A democratic curriculum for the challenges of post-truth

Abstract

Post-truth has been widely applied in the wake of COVID-19, to stipulate causes for growing economic and political inequalities, misinformation in digital spaces and disillusionment with political institutions and notions of common/public good, to name a few. To address these concerns, this article constitutes a series of suggestions for how educators might engage with curricula that are embedded with democratic ideals. The first section will provide a brief survey of how various incarnations of the national curricula in Australia have been used as a vehicle for both envisaging a future in Australia and promoting civic participation as a way of fostering an inclusive society. The forms it developed into during the 1980s to the 2010s, however, usually promoted national priorities over localised concerns, such as the aims of individual teachers, schools and curricula. Over the long term, these tendencies have provided the foundation for a shift in educational discourse from generating social capital under the Whitlam government (Lingard, 2000). More recent discourse by contrast has focused on how digital resources can be effectively used, accountability, minimising teacher demoralisation and burnout, maximising student engagement (Dunning, 2022) and tinged with concerns about how constructive critical thinking can be better encouraged (Paterson & Gavrin, 2022). In this article, the structures which catalysed such changes will be contextualised in relation to how post-truth has emerged as a byword for a range of disruptive factors, such as denial of knowledge expertise (Malpas, 1992; Coper, 2022), and how authorities (in governments and media) have pragmatically lied to subordinates (Tesich, 1992; Keyes, 2004; Consentino, 2020). The second part examines how these same conditions have been recently perpetuated through schools being characterised as key to economic recovery, rather than places to regenerate relationships such as those between community-school or curriculum-teacher-student in response to the disruption which has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lastly, there is a focus on what is being—and could be—done to encourage democratic thinking in an Australian classroom context, as ways of addressing phenomena linked with post-truth by generating cultural and political capital.