The progressive left, science and museums.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: While reading the summer magazine of Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, Powerline, I could not help but think of the pertinence of Keith Windschuttle's 2006 Sir John Latham Memorial Lecture (January-February 2007) and Kevin

Donnelly's and John Daicopoulos' articles on the postmodernisation of school curricula (December 2006). Donnelly identifies the lack of a meaningful history narrative in educational curricula. Daicopoulos observes that various science curricula around the nation are being increasingly infiltrated by "cultural relativity" and asserts that "Science must stand above political pedantries and go its own way".

Windschuttle observes of the National Museum of Australia, a prominent educational mechanism, that it has become something of an organ for the Left political agenda:

 
   Most of the people celebrated--in 
   the museum's exhibits are those 
   who fit contemporary political 
   interests, especially radical 
   environmentalism and the 
   politics of Aborigines and ethnic 
   groups. The white males who 
   established Australia's political, 
   legal and educational institutions 
   and those who played major 
   roles in building our economy 
   barely rate a mention. 

One might have imagined that a museum of applied arts and sciences, such as Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, formerly known as the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, would be less prone to subversion (how can a steam locomotive or an old computer be made tools of relativist propaganda?). Alas, the historical narrative is emaciated and corrupted, and the sciences' natural objectivity is smothered with political agendas.

Many of the pivotal Western technological developments, the circumstances under which they occurred, explanation of the ways of thinking that gave rise to them, and their place in the tapestry of technological development to the present day, are scant if not entirely absent from the material in the Powerhouse museum. I have heard senior practitioners in my own profession of railway engineering lament the loss of many exhibits which displayed key steps in the evolutionary process of modern engineering systems.

Powerline (Summer 06-07) starts with a feature on the Great Wall of China exhibition. Opened by the Honourable Gough Whitlam, this is no doubt a very informative and entertaining exhibition, but is surely not central to the purpose of the Powerhouse Museum. Presumably neither more nor less relevant to the story of applied arts and sciences as they give rise to our present existence, there is no narrative explaining where the Great Wall lies in the space of historical developments; it is a series of stories and thoughts that drifts around, in much the same way, but with more prominence, than flight, electron tubes, steam engines or rotary cultivators.