Akerman: Lessons in idiocy by cowards preaching zealotry

Action must be taken now at every level of our education system or this country is finished, writes Piers Akerman.

The pathetic antics of the copycat pro-Palestinian kids at Sydney and Melbourne universities highlight the need for a major restructuring of the education sector. Aping the anti-Semitic protests at New York’s Columbia University shows how bereft the demonstrators are of original thought.

Declining the opportunity to debate or even discuss their views on the Gaza conflict, and overlooking the plight of the more than a hundred prisoners or corpses still held hostage by the Hamas terrorists, demonstrates the intellectual weakness of these immature students. Not that they might have been better equipped had they attended their lectures as many members of the humanities staff at these universities are irrevocably yoked to Marxist philosophy aimed at the destruction of Western culture.

The record is embarrassing. James Cook in Queensland hounded scientist Peter Ridd from the faculty after he spoke out against phony science; Adelaide, ignoring the desecration of the state museum’s historic collection of Aboriginal history, and Perth, where the University of WA has taken no action against academics who falsified information in an attempt to block offshore gas development.

Sydney University students have setup a tent camp in support of Palestine.

It was probably to be expected that Canberra’s ANU would give a job to the former ACT DPP, given the ideological bent of the Labor-Green government but that should not be a cover for its inherent incompetence.

The problems which are so obvious don’t begin at the university level though. They start in preschool where toddlers are indoctrinated with recently invented Indigenous myths and continue through primary and secondary school where the curriculum is manifestly slanted to paint Western civilisation as a danger to the planet while primitive mythology is portrayed as the pathway to global salvation.

The problems start in preschool where toddlers are indoctrinated with recently invented indigenous myths. Picture: iStock

The Albanese government is only hastening the further degradation of education by foreshadowing a reduction in the university admission standards required for people identifying as Aboriginal. While all non-Indigenous trainee teachers must pass a literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education students during the first year of their degree, First Nations language speakers will only be required to show “First Nations language proficiency by the relevant cultural authority”, new Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership standards state.

This sort of affirmative action program has been a disastrous failure wherever it has been tried, with many of those given a leg-up finding that their artificially boosted admittance didn’t help them at all when they had to apply their inadequate skills in real life situations. Ill-educated teachers only blight the future for disadvantaged Aboriginal children.

The vice chancellors of our universities must be held to account for the behaviour of their pupils but it is difficult to see which of the current roster would challenge their woke academics. Sydney University had preached an appalling creed of what it called “unlearning”, which it’s website described as “breaking down the old rules so we can write new ones”.

This would be an even greater joke if graduates were able to write coherently when they entered the work force but, then again, the capitalist system was also in the sights of his students. Students have been urged to unlearn the traditional idea of profit and loss in order to build a “sustainable future”.

The hands-off approach to the pro-Palestinian protesters is the end result of the adoption of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and outright cowardice. If there is an adult with any spine left on university senates, they might wander out to the camps on their campus lawns and join the dots for their mindless morons championing the cause of Gazans who voted for the terrorist organisation Hamas 18 years ago.

In the US, there are encouraging signs of a corporate kickback against this destructive wokeness led, most surprisingly, by tech giant Google, which last week fired some 28 employees who had staged sit-in protests at its New York and California offices over a contract with Israel’s government.

Google’s firing statement said their former staff were guilty of “completely unacceptable behaviour”.

The same could be said of individuals at every level of our education system.

Action must be taken now or this country is finished.

Originally published as Akerman: Lessons in idiocy by cowards preaching zealotry