Rita Panahi: Proposed new curriculum will teach kids to hate Australia

Australia’s new proposed national curriculum will produce a generation of poorly informed student activists who’ve been taught to hate their own country.

Australia’s new proposed national curriculum is a dog’s breakfast of intellectually bankrupt posturing and regressive race-obsessed revisionism.

The revised framework released by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority last week would further degrade education standards and produce a generation of poorly informed student activists who have been taught to hate their own country.

Australia’s declining performance on international student tests will continue if these divisive, historically illiterate and just plain lazy changes are implemented.

Coincidentally, on the day the proposed changes were released, Prime Minister Scott Morrison finally began talking about the ills of identity politics.

In a speech to the United Israel Appeal NSW he warned against reducing and dividing individuals to a collection of attributes.

“We must never surrender the truth that the experience and value of every human being is unique and personal,” Mr. Morrison said.

Education Minister Alan Tudge. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

“You are more than your gender, your sexuality, your race, your ethnicity, your religion, your language group, your age.”

These are fine words, PM, but it’s under a conservative government that we are seeing the national curriculum become even more corrupted by Leftist ideology, often far-Leftist ideology that’s obsessed with identity politics.

The current curriculum says: “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ family and kinship structures are strong and sophisticated.”

The new framework replaces the world “Aboriginal” and “Indigenous” with the political, North-American term “First Nations” and expands on the above dramatically: “First Nations Australians have sophisticated political, economic, and social organisation systems, which include family and kinship structures, laws, traditions, customs, land tenure systems and protocols for strong governance and authority.”

This is Bruce Pascoe-style revisionism on steroids.

And it’ll create a generation of ignorant, historically illiterate, self-loathing Australians.

In Year 7 history students will no longer study historically significant events in places such as Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, India and China but will focus on examining Indigenous history.

It doesn’t stop there, there are radical changes in just about year level, much of it concerning Indigenous studies.

Instead of learning about the history and significance of Bastille Day in France or Independence Day in the US, the curriculum will focus on events such as National Sorry Day. Children will be taught that Australia was invaded.

As Australia’s pre-eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey said about the curriculum: “By all means teach Indigenous history, but not at the expense of classical and Western civilisations. Ancient Rome surely did at least as much as Uluru to shape the modern Australian way of thinking and living.”

Many of the changes that are not politically motivated also see the curriculum dumbed down with grade one students no longer taught how to tell the time on an analogue clock, that’ll be delayed until grade two.

And, rote learning of times tables will also be pushed back a year from grade three to four.

Already this year we’ve had school kids being told that Australia Day is “invasion day”, we’ve had boys in multiple schools humiliated for being male, white and Christian and we’ve seen standards fall while political activism in the classroom increases.

It is imperative that federal Education Minister Alan Tudge and the PM step in and address this critically important issue.

Paying lip service to the cause won’t be enough.

The education of our children is too important to be further degraded by cultural Marxists.

If we want to improve our literacy, science and maths results then we need to focus on facts, not feelings.

We need a curriculum focused on academic excellence, not far-Left social engineering.