Political indoctrination in schools by the cultural Left has helped cause the Coalition’s problems
Victoria’s election results prove there has been a generation or more of political indoctrination in the classroom. Abraham Lincoln may very well have predicted it when he wrote during the Civil War “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”
NSW
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Abraham Lincoln may very well have predicted the results of the Victorian election — and the Liberals’ troubles more broadly — when he wrote amidst a raging Civil War that “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”
In other words, if you control the education system you control how people think and act.
Since then dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World have set out how totalitarian regimes exert dominance by enforcing group think and radically redefining language.
As George Orwell wrote, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
Which brings us to Socialist-Left Premier Daniel Andrews’ landslide victory last Saturday and this Friday’s planned students’ strike in NSW and across the nation protesting global warming show Lincoln’s words still resonate.
One of the principal strategies employed by Mao to reassert his dominance during the Cultural Revolution was to destroy China’s universities and schools by turning students into cadres of red guards indoctrinated by revolutionary zeal and his Little Red Book.
Though Victoria is nowhere near as extreme as Mao’s China, it is obvious that the cultural Left has also taken the long march through our schools and universities.
In doing so, they freely indoctrinate students in areas like climate change, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, feminism and the supposed evils of Western civilisation and conservative philosophy.
While there are many reasons why Victoria is once again the Albania of the South, or as Premier Andrews prefers to say the most progressive state in Australia, there is no doubt that many young people in traditionally Liberal electorates for the first time voted Labor because of their experience as students.
Education was once based on the belief that the curriculum should be balanced and impartial and that teachers should not impose their political views on students. Such is no longer the case.
Since the late ‘70s and early ‘80s the cultural-left has radically redefined the purpose of education and the relationship between schools and society.
One-time Victorian Premier and education minister Joan Kirner, and also a member of the Socialist-Left faction of the ALP, argued schools had to be “part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system”.
One of the leading textbooks set for teacher training during the ‘80s argued “the process of education and the process of liberation are the same” and in the fight to overthrow conservative politics “teachers too had to decide whose side they are on”.
Another textbook of that era argues education is part of the “ideological state apparatus” and, as a result, that “inequalities in education are part of the web of capitalist society and are likely to persist as long as capitalism survives”.
The Australian Association for the Teaching of English is also front and centre in what has become the culture wars.
Instead of English teaching emphasising learning how to read and write, the rules of grammar and syntax and introducing students to literary classics teachers are told they must teach “critical literacy” and “critical theory”.
Based on the writings of the South American Marxist Paulo Freire the purpose of English is to reveal how language and literature consolidate the power of the ruling elites and enforce what are described as conservative “constructions of gender, race and social class”.
The Safe Schools gender and sexuality program, where students are told there is nothing normal about being a man or a woman and that they can self-identify as whatever gender they desire, provides a more recent example of the cultural-left’s control of the classroom.
One of the designers, Roz Ward, has admitted that the program is actually about “revitalised class struggle and revolutionary change.”
Last week’s example of the Adelaide teacher who posted the Australian Education Union Facebook page “I am going to try to ensure that the next generation of voters in my classroom don’t vote Liberal” is simply the most recent evidence of this kind of indoctrination.
Additional evidence of the cultural-left’s dominance is the national student’s climate change strike planned for this Friday. Not surprisingly, given the steady diet of politically correct alarmism being taught about climate change, students interviewed by the Fairfax Press simply repeat the PC pseudoscience.
One student opines, “It’s a massive emergency”, another that “whole islands will disappear” and that “we have to act” while a third warns “It’s only going to get worse if we don’t take action now” and “we need to fight for our future”.
Notwithstanding the contentious nature of the debate and the fact that the science about man-made climate change is far from settled students are opposed to coal with one arguing “Striking for climate action is more important (to me) than missing a day of school”.
Even though Australia’s contribution to global warming is minuscule compared to China, India and America the Swedish student who inspired the movement School Strike 4 Climate Action is happy to state, “And Australia is a huge climate villain, I am sorry to say”. So much for education.
Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and author of How Political Correctness Is Destroying Education (Wilkinson Publishing).