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10.1177/0094582X03259904ARTICLELATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES Austin / AMERICANIZING LABOR
Americanizing Labor
Columbian Precedents, U.S. Agencies, and theConstruction of Culture in Postwar Australian
History Curricula
by
Robert Austin
We will not renounce ourpart in themission of our race, trustees under God, ofthe civilization of the world. God has not been preparing the English speakingand Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain [and] idle con-
templation and self admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers oftheworldto establishsystem where chaos reigns. He hasmade us adept in gov-ernment thatwe mayadminister government amongsavages andsenile people.
U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge, ca. 1890
In the twilight years of the nineteenth century, the United States consum-
mated its first sustained foreign military interventions by annexing Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In each case, the Americanization of
autochthonous culture played or would subsequently play a central role in
pacifying national opposition to the appropriation of massive profits by U.S.
companies. A Harvard University summer school for Cuban teachers, for
example, was in place by 1900, contesting thepedagogical philosophy of the
assassinated Cuban independence leader Jos Mart (Santos, 2000; Mart,
1990). The parallel phenomena of economic and cultural intervention werewell established by the time the United States emerged as the hegemonic
95
Robert Austin is a research associate with the Center for Research and Advanced Pedagogical
Training in Santiago, Chile, and a participating editor ofLatin American Perspectives. Transla-
tions throughout this article are by the author, who was an elected member of the History Sylla-
bus Committee, New SouthWales Board of Studies, Ministry of Education, from1990 to 1994.
He thanks Anita de Frantz, Beth Parker, Ron Witton, Malcolm Vick, Anthony Welch, Brian
Hoepper, Stephen Niblo, Tim Harding, Viviana Ramrez, all the interviewees, the LAP review-
ers, andthe legendarySpanish Civil War veteran Lloyd Edmonds foradvice and/orcommentar-
ies.Planned or fortuitousdiscussionswithurban andrural history teachers in Australiawereheld
from 1992 to 2003; interviews based on a structured questionnaire were conducted around
August27, 1999.By agreement, theanonymity ofintervieweeshas been preserved. Some mem-
bers of the syllabus committee whoinitially supportedpublic scrutinyof Board of Studies prac-
ticesovert and covertwere subsequently unavailable for or declined interviews. Sections of
this article have appeared in History of Education Review 29(2) (2000) and 30(1) (2001).LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 134, Vol. 31 No. 1, January 2004 95-133DOI: 10.1177/0094582X03259904 2004 Latin American Perspectives
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world power in the wake of World War II, manifest in its dominance of the
terms under which global cultural bodies such as UNESCO and the United
NationsDevelopment Program(UNDP)indeed, theUnitedNationsitself
were constituted. While classical studies of U.S. imperialism have necessar-
ily emphasized economic exploitation, the accompanying cultural and edu-
cational interventionsrehearsed viaF. D. Roosevelts Good Neighbor pol-
icy in Central America once U.S. marines had suppressed the Nicaraguan
revolution of the1930shave been overshadowed, leading to an incomplete
if not inaccurate picture.
Official Australias 1988 bicentenary of British imperial occupation
sharedmuch symbolismwith the1992 quincentenary of Europes first-wave
colonization of the Americas. It also marked the initial year of a neo-
conservative National-Liberal party(NLP)government in themostpopulousAustralian state, New South Wales, signaling a national rightward shift. The
NLPs aggressive economic-rationalist agenda included a drastic restructur-
ingof theschool curriculum that was largely reproduced in subsequent years
across thecountry.1 Moreover, theNLP privatization-cum-elitizationof prof-
itable sectors of education and consequent degradation of public education
had a complementary national focus under the Hawke and Keating Labor
regimes from 1983 to 1996 (Frankel, 1997; Wheelwright and David, 1989:
117120), epitomized in the conversion of the University of Melbournes
School of Management into an unlisted public company, half-owned by pri-
vate enterprise. Alongside geography, the most widely reported and politi-
cally contested arena of syllabus reform at the New South Wales govern-
ments statutory Board of Studies was history, with direct intervention from
NLPministersfor education, themainstream media,and other powerful con-servative and private-sector lobbyists.2 The present study analyzes a less
public interventionwith deep roots in theconstruction of postwar Australian
society.
The former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles once remarked,
The United States does not have friends; it has interests. History curricula
in Australia would appear to have joined that list of interests in recent times.
Noam Chomsky (1973: 180182) has documented the direct policy and
operational links between the United States Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and the United States Information Agency (USIA), constituted in the
major Australian cities as the United States Information Service (USIS). In
the words of a senior USIA officer, It isnot entirely a figure of speech to say
that USIA forms an American frontline abroad (Coxsedge, Coldicutt, and
Harant, 1982: 114). Public insight into the postwar vortex of interventionistcultural practices on behalf of transnational U.S. corporations and their
global cohabitation with the extreme right has been updated recently in
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Frances Stonor Saunderss Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural
Cold War(1999).
If globalism is the latest stage of imperialism and globalization its mate-
rial expression (Sivanandan, 19981999; Gowan, Panitch, and Shaw, 2001),
then cultural globalizationthe contemporary process of Americaniza-
tionhas had a profound resonance in education systems. Thus this article
responds to thehistoricprocess that haspromptedthe formerFrench minister
for culture Jack Lang (2000) to argue that if political power is incapable of
constructing a shieldin theface of allof thesephenomena of Americanization,
culture will disappear. Further, it resurrects the Trinidadian historian
C. L. R. Jamess hypothesis a half-century earlier contrasting the cultural
history of the postcolonial United States with that of ancient Athens, a state
comparable to Vermont in size, with no more than 100,000 inhabitants at itsheight (James, 1993: 32):
Yet within two or three generations it produced Socrates, Plato, Aristotle asphilosophers; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes as drama-tists;Pericles asa statesman; DemosthenesandAeschines asorators; Pindaraspoet; Praxiteles as a sculptor; Xenophon as a journalist; Thucydides andHerodotus ashistorians. . . . In anyestimate of contemporary culture, studies ofthe past or speculation into the future, their work is indispensable.
By comparison in this sphere, he concludes that, despite its unparalleled
material prowess, the mighty civilization of the United States by universal
agreement stands at the bottom of all great civilizations.
In sum, then, this article develops three principal arguments. First, it
locates the postwar cultural imperialism of the United States as part of abroader strategy of intervention on behalf of its own geopolitical and com-
mercial interestsanddemonstrates that thepolicies andpracticesof theUSIS
and its variants are antithetical to popular democracy wherever they operate.
Secondly, it highlights two complementary tendencies: the characteristic
ways in which such interventions present a construction favorable to the
United States, distorting its history, inflating its importance, and inducing
amnesia, and the way in which U.S. agency intervention in those countries
ownrepresentations of themselves shapes constructions thatconform to U.S.
imperial interests.Latin Americanhistorywillbe seentohaveespecially suc-
cumbedto such politics.Finally, it argues that theoperation of theUSIS inthe
construction of recent New South Wales history curriculaand, by exten-
sion, in all Australian states history curriculaought to be publicly
reviewed because it erodes the reconstitution of the study of history in
Australian schools, already ata postwar low (Austin, 1999; Broome, 1995).
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PERVERSE PEDAGOGY AND FOREIGN INTERESTS
To explain the first contention and its relationship to thesecond and third,
we must look to a separate but related arm of U.S. foreign policy, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). The former senior agents Marchetti and Marks
exposed global CIA activities on behalf of U.S. capital and its allies, epito-
mized by systematic support for reactionary despots such as theshah of Iran,
the Cuban dictator Batista, Mobutu in the Belgian Congo, Diem in Vietnam,
andtheSomoza dynasty inNicaragua. They also documented CIAorchestra-
tion of the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 and assassination attempts on its
president,FidelCastro; similar activities elsewhere included the massacreof
a half to one million Indonesian communists in 1965 in the coup that
installed the corrupt Soeharto dictatorship (Marchetti and Marks, 1974: 6,306307; Anderson, 1999). The agency owns airlines throughout the world,
masscommunications, armsdepots, and a varietyof installationsand compa-
nies referred to in CIA-speak as the Delawarecorporations (Marchetti and
Marks,1974: 23,51,134137, 160173; also Agee, 1978: 8792,583595).
Its connections with predatory multinationals like ITT (lately AT&T), Ana-
conda Copper, and United Fruit-Chiquita and what Henry Ford II called
creatures of capitalismfoundations such as the Ford, Rockefeller, and
Carnegiecontribute to an intricatenetwork of operations in which no inter-
vention is toobold, no schemefor theacquisition anddelegation of surrogate
power too bizarre, and no act too cruel in the pursuit of quite narrowly
defined U.S. interests (Ranelagh, 1987: 265266, 146; Dunkerley, 1988:
144145, 322323).
Applying Woodrow Wilsons dictum that nationalist and popular democ-racies were an exception to the principle of self-determination, the CIA has
directly influenced all military coups throughout Latin America and the
Caribbean since 1945 (Julien, 1969: 343384; Grindle, 1981; Vitale, 1999:
402404). Examples include the decimationof the populist Arbenzadminis-
tration in Guatemala, extinguishing a decade of postwar democracy and
peasant-oriented land reform (1954), the Brazilian coup (1964), the installa-
tion of a puppet regime in the Dominican Republic (1965), the overthrow of
Allendes Popular Unity government in Chile (1973), the Argentine coup
(1976), and the invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989) (Bulmer-
Thomas, 1988: 140147; Galeano, 1991; Vitale, 1999: 373374; Boorstein,
1987: 205236; Williams, 1997). In all cases the local armed forces leaders
havebeen trained at the U.S. armys Pentagon-advised School of the Ameri-
cas (SOA)the School of Assassins (Nelson-Pallmeyer, 1997;McSherry,2002) recently transferred from Panama to the United States. Luis Vitalehas
calculated that 25,000 LatinAmerican militarypersonnel were trained at the
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SOA Counter-InsurgencySchool and Center for Tactical and StrategicStud-
ies between 1945 and 1975 (1999: 428). While SOA officials admitted hav-
ing trained nearly 59,000 Latin American military, policemen, and civil-
ians by the mid-1990s (Nelson-Pallmeyer, 1997: 2, 34), the incomplete
official statistic of 3,850 for Chile alone suggests that around double that
figure is probably more accurate (School of theAmericas, 1997, analyzed in
Austin, 2001).
Colonel Nicholas Andreacchio, former commander of the SOA in the
Canal Zone, in effect confirmed the practice of torture training in 1983at
the height of U.S.-sponsored atrocities against civilians by the Salvadorean
armyby noting that SOA human rights training was essentially teach-
ing NCOs that it was more valuable in intelligence terms to keep prisoners
alive than to kill them. A seniorAmnesty International researcher noted thatthis simplymeantprolonging thetorture andpostponing thesummary execu-
tion that was nonetheless inevitable (McClintock, 1985: 338340).3 When
the Clinton administration was compelled to release the contents of SOA
training manuals in 1996, the New York Times commented that Americans
can now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons the United States
Army taught to thousands of Latin American military and police officers at
the School of the Americas (cited in Brown, 1998: 11).
The Marchetti-Marks thesis is graphically complemented by the film On
Company Business, which adds infiltration of the highest levels of the trade-
union bureaucracy in the West to the list of CIA operations (Francovich,
1980). The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), set
up in 1949 by British and U.S. top union bodies, was CIA-funded and CIA-
controlled from its inception (Ranelagh, 1987: 247; Agee, 1978: 611). Thisensured the harnessing of the noncommunist international labor movement
to the economic and political agenda of the U.S. establishment in both the
West and the Third World. There were particular consequences for the other
Americas in these arrangements (Spalding, 1988: 1):
Organized labors support forU.S. expansionistpoliciesdatesback to the 19thcentury. But it was the Cold War that gave the AFL-CIO a seat on the foreignpolicy team, with a mandate to limit communist influence on labor abroad. InLatin America, the Federations American Institute for Free Labor Develop-ment (AIFLD) has interpreted this broadly, working to undermine any radicalor nationalist tendency and, in AIFLDs words, to make the investmentclimate more attractive.
The CIA-ICFTU connection necessarily involves the Australian labormovement: theAustralian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)is an affiliate of
the ICFTU and (of particular interest here) includes all Australian education
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unions. Evidence of CIA penetration of the Labor party and the organized
labor movement abounds. In 1977, Gough Whitlamwhose center-left
Labor government had been toppled in a bloodless 1975 coup aided by CIA
operativesrevealed CIA manipulation of trade unions in Australia, but his
former minister Clyde Cameron had set the scene in the early 1960s with an
expos on one Robert Walkinshaw. This U.S. labor attach had been instru-
mentalin theCIA establishment andoperationof thetrade-unionpublication
SpotlightinMelbourneduring hisperiod asanagency functionary therefrom
1962 to 1964 (Pilger, 1992: 187). Australian teacher-union officers have
accepted invitations to U.S. universitieswhere the agency has clout, particu-
larlyHarvard (Marchetti and Marks, 1974: 3233; Austin, 2000: 99). By the
late 1960s there were hundreds of professors and administrators on over a
hundred campuses secretly contracted to the CIA (Marchetti and Marks,1974: 5960). Moreover, the Pentagons massive militarization of research
in U.S. universities during the postwar era has ensured that such visitors are
exposed to if not enlisted in the ideology of themilitary-industrial complexs
imperial agenda (Feldman, 1989: 189223).
Special training courses for senior Australian union bureaucrats are part
of the Australian Trade Union Training Program at Harvard Foundation,
essentially a CIA-front organization (Pilger, 1992: 186). The far-right National
CivicCouncil (NCC) under theCatholic Action cofounder B. A. Santamaria
admitted financing the right-wing victors in the 1983 New South Wales
Teachers Federation presidential elections (Scarrabelotti, 1983; OBrien,
1987: 88). In turn, theCIA-funded U.S. Congress for Cultural Freedom con-
tributed funds to Quadrant, the Australian magazine edited from its incep-
tion by the Santamaria confidant and fervently anticommunist Catholic poetJamesMcAuley (Saunders, 1999: 215, 395; Campion, 1983: 165167).Both
the Movementthe clandestine Australian precursor to the NCC, funded by
the Catholic hierarchy from 1945and the NCC itself nurtured links with
General Francos Spanish fascist organizationEl Movimiento and itsassoci-
ated secret Opus Dei Catholic political cell. One of the Opus Deis most
recent major national interventions in education and culture arose from its
alliance with theArgentinedictatorship, where a massive official program of
approved and prohibited books followed its fundamentalist moral dicta
(KaufmannandDoval,1997: 4570). In a World Bank strategy imposed mil-
itarily onmuch of LatinAmerica since the1970s, theArgentine dictatorships
under Galtierian SOA graduateand later generals paved the way for the
corporate Americanization of Argentine higher education, which responds
to interests of an economic rather than an academic nature, and aspires toeradicate [the tradition of] the humanistic professional, committed to the
community and to democratic practices (Mollis, 19992000).
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At the national level, the USIS role in this CIA-ICFTU-ACTU nexus has
historicallybeenbothconcreteandcircuitous: it systemicallylinksstructures
and individual functionaries mediated by common ideological interests.
More obvious has been the steadily increasing postwar U.S. influence over
educators in Australian schools and universities, replacingpostcolonial Brit-
ish dominance. This influence has been accompanied and conditioned by
economic and cultural penetration: a politics of cultural incorporation
(Apple and Christian-Smith, 1991: 9). Its postwar U.S. history includes the
indictable and successfully deployed offense of conspiracy to teach revo-
lutionary ideas, imposing a cultural straitjacket while paving theway forcor-
porate commodification and export of cultural products embodying the
rules and values of the market system that produced them. What has been
happening from the perspective of U.S. capital, wrote Schiller presently, isthe creation and global extension of a near-total corporate informational-
cultural environment (Schiller, 1989: 162, 33, 128).
Pentagon intervention in Australian universities came into focus in the
mid-1970s with wide-ranging allegations about the involvement of the
Flinders University of South Australia vice chancellor Roger Russell in sci-
entific research on behalf of the U.S. armed forces. Russell (a U.S. psycho-
biologist) hadworked fora numberof U.S.militaryinstitutions andagencies,
including the Department of Defenses National Security Agency, authorita-
tively described as more secret, larger, and more costly than the CIA and
the command center for the most far-flung intelligence agency in history
(Nancy Stein, quoted in Yates and McHugh, 1974: 22). Moreover, he was
coauthor of the confidential 1967 U.S. government Report of the Panel on
Defense Social and Behavioral Sciences, which promoted academic linkswith the Defense Department to provide it with data to expand U.S. interests
(militarily). Objects of research in foreign areas, reflecting the fact that the
war in Indo-China had dominated U.S.-Australia relations for a decade,
included sociocultural patterns,social organizationof troops, and the evalua-
tion of U.S. agency programs in underdeveloped countries. The USIS has
been central to the collection in Australia of data on perceptions of U.S. con-
trol of Australian natural resources and industry and on the reports stated
aimof support by militaryagenciesthat train foreign socialscientists toelu-
cidate the problems of social change in their own countries (Yates and
McHugh, 1974: 26, 33, 75). Indeed, Gordon OBrien, a psychologist at
Flinders and a contemporary of Russell, provided the Pentagon with a study
on techniques for rapid acculturation of U.S. troops in Guatemala
(Coxsedge, Coldicutt, and Harant, 1982: 116117).Outcomes of such research have regularly informed U.S. psychological
warfare, complementing the chemical and biological warfare research to
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whichRussell continued to contributeat Flinders (Richardson, 1998; Hilliard,
1991: 67). In theearly1970s, theGeorgetown UniversityCenterfor Strategic
and International Studiesheaded by the retired chief of naval operations
and major U.S. shareholder in AustraliaAdmiral Arleigh Burkelauncheda
multilayered program of cultural and economic intervention. It linked the
interests of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, billionaire conglom-
erates such as Morgan Investments, Chrysler, General Electric, IBM,
Monsanto, and Goodyear, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Australia, and
Congress for Cultural Freedom emissaries with the initiative by the Ameri-
can Council of Learned Societiesfunded by the Ford and Carnegie Foun-
dationsto establish American studies courses in Australian universities.
Three members of the Georgetown centers advisory board appeared in
Whos Who in the CIA (Witton, 1972).Not only had the Carnegie Foundations philanthropic establishment of
the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) in 1928 opened a
permanent conduit for corporate U.S. ideology to Australian schools but
increasingly it permitted the articulation of the powerful business interests
represented by U.S. philanthropy with the discourse of compatible forms of
systemic education (Arnove, 1980). With ACER support, behaviorism
forms of which Vygotsky had located at work in U.S. education as early as
the 1920s (Braslavsky, 1995)entered Australian pedagogical practices
through the influence of Tylers instrumentalist curriculum of the 1950s and
Blooms taxonomy (Bessant and Holbrook, 1995: 1012). Alongside were
the Skinnerian, neo-behaviorist Science Research Associates reading kits,
evidently used in 60 percent of Australian primary and junior secondary
schools by 1966 (Connell, 1993: 135138). When in the 1970s the NationalCommitteeon Social Science Teaching attempted a liberalization of primary
social science curricula in theform of theSocialEducationMaterialsProject
(SEMP) and Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), Christian fundamentalist
opposition was both inspired and funded by friendly U.S. organizations
(Connell, 1993: 597605).
INFORMATION SERVICES AND
CONSTRUCTIONS OF AMERICA
The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialismagainst collective defiance [of the oppressed and exploited] is the cultural
bomb. The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a peoples belief in their
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names,in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, intheir unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.
Ngugi wa Thiongo
USIS publications subject the history of the Americas to what a reviewer
of Ronald Reagans memoirs has called ideological carpet bombing
(Wills, 1990). The USIS Outline of American Historyat least 12,000 cop-
ies of an earlier version had been donated to Australian schools and colleges
by the early 1970s (Witton and Richards, 1972)describes the Reagan
regimes neocolonial policy in El Salvador as a more assertive role for the
nation [in foreign policy] for which Central America provedan early test.
Hence in El Salvador the administration responded with a program of eco-
nomic aidandmilitary training to help thegovernment in stemming guerrillaattacks. On October 25, 1983, the mythologizing continues, U.S. forces
landed on theCaribbean island of Grenada after an urgent appeal for help by
neighboring countries (Olson n.d.:187189). The realitiesof extensiveU.S.
economic and logistical support for paramilitary death squads and military
dictatorships in El Salvador or Guatemala or the U.S. marines invasion of
Grenada and replication of its preferred puppet regime model seem to have
evaded the author (Bonner, 1985; May, 1999; Dunkerley, 1988: 318, 323).
Such has been the degree of colonization of Australian English that it has
becomecustomary to refer to that country, occupied by a minority of Ameri-
cans, not by its geopolitical name, but by the unrepresentative term Amer-
ica. One recent study revealed the presence of some 3,000 U.S. expressions
in regular usage in Australia (Peters, 1998), but itsauthors understanding of
U.S.cultural impactthrough, for instance, such programs as Sesame Streetisequivocal. Plaza Ssamo, principally the brainchild of the U.S. Education
Department and the Carnegie and Ford Foundations, emerged in the late
1960s duringa surge in USAID,World Bank, andFoundation-fundededuca-
tional television directed at areas of U.S. investment in theThird World. Pro-
vocatively, the program was launched in Allendes socialist Chile in April
1973, sixmonthsfrom the reimpositionof U.S. economic andcultural domi-
nance via General Pinochets bloody coup. It was carried by the putschist
Televisin Universidad Catlica on weeknights in prime time. UNESCO-
Chile praised its neutral literacy and numeracy content, ignoring thepeda-
gogical role of such series in the universalization of the U.S. mass cultural
model (Puiggrs, 1980: 201203; Austin, 2003: 181). Thecentral characters
were all entrepreneurs: the seriess subtext legitimated the transfer of
imported bourgeois culture to thepoor and presented theexistingdivisionof
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labor as natural. By associating unchanging functionswith themechanic, the
doctor, and the police and with money, literacy is simultaneously achieved
on two levels: the two pedagogies [those of culture and labor] are superim-
posed and appear in essence to be perennial (Mattelart, 1976: 8492, 99
100).
Most Americans, in fact, live in Latin America and the Caribbean, the
immortal Nuestra Amrica of the Cuban intellectual and patriot Jos Mart.
His New York exile (ca. 18751895)in the bowels of the monsterhad
led Mart to characterize U.S. schooling in terms of its narrow and stupefy-
ing pragmatism, and miserable specialization(quoted in Urrutia, 1959: 77
92; see also Mart, 1984: 177182). Large numbers of U.S. citizens are the
descendants of those Mexicans whountil U.S. annexation in the mid-
nineteenth centuryinhabited California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas,Colorado, and New Mexico as their homelands. They bear the cultural his-
tory that has produced a resurgence of theSpanish language to such a degree
that, according to current demographic forecasts, it will overtake English as
the first language of the United States by 2010 (Davis, 1999). The editors of
Americanization and Australia claim that Australia has avoided cultural
imperialismfrom theUnited States(Belland Bell,1998: vii),4 butthe book
published in Australia and showcasing localwritersemploysU.S. spelling
for its title.USAID, the USIA, the USIS, and the U.S. State Department have
been unambiguous about exporting U.S. English as an important vehicle for
cultural and economic penetration. Why is the USIA in the business of
teaching English to thepeopleof other nations?asked an anonymous USIA
writer. Director Murrow responded that just as much of the world would
share our knowledge and emulate our machine age productivity, so wouldthey speakour language. The English Teaching Divisionchief Harold Urist
continued, We teach English in tune with the objectives of USIS. We teach
American English, and thematerialsused reflect American life (USIA Cor-
respondent, 1962: 89, emphasis added).5
Among the substantial literature distributed gratis at the October 1987
USIS-funded in-service course for secondary history teachers in Newcastle
was an article comparing the frontiers of California and Victoria during
their respective gold rushes. Ignoring atrocities by the British imperial
authorities against indigenous groups living on prime mineral resources,
suppression of Aboriginal land rights, andspirited Aboriginal resistance, the
author concludes that the Eureka stockade affairthe anticolonial Irish-
led minersuprising in Victoria of 1854contributed to the development of
broad-based, representative government (Franklin, 1986). Moreover, heapprovingly cites a Ballarat entity whose name was to become associated
with the most radically right of postwar Australian think tanks, the H. R.
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Nicholls Society. Aside from the Hollywoodesque appeal to frontier ideol-
ogywhich romanticized neocolonial intruders on indigenous lands as
classless civilizers (Kellner and Ryan, 1988: 7784)one might ask how
broad a base and representative of whom. For 120 years after the events
of the Eureka stockade, Aborigines were denied the vote, despite having
served in both world wars (Clark, 1979: 7982, 98, 393, 401; Kidd, 2000:
139, 240, 242243). Women have yet to gain more than a handful of repre-
sentatives in any Australian parliament despite a rich history of black and
popularfeministstruggle (Saunders,1991;Grimshaw, 1988;Reynolds,1995).
Another freelyavailable USIS publication designed to help history teach-
ers draw the desired conclusions about the ingenuity of U.S. society is the
450-page Community in American Culture. As with much USIS material,
publication details are incomplete. This collection contains a piece by DanielBellReaganisms end of ideology complement to Fukuyamas end of
history doctrinein which societies are divided into preindustrial, indus-
trial, and postindustrial, of which the only entrant is the United States (Bell,
n.d.: 431; on Bell on ideology, see Chomsky, 1995). Western Europe, the
USSR, and Japan are industrial, while Asia, Africa, and Latin America are
preindustrial societies.
In terms of social methodology, the latter are locked into commonsense
experience (which apparently contributes to their backwardness); empiri-
cism and experimentation characterize the industrial societies, and the
United States alone has achieved the highest form of abstract theory: mod-
els, simulation, decision theory, systems analysis, to which theother groups
aspire. While according to Bells time perspective preindustrial societies
display orientation to thepast andadhoc responses, theUnitedStatesbycontrast is future orienting and forecasting (Bell, n.d.: 434). Extending
the metaphor, we come to the underlying explanation for the preindustrials
backwardness: they are subject to the laws of diminishing returns and low
productivity. Whereas enlightened research has elaborated the realities of
neocolonialism, neoimperialism, structural underdevelopment, and adjuncts
such as dictatorship, illiteracy, and chronic indebtedness to explain theThird
World quagmire, here we see a variant of the tribal backwardness account
of underdevelopment (for contrast, see Mies, 1998; and Chilcote, 1984).
Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians are depicted in a general schema
of socialchange as limited byphenomenasuch astraditionalism andland/
resource limitation (the converse in reality being what makes them such
prime targets for the expeditions of Columbus, Marco Polo, and latter-day
interventionists) in contrast to the United States, which has achieved cen-trality of and codification of theoretical knowledge (Bell, n.d.: 434). The
imperial cultural perspective and associated racism underscoring this model
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are barely disguised. The imposition of such models was assisted during the
1960s in Central America by the USIS-cousin USAIDs distribution of 10
million copies of school texts that concluded with regard to the Spanish
appropriation of indigenous lands that the Indians felt grateful to those who
made them flee (Regional Office for Central America and Panama Affairs,
1969, quoted in Jonas and Tobis, 1974: 30). Following the 1990 electoral
defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the right-wing Chamorro regime
paved the way for a major USAID intervention with textbook pulping and
burning. Presentlya USAID official wrote that it hadbeen thefirst time in the
agencys history thatat a cost of US$12.2 millionit had in the span of
ten months . . . totally replaced textbooks for all the schools in a country
(Long, 1991).
Colonizers, notes Pavla Miller, routinely asserted that natives, likechildren incapable of self-control and rational thought, respond best to firm
paternal control and beatings (1999: 113). Indeed, the childrens literature
exported to theThird World is frequently imbuedwith Westerncivilizations
modernist crusade, as a redoubtable critique of Disney in Latin America has
shown.The hegemony. . . detectedbetween thechild-adults whoarrive with
theircivilizationand technology, and thechild-noble savageswho accept this
alien authority and surrender their riches, stands revealed as an exact replica
of the relationsbetween metropolis andsatellite,between empire and colony,
between master and slave (Dorfman and Mattelart, 1991: 4849).
Neoliberal economic texts by William Petersonprofessor of philoso-
phy of business at Campbell University in North Carolinahave been dis-
tributed to Australian schools since the1970s under theCIA-connected U.S.
Chamber of Commerce economics education program. A 1949 U.S. Con-gressional reporthaddescribedoneof itsassociates, theFoundation for Eco-
nomic Education, as closely linked to organizations that were part of the
latent fascistelement in theUnited States (Coxsedge,Coldicutt,andHarant,
1982: 121123). An Outline of the American Economyrewritten by the
sameauthorisanother widely distributed USIS publication. On Petersons
account, the absence of any American labor party is due to the countrys
egalitarianism: most American working people have thought of themselves
as essentially no different from other groups of Americans (Peterson, 1991:
173; for a conflicting view, see Roediger and Foner, 1989: 177207). This
characteristic instance of what Terkel calls the Law of Diminishing Enlight-
enment ignores definitive evidence on the profound disparities of wealth in
U.S. society and theequally profound effects of race andgender exploitation
(1989: 3).The linchpin of theChilean dictatorships harsh economic restruc-turing (19731990) and steadilyimposed on theentire continent, Friedmans
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neoclassical Chicago Boy economics have well suited USIS projects
(Born, 1995: 6):
By means of a rather simple manipulation of complex historical categoriessuchas competitive capitalism and democracyFriedman endsin the recipro-cal assimilation of both terms. The historical and theoretical problem of therelationshipbetweencapitalismanddemocracy . . . isthus solved by way ofatautology: democracy simply becomes the political organization of capital-ismcompetitive ex definitioneand capitalism is posited as the sole struc-tural support congruent with the specific needs of a democratic state. Thissophistic operation is far from being an extravagant turn of Friedmans ideas:in one way or another the diverse expressions of the established politicalthought regularly assert this substantial identity between capitalism anddemocracy.
In Part 9 of Petersons Outlineentitled Labor in America: The Trade
Unions Rolehigh-profile AFL-CIO links to the Mafia and the CIA are
ignored (Ranelagh, 1987: 345, 356, 386, 793, and247249 respectively) and
low wages (low labor costs) arepraised forhavinghelped foreign compa-
nies in such fields as automobiles and electronics to gain larger shares of the
American market (Peterson, 1991: 180). Part 10 depicts U.S. foreign policy
as benignandequitable, a position noteven sharedby such conservative bas-
tions as Newsweek, wherein correspondents presented a different history of
U.S.-Latin American relations (LeMoyne and Walcott, 1981):
When the republicsof Central America wontheir independence from Spain in1821, their history was already marked by poverty, violence, greed, treachery,
and enslavement. . . . With resources to exploit and rulers willing to sell, itwasnt long before American and European entrepreneurs came looking forbargains,and what Latin Americanscame to call Yanqui imperialismbecameahabit.
In addition to its own glossy publications, USIS widely distributes Voice
of America (VOA) publications toAustralian schools andcollegesgratis(for
instance, Rose, 1978). Marchetti, Marks, and Ranelagh have all emphasized
VOAs undisputed institutional links to the CIA by virtue of its integration
with the USIA in Washington. According to one senior teacher (interview 6,
June 29, 2003),
Theviewof theU.S.that emerges from schoolhistory is inseparable fromwhatis served up on T.V. Disneyland, Hollywood;somethingessentially benignand
wonderful. No notion of its realities, the poverty, infant mortality rate, illiter-acy, theviolence,breakdownof infrastructures,inability to deliverbasic healthto all, racism, huge inequalities, the corruption of the political process, the
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huge national debt, the way the economy survives by screwing the rest of theworld,the dominanceof blacksin theprison system andon death row andwhy.
Standard New South Wales and Queensland school history texts show a
certain congruencewithUSIS-centric cultural politics.Pioneers All, a junior
secondary text in wide use, preserveswhite Australian explorers andpio-
neers as the spearhead of civilization. Captain Cook remains Australias
discoverer, and what the historian Raymond Evans calls the Frontier or
Great Land Warswherein armed Aborigines defended their territoryare
reduced to massacresperpetrated as much by theblacks as by the pioneers
(1999: 204207, 233; Johnson and Johnson, 1989: 3354). Like USIS texts,
Modern Questequates popular culture with mass culture, elevating it to a
technology-based and therefore desirable commodity (Cortesis et al., 1996:
32). In its13 chapters it makes no substantive reference to Latin America and
the Caribbean, employing the U.S. misnomer America throughout.
Despite the prominence of the Americas from pre-ancient times on in the
1992 junior syllabus options and purpose-written support materials (History
Syllabus Committee, 1994), the popular Checkpoint 1 excludes them from
ancient, medieval, and earlymodern history. Columbus remains the discov-
erer of the Americas, which are understood only in terms of European
impact on indigenous societies (Mooreet al., 1994a: 146206) and then as
British-occupied America and later the United States throughout (Moore et
al., 1994b). A notable exception is thejunior textbookWas It Only Yesterday?
(Coupe, Coupe, and Andrews, 1998), which breaks with America as a
generic term, substituting the U.S.A. throughout. Their Ghosts May Be
Heard(1997), a second text by thesame authors, uses the innovative conceptAncient Australia to frame thestudy of preinvasion Aboriginal society and
culture. Academic advisers seem not to havedeterred prominent Queensland
authors from reproducing the age of discovery fiction in that state through
their widelyused juniorhistory textTraditionand Change(Guest, Lawrence,
and Eshuys, 1984: 169188).6
A more sober account would show that the principal political legacy of
Spanish colonialism has been savage state violence against the indigenous
and later the working and peasant classes of postcolonial Latin America
(Ramrez Necochea, 1965; Carew, 1992; Vitale, 1992: 183250; Cueva,
1990: 145164; Collier and Quaratiello, 1999). Columbian discovery ide-
ology resonates with the Bernal Daz tome, which exalts the heroic over-
throw of the Aztec empire and the heroism of the Spaniards much as
Smiths definitive work had done a century earlier for Valdivias genocidalpolicies against the Mapuche of Chile (J. M. Cohen, in Daz, 1963: 7, 10;
Smith, 1855: 282). For the 1992 quincentenary, the petroleum multinational
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Texaco endorsed the official U.S.-organized Columbus festivities through
theSpanish dailyEl Pas, claiming for itself the inheritance of themercenary
expedition leaders discovery spirit (Philip, 1982: 104105, 287). But, as
the Guatemalan Maya recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Peace observed
(Mench, 1992: 98-99),
It is only necessary to look at the number of indigenous people who have diedcompared with the number of Spanish dead to knowwho were the victors. It isonly necessary to look at thecurrent conditionof thepeopleto understand whois the victor. It is true that expressions of indigenous culture have been inte-grated into mestizo culture, but in general indigenous culture has been pushedaside, discriminated against, or simply served as decoration.
Twentieth-Century Australia: Conflict and Consensus(Cahill and Stew-art, 1987) is a senior text that approaches foreign relations, including imperi-
alism, from a novel and critical perspective. Its coauthor, the distinguished
labor historian Rowan Cahill (1969; Cahill and Evans, 1978; Cahill and
Fitzpatrick, 1981), taught history from theearly 1970s until his retirement in
2001 after the abolition of the history departmentconsistently among the
states most successfulin a burst of neoliberal downsizing athisNew South
Wales high school (interview 6, June 29, 2003):
The mechanics of cultural subversion, the role of the CIA, are not part of gen-eral teacher awareness. . . . Regrettably, theidea that American knowledgepro-duction works ina covert, duplicitous manner, that alleducation isbasicallyanideological process, is not part of general understanding. No understandingalso that cultural subverters and CIA hirelings and thugs may come as gentle,
lovely, impeccably credentialed and attired people.
To suggest that these interventions in the process of cultural formation in
secondary schools are unilinear and unchallenged would surely be mistaken
(see OBrien, 1987: 148178; Connell, 1993: 420424). Nevertheless, if
commentary by one experienced teacher elected by the New South Wales
state teachers union to history syllabus committees since the 1980s can be
taken as a guide, at best a minority of teachers would be aware that cultural
imperialism hadbothhistoryand historiography. Revealing tooare the impli-
cations of thatteachers reductionist reconstructionof moves by severalcom-
mittee members to broaden student familiarity with Latin Americaover-
whelmingly and repeatedly endorsed by statewide surveys of history teach-
ersas a campaign by one member wanting to playpolitics in order to
get as much on the Americas into theSyllabus as possible (Paige, 1992: 47,
72). The teacher in question reported visiting USIS offices on invitation and
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receiving resources during the development of the 19901994 syllabi.7
Given that a veteran syllabus writer displays such impoverished understand-
ing of the geopolitical fundamentals of North-South borders, both the trans-
mission of implicit knowledge gaps to the blackboard and the academic
training of history teachers seem in need of a radical overhaul.
The Yale professor and CIA operative Norman H. Pearson observed that
American studies abroad were of clear imperial import to the United
Statess unique suitability for its postwar role as the worlds governor
(Saunders, 1999: 238). Since the 1970s and possibly earlier, USIS has
offered tours of selected U.S. universities and institutions to academics and
history teachers. These tours are all-expenses-paid and normally of around
six weeks duration and generally include both briefing and debriefing ses-
sions with USIS officers in Washington. Fulbright scholarships offered forthe same purposes appear to function similarly and have on occasion pro-
vided academiccover forCIAprojects (Saunders, 1999: 365366). Since the
mid-1980sandmore so since theformation of theNew South Wales Board of
Studies in 1990, there has been a marked shift in participants from ordinary
classroom teachers to policymakers. At least 6 of 17 members of the boards
19901994history syllabuscommitteehavebeen on tour,including thethree
key board officers attached to the committee and exercising most direct
influence on its work.
For several decades USIS has copiously funded in-service programs on
U.S. history. The cost of teacher release and replacement, incidentals, and
operations isborne by theUSIS, andtheagency commonly provides selected
speakers from U.S. and Australian institutions. Impressive participants are
sometimes subsequently offered tours. Teachers involved with the toursrecalled that these courses to date have not had a single black, Hispanic, or
woman speaker; thesameapplies to lectureson theUSIS circuit in theUnited
States. Reflecting the USISs one-dimensional America, the Sydney Uni-
versity historian Richard Waterhouse argued that the time for the introduc-
tion of a comprehensive American history syllabus is past due. . . . A more
thorough and comprehensive examination of United States history will lead
Australian students into a more mature understanding of the uniqueness of
American civilization (Waterhouse, n.d., [1981?]). Subsequently, he dis-
missedas ill-founded an Australian intellectualtradition of suspicionof U.S.
mass (which he confused with and called popular) culture, claiming wide-
spread Australian admiration of a whole range of [U.S.] cultural virtues,
particularly those philanthropically supported (1995: 186). Yet prominent
U.S. writers had already exposed the intimate links between philanthropyand U.S. imperialism: the foundationsargued Edward Berman (1979:
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145)have directed their support at areas of political or economic
importance to American corporate interests.
While an accurate gauge of the effects of USIS materials on students
constructions of history is elusive, it seems reasonable to suggest that these
influenceswhen taken together with Whig historiography and the
broader globalized cultural contexthave operated as heuristic cues in the
dialectical processes of cultural (de)formation and Americanization. On the
geopolitical level, since 1991 USIS materials have been disseminated in a
unipolar world in which thecultural politics of teacherswork is policed by a
uniform and authoritarian Teaching Services Act or its analogue in every
Australian state. Typical of my 13 interviewees, an experienced history edu-
cator observed that teachers have been pivotal in interpreting thenew syllabi
for students.Significant numbers of teachers seem threatenedby the termsinvasionor occupation, preferring thecontactview of British colonial-
ism in Australia generally promoted in texts (interview 2, September 17,
1999), which conforms neatly with official U.S. agency descriptors.
My intent in offering these observations is to highlight themisrepresenta-
tion of the subject America at thepoint of academic production and itsdis-
tribution and consequences, relegating the majority history of the Ameri-
casincluding the history of black and Hispanic U.S. communitiesto
esotericbackwaters. Suchpractices, imported intohistorypedagogy andcur-
ricula, go hand in hand with the romanticizationpromoted by theUSIS, cog-
nate agencies, and sympathetic intellectuals: what C. L. R. James called the
delusive belief, based on Americas early history, that America, in its mere
existence, was a rebellion (1993: 65) or the national origin story that
Edward Said has described as a strange mixture of invention, history, andself-aggrandizement (1993: 381).
OUT WITH THE NEW, IN WITH THE OLD
In the United States . . . cultureis a business, justlikemaking sausages or serv-ingin a restaurant.Culture isnot . . . a socialnecessity that shouldbe made a giftof, rather . . . an activity which has a market so long as it has quality.
G. Domnguez, General Pinochets head
of the Cultural Corporation of Santiago, 1979
The Americanization of the history curriculuminitiated with the U.S.
strand in the 1982 New South Wales senior syllabus, complemented by theacademic formation of teachers at major pedagogical universities and USIS-
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driven professional developmentwas extended in the 19901994 syllabi
and consolidated in the new junior history syllabus implemented from 1999.
Despite shortcomings, the 1992 junior syllabus and the senior modern his-
torysyllabusgave visibility to capitalism andcommunismas discretehistori-
cal forces. For instance, the first mandatory question of the junior syllabus
listed trade unions, labour, and capital for study (now eliminated), while
the second offered the environmentally focused and communist-led Green
Bans (now eliminated), the Aboriginal land rights movements (now voided
of their political economy and defined merely as protest movements), and
reconstruction of the past as research topics for the study of heritage. The
third specificallymentioned communism and anti-communism and mul-
tinationals as examples of economic issues that the teacher could legiti-
mately present as vehicles for understanding Australias international rela-tions since European contact (New South Wales Board of Studies, 1992:
1620).
But as if inspired by a USIS-distributed Fukuyama (1993) equation of
capitalismwith democracy, the1999 juniorsyllabus readministers thelast rites
of communism, promoting instead a contradictory identity history that is
nationalist butdevoid of autochthonous roots and susceptible of Hobsbawms
critique as prone to anachronism, omission, decontextualization and, in
extreme cases, lies (Hobsbawm, 1997a: 351366). For instance, the third
mandatory area of study is anti-communism and theVietnamWar, making
anticommunismrather than anti-imperialism or anticapitalismthe
default focus. Reading as if written by Senator Joseph McCarthys House
Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, the mandatory question is
How did the Australiangovernment respond to the threat of communism inAustralia? (New South Wales Board of Studies, 1999a: 24). Such questions
intentionally shape answers.
Proponents of the active or multiple-reading thesis might here inter-
ject that such text, like all text, is open to various readings. We cannot
assume, asserts Michael Apple, that what is in the text is actually taught.
Nor can we assume that what is taught is actually learned. Teachers have a
long history of mediatingand transformingtext materialwhen they employit
in classrooms. Students bring their ownclassed, raced, andgendered biogra-
phieswith themaswell. Paulo Freires evocation of thebankingeducation
model, he concludes, no longer applies (Apple, 1993: 211). Nevertheless,
Freire held to its relevance through much of his later writings (1985: 100).
While it isundeniable that multiple readings arise,the boardensures that they
coalesce around a hegemonic interpretation via its most potent ideologicalinstrument, the centralized examination system. In practice, the overlap
between history syllabus committee and syllabus examination committee
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memberships has always been decisive. Moreover, the board polices the
boundaries of meaning through periodic model answer advice to teachers.
Simultaneously, schools have become more rather than less hierarchical,
integrating managerialism alongside verticalist pedagogical practices.
Reviewing the shortcomings of the multiple-readings thesis in the context
of mass culture industries, after noting how capital adapts to, incorporates,
and then subordinates client taste, Schiller responds appropriately: How
much more satisfying to be told that you already possess power than to be
instructed that you must struggle for it against some very formidable oppo-
nents (1989: 152).
Indeed, the signposts to teachers are clear, situated in the most politically
constrained antilabor and unipolar context since the 1930swhat Robin
Blackburn calls absolute capitalism. Despite the heterogeneous massmovement of opposition to the Vietnam War in Australiaembracing the
AustralianQuaker PeaceCommittee, liberals, trade unionists, centrist Labor
politicians, theold andnew lefts, theStudentsfor a Democratic Society, Save
Our Sons, Catholics for Peace, the Student Christian Movement, womens
organizations, and otherwise apolitical citizens with draft-aged sonsthe
board in effect has deemed that movement a communist threat. Its impera-
tive, therefore, is to obscure theanti-imperialist or antifascistactivities of the
popular movement (dating from at least the Spanish Civil War) that finally
forced Australian military withdrawal from neocolonial U.S. intrusions in
Southeast Asia (Feith, 1976; Hobsbawm, 1997b: 244245). Rather, students
and teachers are to construct anticommunism, the threat of communism, and
the official rationale for the Vietnam War as synonymous. Their implied ref-
erents are the sophistically constructed freedom and democracy sobeholden to USIS, Pentagon, and New Right propaganda.
The single mandatory question on the theme Popular Culture redefines
industrially produced, corporation-controlled U.S. mass culture as Ameri-
can popular culture, thereby implying congruence with the vibrant,
autochthonous, and frequently anti-imperialist popular cultures of Latin
America and the Caribbean (in contrast, see Schutte, 1993: 98, 193194;
Kellner and Ryan, 1988: 3748, 266286; Reyes Matta, 1988). But popular
culture is also dominatedculture. Conceptually it sharesthe propositionsof a
broader struggle that seeks to transform society, making it more just andcol-
lectively responsible. Behind this formulation there is an understanding of
economic,social, andpoliticaldomination that defines a politicalstruggleby
the popular sectors as necessarily connected to a cultural struggle (Gramsci,
1992: 8289).Thus, in deference to theascendant new imperialism, the latest junior syl-
labus removes capitalism entirely from the areas of both mandatory and
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optional study (Perera, 1999). There is no requirement that capitalism be
contemplated, still less historicized, let alone subjected to scrutiny, despite
(or perhaps because of) itsvirtually complete routing of real existingsocial-
ism and near-totalhowever contingentglobal hegemony. Rather, it has
been molded into the framework of the syllabus as an incontrovertible and
natural historical given: like God, this ideology admits of no doubts. The
dangers of studentsbeingdenied access to criticalperspectiveson globaliza-
tion in itshistorical context haveeitherescaped theboards attentionor, more
likely, been written out. This process of exclusion intensified after the board
downgraded syllabus committees in 1995 andbegancontractingout thewrit-
ing of the syllabi and support materials on free-market principles (interview
2, September 17, 1999). Although 75 percent of secondary schools remain
public, the production of curriculum has been effectively privatized.Whereas the board included no acknowledgments in the earlier junior sylla-
bus, it now both acknowledges and quotes from the Sydney University his-
tory department website in thenew one(New South Wales Board of Studies,
1999a: inside front cover, 6). Since this article has also highlighted the at-
least-20-year trajectory of USIS links to that department, it seems reasonable
to adduce an intensified tripartite project that, however carefully or coinci-
dentally organized, sees history syllabi as a convenient vehicle for preparing
would-be Americans cum consumers-in-waiting for a World Bank/IMF,
Multilateral Agreement on Investment, structurally adjusted history of the
future.
LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY AND THE CURRICULUM
When the trumpet sounded, and everything on earth was ready
Jehovah divided the world between Coca Cola Inc,
Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other entities.
The Fruit Company Inc reserved the most juicy piece . . .
the sweet waist of America.
It baptized her lands anew as Banana Republics
And on top of the sleeping dead . . . established the buffoon opera.
Pablo Neruda, La United Fruit Co. (ca. 1948)
In an uncanny reflection of their distorted twentieth-century interface,
USIS-driven American history has lately expanded and consolidated its
curricular role while Latin American historydespiteor perhaps because of
its prolific literary iconographyand an organic popular rather than manufac-
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tured mass culturehas been relegated to the unresourced periphery. It is a
decline that mimics the results generated in Latin America by thecomprador
practices of corporate global recording companies such as Capitol and CBS,
wherein radio programmers and disc jockeys are bribed to promote main-
stream U.S. artists, thereby drowning out autochthonous music, and calypso
songs from Trinidad and Tobago are pruned of any local insurrectionist con-
tent for mass consumption at home and then repackaged for the country of
origin (Reyes Matta, 1988; Holton, 2003). Far from being a desultory or
teacher-endorsed decline, the trajectory of Latin American history in the
New South Wales syllabus revisions since the 1980s is a fertile case study of
the power relations within the reigning national cultural, educational, and
political structures.
The negation of Latin America and the Caribbean in the West derives inpart fromand isconditioned by thecolonialandpostcolonial constructions
including metaphorical absorption into the fiction Americafostered by
Western scholars. The Orientalism of Saids sharp analysis of the Eastern
world hasa mirrorin this Westernconstruction of Nuestra Amrica, thecrud-
est examples of which include sombreroed Mexicans lazing under cactus or
tailor-made religious icons such as themestiza Virginof Guadalupe, thought
more presentable in the region by religious colonizers. Denial of a vigorous
feminist history has accompanied the gender stereotyping of such construc-
tions,whichoften borderon thesubstantialerasureof womenas protagonists
in Latin American history. Routinely produced in the West and then trans-
lated and pressed into the service of Latin American dominant classes, such
positivist historiesportray historical processesin theregion asa chainof con-
quest, independence, and republicbarely touched by modern imperialismor popular struggleand the province of patriarchs (for contrast, see Zea,
1949; Labarca, 1947; Lavrin, 1995).
Release of theNew South Wales juniorsecondary history syllabus in1992
coincided with the mass indigenous and popular mobilizations in Latin
America against orthodox historys usurpation of the symbolism of the
Columbus quincentenary. The pertinentacademic literature in Spanish alone
was massive: a single Argentinine bibliographic guide listed 665 publica-
tions (Ezcurra, 1991). International press coverage was constant and high-
profile for much of the ten-month lead-in period, stimulated by the award of
the1993 Nobel PeacePrize toa QuichMayanleaderin exilefrom hernative
Guatemalaafteratrocities against her familyandhighland communityby the
U.S.-backedmilitarydictatorship (Burgos,1993). Again, muchof thiswould
appear to have eluded the board and would have been inconvenient for theUSIS syllabus project.
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Board equivocation on the inclusion of any Latin American history in the
options of the new junior secondary syllabus stood in marked contrast to its
uncritical embrace of U.S. history. Despite categorical teacher endorsement
for the inclusion of Latin American history in the syllabus throughout 1991
and 1992, the board consistently omitted Latin American material from
draftssent to schools forteacher evaluation.When itwasfinallyincluded, the
material gained wide support (see minutes of the History Syllabus Commit-
tee, March 12, 1991; January 24, 1992; April 9, 1992). Tactically, the board
persistently misplaced my response to a request by the syllabus committee
for potentialunits of work on Latin American history. Such tactics frustrated
public opportunities for critical and informed reflection. Nonetheless his-
torythat department of unexpected resultsalso produced an unexpected
deterrent, from theSchool of Spanish andLatinAmerican Studies at theUni-versity of New South Wales. At the very moment that all the Americas
stood their first serious chance of entering a mainstream syllabus for inte-
grated study, University of New South Wales academics evidently triggered
the removal of Hispanic cultural studies from the new senior Spanish sylla-
bus, thus eliminating a potential area of cognate study. Hispanic culture,
remarked one academic, was not being well taught; the solution had been to
remove it altogether.8
Then, a syllabus-writing team of experienced history teachers appointed
by the board to update 1991 drafts was reportedly unable to find evidence of
LatinAmericancivilizations before around 2000B.C. (see minutes of theHis-
tory Syllabus Committee, January 24, 1992). This outmoded Western ortho-
doxypremised on a culturally exclusive historiography and oblivious to
societies that were not alphabetically literate but finally challenged in thenew juniorhistory andseniorancient history syllabistill found itsway into
widely usedcontemporary government publications.An Introduction to His-
torical Techniques, an official New South Wales seniorancient history guide,
asserted that history is thestudy of written records. So the invention of writ-
ing marks the beginning of history (Simpson and Davis, 1992: 45).9 Con-
gruence with the USIS construction remained, ignoring even the education
ministers simultaneous launching of an antiracism policy statement that
obliged the director-general of education to develop materials and docu-
ments to support the policy and, by inference, to remove from circulation
those that clearly breached it (New South Wales Department of School Edu-
cation, 1992: 4).10 Eventually, under pressure from supportive minority ele-
ments of the syllabus committee, its full decision was implemented, with
Latin American history becoming available in seven of ten options in thefinal 1992 junior secondary syllabus.
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There were, however, to be other obstacles. Despite of its multimillion-
dollar budgetincluding lavish funding for computer materials that were
never considered by the syllabus committee but that render specialist history
teachers redundant (Preston, 1994)11the board claimed for several years
that it could not afford six teacher release days (at around A$800) to have
Latin American teaching materials written. Education reform means that
history no longer has to exist as a separate faculty in New South Wales
schools and can be swamped by a general (Human Society and Its Environ-
ment) department. It would be interesting to know how much junior and
senior history teaching in New South Wales is now being done by untrained
generalists (interview 6, June 29, 2003). The net effect of this bureaucratic
block in a resource-barren climate, especially as it afflicts state schools, has
been that teachers cannot readily obtain resources for the Latin Americanoptions and rely instead on the well-worn paths of traditional European and
North American material (asanticipated by USIS). As one experienced state
high school history head teacher noted, Most teachers would have chosen
options according to available resources and interest (interview 5, Novem-
ber 25, 1999).12 The political economy of publishing remains conservative:
publishers survey schools, seek the topics most likely to be taught, and
produce accordingly (interview 2, September 17, 1999).
Critical study of paradigmatic (and anti-imperialist) modern revolution-
ary societies such as Cuba in the senior modern history syllabusperma-
nently contentious among state education bureaucrats and USIS allies
becomes vulnerable in such circumstances. History teachers are already
insufficiently criticalof texts, according to another experienced head teacher
(interview 2, September 17, 1999). Finally, after persistent pressure from thesame minority group of the syllabus committee, an academic member was
allocated one days pay to write Mesoamerican material to be included in a
teachers resource book for the new 710 syllabus (History Syllabus Com-
mittee, 1994). Two of 15 case studies addressed precolonial Latin American
history, while funding for the writing and production of materials for Latin
American history in the remaining 50 percent of the syllabus options was
denied.
While direct board-USIS-Ministry of Education links have been demon-
strated, successful USIS intervention at the level of curriculum construction
required a politicalpredispositionamong administrators. Predicated on what
a private-school teachersunion leader called sycophancy to U.S. academic
imperialism, this was framed by the internalization of the New Right free-
market agenda in Australian education, including U.S.-style large-corpora-tion adopt-a-school schemes, lip service to critical thought, and the unre-
strained adoption of late-capitalist ideology in education articulated by such
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groups as the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia
(CEDA), representing U.S. multinationals such as Honeywell, Ford, Caltex,
and GMH, alongside Shell, AMP, Kodak, ANZ Bank, and others (Lee,
1985). Taken together with the preconditions created among educational
administrators via a history of persistent high-profile, opulently funded, and
strategicUSIS interventions in thecomplex process of syllabusconstruction,
theseweresufficient to legitimateeffectiveopposition to the incorporation of
Latin America and the Caribbean into thecurriculum on equal terms with its
imperial neighbor. According to one interviewee (interview 6, June 29,
2003),
The exception to all this was the three-unit Revolutions course (senior sylla-bus) and the study of Cuba, which did have a following amongst teachers andstudents, and had to look at American imperialism. But there was a great lackof resources here. . . . Teaching the subject still required access to hard-to-get,expensive books. It was cheaper and easier to prepare the Russian and FrenchRevolutions and just use the readily available materials in the bookroom.
Paradoxically, the Americanizationof history curriculacarried through in
the most recent syllabi has also meant their de-Latin-Americanization.
Whereas theadvanced level of the1986 and 1993 senior modern history syl-
labi permitted the comparative study of Cuba and China as one of two revo-
lutions options, available from four electives, that option has been dropped
from the latest revision. Instead, Nicaragua and Cuba (reconstructed from
primarily nonaligned revolutions to terminal sites of cold war conflict) may
be chosen among six coldwar crises, asone of eleven subsections, inanelec-
tive with five sections, among seven electives, of which only one may betaken under International Studies in Peace andConflict (New South Wales
Board of Senior School Studies, 1991 [1986]: 3842; New South Wales
Board of Studies, 1993: 4852; New South Wales Board of Studies, 1999b:
55, 6061). Mathematically this reduces the likelihood of a Latin American
topicsbeingchosenfrom 1 in 8 in 1992 to less than 1 in 1,000 at the dawn of
the new millennium.
CULTURAL INFLUENCE OR
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM?
If the term imperialism wasused in a syllabus it would compel some aware-ness of what it involved. The word has a hard edge missing from the shoulder-rubbing gentility of influence. Imperialism comes at the point of a gunassimpleas that.The omission of thetermis culturally significant,as itwarpsand
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distorts a whole cultural process. The same with contact versus invasion/occupation. Attitudes and processes are lost in the selection of language.
Interview 6, June 29, 2003
As a historical phenomenon, cultural imperialism datesfrom theEgyptian
and Roman empires and the Minoan, Classical Athenian, and early Meso-
american civilizations. Politicaland economic domination of subjugatedter-
ritories requiredin Gramscis sensecultural hegemony (Forgacs and
Nowell-Smith, 1985: 88, 164165, 172173). Contemporary analyses dat-
ing from Gramsci and the Peruvian Jos Carlos Maritegui (1955), later
indebted to the Trinidadian C. L. R. James (1993), the Mexican philosopher
Leopoldo Zea (1949), the almost Chilean Brazilian Paulo Freire (1972;
1985), the Filipino Renato Constantino (1978); extending through the pio-neering work of Dorfman and Mattelart (1991), Edward Said (1993), Ana
Pizarro (1987), Gabriel Salazar andJulioPinto(1999) inChile toGail Ching-
LiangLow's. Fanonist inversion White Skin, BlackMasks(1996), have added
new dimensions to publicknowledgeof the intertwined operations of culture
and imperialism. It is no geopolitical accident that much of this work has
come from Latin America and only then been discovered by the West.
Neoliberal discourse permeated the reconfiguration of the curriculum
during the 1990s. The board introduced an outcomes-based curriculum fol-
lowing Ronald Reagans Nation at Risk prophet William Spady, whose
reinventionof measurement in educationformed partof theconservative cul-
tural restoration (Update, 1992; Shor, 1986). Through national education
policy reports in the early 1990s overseen by business executives, further
political pressures were placed on curriculum teams to link the demands ofglobal capital more closely to schooling agendas. By 1999, enhancing stu-
dentsglobal identitywasan aimof theboards new juniorhistory syllabus
(New South Wales Board of Studies, 1999a: 5; Wexler, 1993/1994). The
national profiles imposed on the curriculum in 1993 through the collabora-
tion of all state ministersof educationemphaticallyrestored measurement as
a focus. Indeed, such is thepriority assigned to measurement in thenew pro-
files that many teachers began to speculate publicly on their chances of ever
having enough teaching time. At least one officer from the quantitatively
driven assessment branch of the board attended history syllabus committee
meetings from 1993 on, at one stage proposing that the essay-based univer-
sity entrance examination at the end of the final year of secondary schooling
be abandoned for a multiple-choice questionnaire that would replace
teacher-examiners with computers.In thiscontext, strugglesaround the exclusion/inclusion of LatinAmerica
and the Caribbean in the syllabus and official nomenclature for cultural
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imperialism can be seen to be related. Diverse potential interpretations of its
subject matter endow LatinAmerican history withsufficient latent challenge
to globalization ideology, if not practice, to prompt conservative opposition
to its inclusion. Closely linked to this political struggle has been the triumph
of official euphemism in the representation of cultural imperialism in the
1992 junior syllabus core and, by implication, in the options (where Latin
America was, finally, prominent), but that outcome was decidedly unrepre-
sentative of syllabus committee and teacher preferences.
Seven of eight board-approved drafts of the 1992 New South Wales Year
710 history syllabus listed cultural imperialism as an issue in the manda-
tory Australian section. Statewide school surveys by the board had revealed
consistent support for its retention. However, in mid-1992 a bare quorum of
the history syllabus committee decidedby a majority of oneto representcultural imperialism as cultural influence in the junior syllabus, at the
instigation of the Sydney University historian Richard Waterhouse.13 Water-
house, whose position on Aboriginal and gender issues was a consistent ral-
lying point for right-wing elements on the committee (whose lines to board
authority seemed ensured), had also opposed the representation of the colo-
nial occupation of Australiaas an invasion, successfullypromoting thecon-
tact reconstruction in itsplace. Congruentwith therepackaging of imperial-
ism as mere influence, the mandated question on Aboriginal history thus
framedinvasion as contact. In both history anda comparable dispute over a
board primary-school social science syllabus, the NLP Education Ministry
also promoted constructs such as encroachment over invasion (Lewis,
1994). This quasi-Nation at Risk coalition was completed by elite private
schools such as Knox Grammar, Sydney, which lobbied for similar USISanalogues.
All met strenuous resistance from progressive teachers, academics, the
Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander Social Justice Commission, theAborigi-
nal EducationConsultative Group (AECG), anda substantial minority of the
committee.The boardsown Aboriginaleducationunit rejectedthecontact
construction, arguing that it was Eurocentric and euphemistic, sociological
rather than historiographic, and (misleadingly) suggestive of equal power
relations and broke the boards public History Round Table consensus that
invasionand massacre werekeydescriptors for thismandatoryquestion.
On the issue of whether this may be inflammatory terminology, the author
ruminated, we have to ask whether prejudice and ignorance should be the
guiding principles of syllabus design (New South Wales Board of Studies
Aboriginal Education Unit, 1992). Responding in a similar vein to Anglo-phobic hysteria in Big Brother Writes the Syllabus by the Murdoch jour-
nalist and Quadranteditor P. P. McGuinness (1991), the AECG president
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and teacher Linda Burney reminded readers that Australians were indoctri-
nated for generations both by the denial of Aboriginal history in school and
by the racist lie of white Australia. It was about time, she concluded, that
the real Australian story was told (1991).
These events stand in marked contrast to the advances made in the 1995
Queensland (senior) modern history syllabus, in which cultural imperialism
is an option for study under the topics Modern Australia (post-1939) and
Imperialism. Balanced and intelligently organized resource material for
that study is provided in the two-volume textbook series Inquiry (Hoepper
et al., 1996a; Hoepper et al., 1996b), despite itsoccasional andequivocal use
of the generic America where the United States or its citizens, culture, or
political institutions are meant (Hoepper et al., 1996a: 434437). One of its
academic authors observed that since 1973, Queensland has had broad-framehistory syllabi, giving schools greatchoicein thespecific topicsthey
choose to exemplify themes such as nationalism, imperialism, racism.
Moreover, students can study black-white relations in a semester unit Im-
perialismand Racial Conflictsand Compromises (interview 4, October 27,
1999).
Nonetheless, in the New South Wales casegiven the combination of
consistent media misinformation or marginalization of the issue, the stifling
conservative climate in schools, thesubordination of teacher training to free-
market ideology, and theequivocal signals sent by thenotion cultural influ-
ence as opposed to cultural imperialismfew history teachers would
interpret the influence construction as a call to problematize the political
economy of culture. Unremarkably, then, one senior head teacher regarded
the influence-versus-imperialism distinction as immaterial, reportingthat his staff was unaware of U.S. agency influence in syllabus development
(certainly a common position) (interview 5, November 25, 1999). Another
preferred contact as an adequate, nonthreatening notion for teachers and
students, most of whom would balk at the term invasion if used to define
British colonial occupation of Australia. Moreoverimplying a systemic
failurethe concept of colonialism was beyond the reach of most students
until the twofinal senioryears (interview 2, September17, 1999). Reflecting
the verticalist power practices that commonly transmit officially sanctioned
culture, a classroom teacher noted that the programs were done and, in
effect, teachersjust followedthem(interview 3, October 11,1999). In such
conditions, teachers tend to fall back on that tangle of crimes, blunders,
oversights and off-chances which for the more conventionally minded goes
by the name of tradition (Eagleton, 1992).In late 1991 theboard sought guidance on the juniorhistory syllabus from
the Sydney University history professor Brian Fletcher, one of the eminent
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historians who would talk to us about what they think kids 15 years of age
should know about Australia, the big issues (Susskind, 1991). He urged the
board to base its junior syllabus on the Californian model, which had suc-
ceeded (Fletcher, 1991). This view had less support in California, where the
model in questionsynchronized with the Reagan and later Bush adminis-
trationshad been undergoing drastic revisions discreetly initiated in 1989.
The University of California Los Angelesbased Winston Committee had
begun promotinga history educationthat emphasized both thesudden revo-
lutions and the long-term shifts, encouraging for instance the study of the
earlyIndustrialRevolution as a development involving worldwideeconomic
interrelationships, rather than merely as a topic in the history of England.
Pivotal for this discussion, it did not encourage history teachers to embark
upon a search for the eternal essences of individual civilizations. Syllabusstandards would be multicultural and inclusive, avoiding the traditional hier-
archy of cultures that, argued a key academic contributor, would assuredly
lead to divisive rhapsodizing over which civilization was the greatest moral
success, or which placed first in this or that cultural achievement (Dunn,
1995). Resonant with the New South Wales case, the new syllabus came
under concerted attack from the Moral Right, which accused it of political
correctness and extravagant multiculturalism. One of its loudest critics was
the CIA asset and Watergate plumber Charles Colson, who had once
described himself as a flag-waving, kick-em-in-the-nuts, antipress, anti-
liberal Nixon fanatic (Ranelagh, 1987: 804).
In 1992 U.S. president Bush opened a multimillion-dollar Australian
Center for American Studies (ACAS) at the University of Sydney, home to
consistentsupport for USIS ideology and interventionist practice.Funding ischanneled through the USIA, and the center aims to expand U.S.-Australia
links in theareas of business, finance, trade, academia,culture, andmilitary-
strategicrelations. A schools program wasplanned from theoutsetand USIS
involvement acknowledged (Gazette, 1992). In this new high age of conser-
vatism, the inauguration of the ACAS marked a shift from Reagans impos-
ing approach to cultural affairs to decentralized domination. Its parameters
are Gramscian, using the locals to do the colonizing through informal
empire, where U.S. and Australian corporations in Australia pay, along
with our universities and governments, for what was previously done by the
CIA (Ian Tyrrell, personal communication, November 7, 1994).
Inevitably, theprocesses that shapethehistory curriculumincluding the
erasure of Nuestra Amricaare complex andrequire analysis and response
beyond the limits of this investigation. Nonetheless, it has underlined thesheer force of the USIS and related agencies and organizations, their amoral
tactical arsenal, and the gargantuan budgets with which they operate. The
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exercise of that power in selective policy-making circles away from public
scrutiny has become essential to the USISs capacity to insert racist, patriar-
chal, and Americanized late-capitalist discourse into national curriculum
development andimplementation.Thepracticesof a publicBoard of Studies
that responds less to consultative democracy than to the boards of transna-
tional corporations ought to be subjected to ongoing public examination and
interested response. To cede this struggle to globalcapitalism and theUSISs
substantive role in promoting it through the self-serving practices of cultural
imperialism promises only an anesthetizing, Americanized curriculum
tailored to precipitate the end of history in Australian schools.
NOTES
1. Among the early changes by Terry Metherill, minister for education (19881991), were
abolition of the broadly representative Education Commission and Higher Education Board,
reinstatement of the Year 10 statewide school certificate, introduction of basic literacy and
numeracytests in Years 3, 6,and 10,and a doublingof thenumber ofselectivestate high schools
(Barcan, 1988: 314). These, coupled with the abolition of 2,500 (of around 80,000) teaching
positions, led to the most prolonged popular mobilizations around education since the equal
paycampaigns of the 1960s. On the politicsof economicrationalismin the Australian educa-
tion system, see Marginson (1993: 5580).
2. The board itself consisted of Leonie Kramer, a high-profile antifeminist, member of the
CIA-funded Association for Cultural Freedom, and public advocate for U.S. neocolonialism in
Southeast Asia, the managing director of multinational AMATEK Ltd., the principal of Knox
Grammar (oneof Australias wealthiest private schools), conservativeCatholic education repre-
sentatives, and state bureaucrats. The representatives of the Aboriginal Education Consultative
Groupand public school Parents and CitizensAssociations were the singular nonestablishmentvoices. Curriculumis used throughout in a broad sense,implyinga pedagogyof thesocialsci-
ences as distinct from the physical and natural sciences (Surez, 1997), a contentious disci-
plinehistorybeyondthe subject matterof a formal syllabus (Zemelman,1998),and theoper-
ationof an exclusivebut contested political economy of education basedon class,race/ethnicity,
and gender (Tosh, 1993; Freire and Shor, 1987: 10, 116117).
3.TheCosta-Gavras filmStateof Siege (1973)suggeststhat political prisonerswere usedas
subjects forpracticaltorture training in Panama; the