Christopher Hilliard is Professor of Modern British History in the Department of History at the University of Sydney.

Children have imaginary friends. Do some Australian polemicists need imaginary enemies?

In her recent article about the study of Western civilization, Bella d'Abrera has much more to say about the kind of history education she doesn't like than she does making a positive case.

Her account of the teaching of "the particular version of Western civilization" that students are being offered in Australian universities is badly inaccurate. According to d'Abrera:

"The concepts that should be transmitted to university students, such as respect for the individual, equality of men and women under the law, the abolition of slavery, freedom of speech and religious toleration which are simply not part of the narrative and are not being taught."

It's not clear why students need to know about the abolition of slavery rather than the rest of the history of slavery. But in any case, it's just not true that these ideas aren't being taught.

As she looked over the lists of history classes on offer at the University of Sydney over the past few years, d'Abrera must have skipped over the units on the history of human rights and European traditions, the natural law tradition and free speech. In her haste to find courses on "identity politics" at the ANU, she likewise glosses over the ones on the French Revolution and "Tudor-Stuart England, c.1485-1714: Politics, Society and Culture."

D'Abrera doesn't seem to recognize the history of Western civilization when she sees it. She wants students to know about the abolition of slavery but is dismissive of a University of Sydney class on eighteenth-century Britain that covers "humanitarian movements." Abolitionism is the biggest of those movements. Indeed, the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself are topics that many history classes at Sydney and other Australian universities deal with.

D'Abrera would know that if she had read syllabi. Instead she judges books by their covers - or, in this case, judges courses by the 80-word description of them that lecturers have to provide. It's remarkable that someone who professes to speak for educational standards is willing to pass judgment on courses and degrees after scanning some blurbs.

It is a sign, perhaps, of how little d'Abrera knows about the subjects she claims to defend that she deplores the idea of students of eighteenth-century Britain learning about how "major treatises on political liberty were published alongside drinking manuals." They should be studying "the Age of Enlightenment" instead, she says. It's not an either/or choice.

Some years ago, the distinguished historian Robert Darnton - then at Princeton, now at Harvard - described an order that a French bookseller sent to his supplier in 1772. The bookseller included a list of "philosophical books." Alongside Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature and other heavy Enlightenment works sat titles such as Venus in the Cloister, or, The Nun in a Nightgown and Margot the Campfollower. What, Darnton asked, did "philosophy" mean to eighteenth-century booksellers and readers? It was disconcerting to compare the bookseller's order with the lofty historical tradition focused on a pantheon of major thinkers:

"Perhaps the Enlightenment was a more down-to-earth affair than the rarefied climate of opinion described by textbook writers, and we should question the overly highbrow, overly metaphysical view of intellectual life in the eighteenth century."

That's not a reason to put Diderot and Rousseau to one side and concentrate on Venus in the Cloister, or to focus on drinking manuals to the detriment of treatises on politics. But this eclecticism is part of the energy of the Enlightenment, and following the lead of Darnton and others has given historians a much more comprehensive understanding of Enlightenment ideas and their context.

Since the 1980s, many historians of eighteenth-century Europe have stressed the importance of newspapers and coffee houses - and even taverns - as forums of political and intellectual debate. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas's concept of the "public sphere," which took shape in Britain and France in the eighteenth century, was especially influential here. In Habermas's account, the public sphere was a space for debate that was distinct from the state and the church. Thinkers and radicals appealed to the authority of "the public," rather than particular estates or other social groupings. Here was a way of understanding the rhetoric of "the rights of man" distinct from the interests of an emergent middle class, as Karl Marx and many non-Marxist historians believed. The accumulation of empirical research and theoretical challenges had made it difficult to continue trying to explain the French Revolution in class terms. The concept of the public sphere offered an alternative.

D'Abrera claims that, "Academic positions have been filled by individuals who have based their entire careers on propagating the theory which sees society as a zero-sum contest for power between the privileged and the oppressed." I'll bet that there are many more academic positions filled by individuals whose careers have been based on developing approaches to questions that Marxist frameworks failed to answer, or even ask.

D'Abrera laments that Australian students don't get to learn about the origin of principles such as "the equality of men and women under the law," but she mocks a course on protest and social movements in Australia. You don't need to know much about women's suffrage or the restrictions on married women's property ownership, the inequalities of divorce law, jury service, marriage bars, access to higher education and so on, to know that formal equality had to be fought for. It took strenuous thought and strenuous campaigning. The story of the rights and freedoms d'Abrera celebrates is not a story of great ideas magically unfolding in the world.

And those rights and freedoms aren't straightforward and unambiguous. The freedoms and entitlements of some were premised on others not being free. When radical working men agitated for the vote in Britain in the 1860s, they demonstrated their fitness as citizens by comparing themselves with women and Jamaicans. French republicanism is famously secular and struggles with expressions of religious difference (such as the hijab) in a way that more pluralist democracies do not.

If you think that pointing this out is to dismiss or betray the legacy of European history, you're opting out of some serious and challenging debates. Students are up for those challenges. They're not passive recipients of their teachers' wisdom or indoctrination. It is revealing that d'Abrera writes of "concepts that should be transmitted to university students." Ideas about power and freedom can't simply be transmitted. They need to be engaged with, wrestled with. When students in the humanities get the chance to do this, they often surprise their teachers. That was certainly my experience teaching a course on the history of free speech at the University of Sydney.

Christopher Hilliard is Professor of Modern British History in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England and English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement.