Clarissa Bye: Controversial issues in NSW schools policy needs to be urgently fixed

The ultimate symbol of old-style Marxist propaganda, a raised fist, is being insidiously snuck into schools as woke ideology grows more brazen, writes Clarissa Bye.

My mum taught English as a second language to children who’d fled war-torn Cambodia. They’d been through the most brutal modern-day horrors imaginable under the evil communist Pol Pot and his murderous Khmer Rouge, and some had literally trekked through mountain jungles to escape.

She’d come home and tell us kids about these students sitting in her classroom at the Beverly Hills language centre and we couldn’t quite believe it.

Here were these other children, just like us, who spent their day with our mum, but had lost their parents. When we complained about dinner, not liking fish fingers or peas, she tell us how these kids had scavenged for food on the ground – eating insects, leaves and roots.

On an excursion to the Sydney Botanic Gardens the children showed her the plants and trees that had edible roots. They had caught birds in nets made from their own hair.

They’d seen people shot in front of them. Including doctors and their teachers. Anyone who wore glasses was killed by the communists.

Former schoolteacher Joy Bye, who taught at the Beverly Hills Intensive English Language Centre, early 1980s, with student. Source: Supplied.

One girl told my mum her family had been locked inside a barn and set alight. They were teachers. Her brother had escaped the flames, only to be shot dead. She had been staying with grandparents.

My mother used to take these kids on train trips to the city, to shops and school camps, and show them how to trust the world again.

Cambodian (briefly named Kampuchea by the Communists) propaganda: boy with raised fist, from late 1970s. Source: Supplied.

Communist style raised fists symbols are increasingly being revived as part of the pro Marxist woke agenda. Picture: ThinkStock

In return, they loved and trusted my mum, and wrote many kind notes she treasured.

They’d escaped a nation taken over by the youthful Khmer Rouge, anti-Western zealots who used propaganda to control and brainwash the population.

Yale University’s genocide studies program has analysed the bloodthirsty madness of that revolution of the 1970s. They examined official Khmer Rouge party documents, and found the communists saw any sign of individualism as a threat to the party’s ideology.

They banned student tests and certificates, because that would give “recognition to individual achievement and promoted competition”.

Soviet propaganda: Raised fist published in the Industrial Workers of the World Journal Solidarity in 1917. Source: Supplied.

“Individualism was viewed as a threat to the Party’s control over people’s lives,” the Yale researchers wrote.

“The need to control freedom of thought and expression was key to the Party’s ideology.

“This attitude explains why the teachers’ ability to convey ‘revolutionary consciousness’ was regarded as more important than their mastery of an academic subject.”

Ah yes, sounds familiar. The political agenda was more important than academic results.

And yes, the Marxists knew very well that teachers occupy a special position of power and trust. That’s why they shot so many.

Farmborough Public School shared this NAIDOC flyer on Facebook, which features the racialised militant raised fist motif. Source: Supplied.

They were also well versed in using the typical art of totalitarians everywhere – crude blunt posters, screen printed slogans and bold graphics of clenched fists. You know it’s not real art when it’s so didactic. A bit like much of our contemporary state-funded art, but that’s another story.

The frightening thing is how much propaganda for woke ideology is being forced on our children these days.

At Farmborough Public School, in Unanderra, an image of a racially militant “Black Power” raised fist was shared on Facebook to promote NAIDOC week a few weeks back.

Cowra High School published this image on its Facebook in September 2022, with the depiction of the militant fist. Source: Supplied.

That’s the same threatening raised fist used by militant Marxists everywhere, including the Khmer Rouge, the Soviets and the terrorist Black Panther group in the USA. Parents of a Year 3 child complained to One Nation NSW Leader Mark Latham.

Barely a week goes by without parents contacting him with inappropriate propaganda.

A controversial colouring in poster given to Year 1 students at a central west public primary school, sparking complaints by parents for stating "No Pride in Genocide".

At Cowra, students were photographed in front of a poster saying No Pride in Genocide and Black Lives Matter, before the image was removed from social media.

As Mr Latham rightly says: “It’s disgraceful to allow these lies about our great country and its history.

At Mudgee, they made innocent Year 1 children colour in offensive posters stating “No Pride in Genocide”, “Stop Stealing Our Kids” and “Just Stop The Lies” alongside that ubiquitous raised fist. These were displayed in the school hall.

At Chatswood High boys are told they are privileged and other schoolboys have their nails painted red to “reinvent masculinity”.

At Abbotsford Public School, trans flags are draped over the school fence. When asked about it, the department says they had already “flown for several months” without complaint.

Parents of children who attend Roseville Kids Care, a before and after school care operation next to Roseville Primary have raised the alarm at the pushing of radical gender ideology on children as young as five at the facility. Picture: Supplied

The education system is now so captured by woke ideologies, critical race theories like white privilege, gender fluidity, decolonisation projects and climate alarmism, that many teachers are blind to the inappropriateness of the material.

Mr Latham regularly grills bureaucrats and Education Minister Sarah Mitchell over the political indoctrination. Sometimes teachers are slapped on the wrist. Often they are not.

That’s despite the official Controversial Issues in Schools policy saying they should be “neutral places for rational discourse and objective study” and not overtly political.

Dennis Walker, activist, founder of Australian Black Panther Party and the Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1971, influenced the development of Black Power consciousness among Australian Aborigines.

In 2019, Ms Mitchell said, “ … instilling values sets and encouraging positions on social and political issues is not the job of schools. It is the job of parents.”

Mr Latham has been trying to hold her to this promise, but says she has “fallen short”.

Thank goodness he’s raising these issues, week in, week out, and giving a voice to ignored parents.

He says a fundamental flaw of the policy is that schools are the sole arbiter of what is controversial, so parents might believe an issue is inappropriate, but the teachers don’t.

The department should urgently review it, and codify contentious issues so schools have a clear understanding, with more parental involvement, he recommends.

1978 television sitcom "Welcome Back, Kotter", one of many cultural representations of teachers. Picture: AP.

It was a shame his Parent’s Rights Bill, to prevent this creeping debasement of our education system was not supported by the government.

But never underestimate the power of the individual, as opposed to the collectivist ideology, which relies on propaganda to prop it up.

It’s individuals like Mr Latham, with his free thinking and ability to see through the collectivist mindset, that will help counter the woke ideologues who want to entrench their Cultural Revolution with our impressionable young.

Teachers occupy a special place in the hearts of children, as can be readily seen by their depictions in books and movies like Dead Poet’s Society, To Sir With Love and Welcome Back Kotter.

We need to reject the activists raising their fists at us, intimidating us with their nihilistic worldview.

A better role model for our children would be those courageous Cambodian kids, who used to politely bow and raise their hands together in prayer as a greeting – a universal acknowledgment of sublime respect for a fellow human being.