Kevin Donnelly: Climate strike proves educators are indoctrinating students

That education, instead of dealing with controversial issues in a balanced and impartial way, is now more about indoctrination is proven by the over 600 academics who have signed an open letter supporting students wagging school and taking to the streets, writes Kevin Donnelly.

• I won’t be bullied into joining climate strike

That so many primary and secondary students are wagging school for today’s climate day strike perfectly illustrates how cultural-left, deep green ideology and group think now dominates the education system.

And pity those students who stay at school and refuse to strike.

8 to 15 year old students, many barely able to write a grammatically correct sentence or mentally add, divide, multiply and subtract numbers, are now experts in anthropogenic global warming and are convinced, unless politicians including Prime Minister Morrison act, the world will soon end.

Students at a similar climate strike in New Zealand. Picture: Getty

MORE OPINION

Daley taxed on details of car price hikes

NSW needs the mining sector’s $2 billion a year

Daley’s car tax blunder takes the cake

Even though the science is complex, contested and far from settled children have been taught to mindlessly repeat slogans like ‘coal is poison’, ‘renewables by 2030’, ‘half the barrier reef is dead’ and global warming is an ‘existential threat’.

And visit the schoolstrike4climate web page and it obvious where this radical view of climate change originates. Behind today’s strike and the push to stop the Adani mine and force costly and unreliable renewables are groups like the Sunrise Project, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and teacher unions like the Australian Education Union.

Not surprisingly, given the AEU is a cultural-left bastion of politically correctness, the union fully supports students wagging school on the basis that education is now about promoting student engagement, activism and authenticity.

Australian students will take to the streets of Sydney today, taking time off school for the strike. Picture: Getty

Much like Mao’s red guards with their little red books who took to the streets during the Cultural Revolution today’s students are to be at the vanguard of political activism and change.

One wonders whether the AEU and the other unions supporting today’s strike, including the CMFEU, the Maritime Union of Australia, the ETU and the Victorian Trades Hall Council, would be as quick to support students campaigning for nuclear power stations or stopping the boats and border protection.

That education, instead of dealing with controversial and contentious issues in a balanced and impartial way, is now more about indoctrination and group think is proven by the over 600 Australian academics who have signed an open letter supporting students wagging school and taking to the streets.

The academics, after stating that the Arctic Ocean is about to be free of ice because of man-made global warming, tells students they must act “to counter the ubiquity of corporate interests and climate denialism in Australia”. So much for educators remaining neutral and not forcing their views on unsuspecting students.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and author of How Political Correctness Is Destroying Education.