 national life by any great occasion for national thanksgiving. It 

 is the more important, therefore, that there should be a definite 

 quickening and deepening of national life in connexion with the 

 teaching of history. 



In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries particularly, after 

 times of national disaster, or during the making of a young nation, 

 European sovereigns and governments were profoundly conscious 

 of the vast influence created by the schools, and especially by the 

 teaching of history. Some used the universities and schools to 

 propagate definite political theories, or win allegiance to a par- 

 ticular religion, with evil results. Such a tampering with truth 

 is not only an intellectual sin in the purely academic sphere, but 

 it is a crime also against the national existence which will ulti- 

 mately mar the purity of the national life. History in the 

 schools of Australia should be free from bias of any kind, political, 

 religious, or economic, or it is not history. 



Not that history teaching should be purely academic, remote 

 from national interests, and divorced from the current interests 

 of pupil or student. Political thought, and" the study and teach- 

 ing of history, have always been intimately connected with the 

 changing aspects of national life. We must make every use of 

 those facts of national history which afford incentive to heroic 

 effort or convey a warning of supreme importance. 



In considering how far the consciousness of nationality has 

 affected, or should affect, the teaching of history, the inclusion of 

 civics as a school subject must be noted, especially in those coun- 

 tries where the State system is completely secularized, and where, 

 as in France, " moral and civic instruction " takes the place of 

 religious teaching and moral training. The appeal of such instruc- 

 tion has been purely intellectual and theoretical, and comparatively 

 futile and barren of result in ethical activity in comparison with 

 much of the training in social service given in schools of the 

 English public school type. 



