Illustration: John Spooner

A national act of collective boredom broke out on Sunday when education minister Christopher Pyne, in uncharacteristically subdued mode, announced the publication and the gist of his review of the national curriculum. This review had been carried out in the first half of 2014 by two controversial appointees, Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire, both men with connections to the Liberal party and both columnists for The Australian..

Pyne's Sunday-best dress and demeanour was that of a serious and sober politician who had taken on board Liberal Party director Brian Loughnane's August speech to his parliamentary colleagues to back off on the ideology. Backflipping on his previous position, Pyne commented that, " Politics is too trivial for getting the curriculum right".

Journalists, mostly caught by surprise (not so much The Australian which has a pipeline to Coalition governments), scrambled to get Sunday quotes from their contacts. The subsequent Fairfax press consensus was that the Donnelly/Wiltshire document marked the end of the culture wars. Unusually, the Oz agreed with Fairfax and was also pleased that their boys had done so well. The Guardian however went out on a limb, and thought the review would provoke a new bout of the history wars.

As it happens, the document is a bit of a ho-hum effort on the topic of history. In effect, it is a case of slogans in and slogans out. By this I mean that the review simply repeats the political slogans that have been bruited about since 2006 by culture warriors The Oz, the IPA and Christopher Pyne.

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For instance, following the IPA line, Pyne and Donnelly have, prior to the review, argued for more emphasis on Australia's "Judeo-Christian heritage/tradition". This advocacy of a seemingly benign phenomenon blithely ignores (and this is an unintended irony) the historical background to the phrase, first as a 1980s Cold War anti-Soviet slogan and more recently as a Tea Party anti-Islam propaganda mantra.

Lo and behold, the review argues that students need to spend more time on Australia's Judeo-Christian heritage. There is another irony here. If students did spend more time on Australia's "Judeo-Christian heritage", it would be a very short project and they would quickly discover that it is a neoconservative Christian myth. And it is a myth ignores the substantial contribution of the (pagan) contribution of Greek philosophy and politics as well as the huge contribution of (also pagan) Roman law, civic policy, architecture and literature to our cultural heritage.

There is more. Donnelly and Wiltshire advocate more emphasis on "morals, values and spirituality" as well as the "achievements" of Western civilisation, a Liberal refrain that has bedevilled curriculum politics for more than a decade now. How can I deal with these ideas tactfully and politely? Well, here goes. First, in a multicultural society, we have the issue of whose morals, whose values and whose spirituality?

Second, the study of real history, at whatever level, is about investigation not about indoctrination. Third, history is not about developing "spirituality" which is based on revelation, unless it investigates the spiritual as an historical phenomenon. And it's a real struggle to get this latter point through to the religious Right who see revelation as historical fact. They might change their approach if sections of Australia's sizeable Islamic community advocated teaching Year 9s how Mohammed received his Koranic revelation from the angel Gabriel.

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Curriculum review a ho-hum effort on history