No accident that students find Anzac history ‘boring’ | Caleb Bond

What a surprise that a new study found 87 per cent of teachers actively promoted taking a “critical approach” to history, writes Caleb Bond.

The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.

When William Ross Wallace wrote that poem in 1865, he meant it to be about the importance of motherhood.

These days it more aptly describes the Left’s long march through the institutions – and it’s working.

A new Western Sydney University study has found that school students now find Anzac history “deadly boring” and “irrelevant” to their lives.

Two-thirds of students, according to this study, fail to connect with important Australian historical events such as Federation and the spirit of the Anzacs.

Instead, apparently, they’re more interested in learning about the Stolen Generation and viewing history through the perspectives of Indigenous people and refugees.

What a surprise that this study also found 87 per cent of teachers actively promoted taking a “critical approach” to history.

That’d be a critical approach to Australian and Western history, of course. A black armband view of history.

Ha. But they can’t be taught in a good light – or even acknowledged as important – because they come from a pre-multicultural Australia when everything was evil.

Teachers have deliberately made them deadly boring because it’s harder to push a socialist view of the world on students when they don’t suffer from Western self-loathing.

Of course students should learn about the Stolen Generation and the White Australia policy (which was, by the way, most vociferously championed by Labor prime minister John Curtin and then dismantled by Liberal prime ministers Sir Robert Menzies and Harold Holt).

But that should not be to the exclusion of the greatness of our country.

It was 30 years ago that one of Australia’s greatest historians, Geoffrey Blainey, said in his Sir John Latham Memorial lecture that “the black armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self-congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.”

How right he was – and we are seeing the fruits of this today.

Members of C squadron, 3rd Lighthorse Regiment, Historic Troop salute. Picture: Patrick Gee

He characterised the opposite view of history as the “three cheers view”, which he believed was equally wrong.

Six years ago this month I wrote in these pages about the fact that just 24 South Australian Year 12 students enrolled in Australian history. Only three schools offered it as a subject.

Don’t think that all this is just a coincidence – it is by design.

The Left wants to change our systems of government and economics. They can’t do it by revolution, so they’ve done it by stealth, poisoning the minds of children and young adults through schools and universities.

If they don’t believe there is any goodness in our country or the West – and they don’t even understand the historical context of such important events as Federation – then the next generation won’t defend what we have.

At that point, you don’t need revolution. You’ve already brainwashed the troops.

This has to be reversed now.