Time to acknowledge the crisis in our schools

Woke teachers and snoozing politicians have combined to turn Australian schools into propaganda units where actual education is at best a second-level concern.

When are governments, federal and state, going to accept the damage being done to young people under the guise of education?

We worry about the quality of our air and our rivers; but we ignore, entirely, the intellectual pollution of our children’s minds.

How else do you explain a youth worker at Melbourne’s Parkdale Secondary College ordering Year 11 boys to stand if they were “white, male and Christian” and then be told they were privileged oppressors.

Education systems around the world are being held hostage to wokeness. Art: Terry Pontikos

What was the reaction from political leaders? A passing comment and then move on!

This intellectual poison is being poured, unapologetically, into the minds of our young.

We are involved in a culture war. Sadly, the Prime Minister is missing in action.

Asked this month whether we are too “woke,” the Prime Minister said: “Who cares … I just want people in jobs and I want them healthy.”

Prime Minister, a healthy body without a healthy mind creates an unhealthy person.

Trainee teachers are now speaking up. This week we learnt about trainees in open revolt at the University of Sydney, dissatisfied with what they are being taught.

Lecture slides, reported by this newspaper, contain phrases like “be wary of meritocracy”, “gender is socially and culturally constructed” and “make inequity, power and activism explicit in your teaching”.

These people are training to teach our children.

What response do we get from government? Another review!

Schoolchildren are texting me via my TV program. Anthony from Brisbane: “I am a student and I can 100 per cent agree. Almost every teacher in my school has anti-Trump and anti-Morrison propaganda.”

Debra from Victoria: “My granddaughter came home from her primary school to tell me Trump was a terrible man and Obama was great … this has been out of hand for a while.”

As Professor David Flint has written, “Marxism failed to secure the revolution it sought via the workers; now they are moving into education”.

Vast amounts of your money are being spent on education, more than ever before, and what do we have to show for it?

More than $100 thousand million every year; $46 thousand million from the Commonwealth; $39 thousand million from the states.

And parents who choose a private school education, which subsidises the taxpayer: $25 thousand million.

There is an education pandemic in this country.

For that kind of money, shouldn’t we be asking questions?

Earlier this year, we learnt that three-year-old children, still learning to talk and use the toilet, are being indoctrinated with books on gender stereotyping, inclusion and diversity and discussions about a boy who desires to be a girl.

A parent of an eight-year-old in Mona Vale Public School in Sydney reported that his boy’s substitute teacher told the class that you could be a boy or a girl and Captain Cook was an evil man.

All with your money.

Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard announced an education revolution in 2007. Well, we have one all right.

We are 1½ years behind Singaporean students when it comes to reading and science and three years behind them in maths.

We used to be fourth in the world for reading. We’re now 16th. We used to be eighth in science. We are now 17th. We used to be 11th in maths. We are now 29th. This can’t go on, but who is stopping it?

As well, there is a complete absence of discipline in schools. If students are violent, call the police.

You can’t have an education system without discipline and content.

One parent wrote to me: “My daughter is a schoolteacher. Half the trouble is she has to deal with unruly kids before she can even start teaching the kids who are there to learn.”

Another: “Don’t let up on education, Alan. The present-day curriculum is rubbish.”

There is a genuine pandemic in this country, an education pandemic where the culprit is government.

Politicians everywhere who will do next to nothing.

Kids can’t write properly. They have never heard of cursive writing. They have never heard of Burke and Wills. They don’t know why Adelaide is called Adelaide. They don’t know that Melbourne is on the Yarra River.

And they can’t spell or punctuate because rote learning disappeared along with discipline. So, to many kids, education is nothing more than time wasting.

They can’t recite a verse of poetry and some have never read a novel.

As one of hundreds on my Facebook page said: “Teaching as a profession has tolerated a destructive left for years driven by unions. It has succumbed to school bullying, tolerated unsafe Safe Schools dogma, rejected outcome measurement and contributed to socialist ignorance. It has allowed kids to be used by leftist extremists in street protests about which kids know nothing.”

Politicians talk about education without understanding what it is meant to be.

Emile Durkheim was a French sociologist who saw education as performing two major functions – transmitting the shared values of society and simultaneously teaching the specialised skills for an economy.

Education is not a vehicle to overturn the values which operate in the home from which the child comes.

Much of what is being taught in schools would be anathema to parents if they knew about it.

Parents are going to have to start adopting the activist stance of those who are dismantling what has worked in the past.

The corollary to all of this is that teachers are being swamped with cries for help from suicidal students, with more than two suicide attempts a week, on school grounds, each term.

What an indictment!

In 2019 there were 88 suicide attempts in NSW schools, 215 incidents of self-harm and 196 reports of students with suicidal intentions during the four 10-week terms.

We preach to these young people that the older generation is destroying the planet. Former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery argued the dams would never be full, snow would never fall and, metaphorically, Bondi Beach would finish up at Bathurst.

On top of all that, children are being told that if they’re white, they’re racist, privileged oppressors.

Does anyone not understand the extent to which this destabilises young people to the point they feel that life is simply too difficult?

Who has vandalised the opportunities available to our children? Will we continue to abandon them?

It is time to start again – but with the crisis in educational and political leadership, it may be too late.