This thesis is a critique of the South Australian Certificate of Education curriculum for Australian studies from the theoretical perspective of Jurgen Habermas. It discusses the origins of critical theory; the Frankfurt School Institute of Social Research ( 1923-50) and the philosophical movement against positivism in the study of society. It elucidates the positive insights from Habermas' s social and epistemological theories, including the connection between knowledge and human interests; practical reason as opposed to instrumental reason and the evolutionally social developments in late capitalist societies. It attempts to explain how these developments can be understood in terms of lifeworld and system through the employment of communicative action in the interests of practical reason and social progress in the direction of freedom and justice.