Addressing the rise of anti-Semitism in Australia, Lee pointed to the two matters that should shame us. Think of them as cause and effect.
“Is it not an outrage,” he said, that a “leading Australian university has set up a high-security safe room for Jewish students?”
Even though this room, with high security and swipe-card access, was requested by Jewish students, “the key point is that its establishment amounts to a stark admission of failure”, Lee said.
“An entire university should and must be made safe for Jewish students.”
Rather than providing a high-security room for Jewish students, those running universities, Lee said, should be asking themselves “the profound question as to how and why things have come to this, and committing themselves to reform”. Locating the root cause of this rot is not hard. Look at what students are being taught in civics in schools, Lee said.
Forget that Australian students are failing these civics tests, indeed going backwards: only 43 per cent of year 6 students are “proficient” – whatever that means – down from 53 per cent in 2019. It’s worse in year 10, where only 28 per cent are “proficient” – down from 38 per cent in 2019.
Australian children aren’t failing civics tests, Lee said. Civics education is failing our children.
Five questions and answers in a year 10 sample civics test reveal why Jewish students have been reduced to asking for a safe room on campus.
Too many Australian students are leaving school with little understanding of the grand civilisational battles fought over centuries to secure fundamental values that empower us to be free and prosperous.
Too few understand that every single generation must carry the torch for the next generation. When the torch is dropped, expect darkness.
I took the test. Here are my conclusions. Question one asks 15 and 16-year-old students which of the following is the task of a local council: look after parks and gardens; set up schools; run hospitals; or take part in parliament. Enough said there.
Question two is even more shallow. It asks why a group of university students – called Student Action for Aborigines – was able to protest for better outcomes for Aboriginal people in 1965. Answer: “In Australia, people have the right to organise legal forms of protest.”
This is a case of the ideological tail wagging the dog. Those who wrote this civics question can tick the box – they have indeed addressed the first of three “mandatory cross-curriculum priorities” of the Australian National Curriculum – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures.
But have they taught students about why freedom of speech matters in a free country? Where it comes from? That it’s not given to us by government or the UN? That freedom of expression emerged from our long, long, history, from an age of reason and a period of Enlightenment?
Are they taught that without free speech there is no marketplace of ideas capable of identifying the best ideas and getting rid of the worst ideas? Are students taught that the friction of freedom means defending those with whom you disagree, and that without free speech other freedoms can’t exist? None of this is difficult.
If students are failing civics, it’s probably because they’re bored stiff by the curriculum that culminates in even more boring tests.
Question three is more proof of the woeful state of civics and education in Australian schools: “What is the main reason for the separation of powers in a democracy?” The answer – “To make the system fair” – trivialises our system of government and dumbs down our kids.
“Fair” doesn’t touch the sides of the significance of the separation of powers. The separation of powers is a very big idea about power and freedom. Our democracy is premised on the separation of powers to ensure that none of the three branches of government – the executive, parliament and the judiciary – can exercise complete control over us.
It’s not asking too much to expect teenagers on the cusp of voting to understand that separating the powers of our major institutions helps keep each institution in check, that the separation of powers ultimately protects the rule of law and individual rights.
Students deserve more than a daft Disney story about fairness. God help us if they are not taught why judges shouldn’t presume to be politicians and why the government of the day can’t pass laws without convincing a majority of those sitting in parliament.
Another question is equally inane, a textbook manifestation of multicultural ideology. Why did Australia move from a policy of assimilation to one of multiculturalism? Answer: “The diversity of immigrants coming to live in Australia needed to be recognised.”
That is another worthless statement. This eagerness to denounce assimilation as a vice and treat diversity as a virtue reveals what has gone wrong, not just with civics education but with the multicultural industry in Australia. Diversity is not, in and of itself, a societal good.
Our freedom, safety and prosperity as a nation depend on people uniting around a core set of non-negotiable values – freedom of speech, separation of church and state, representative government, the rule of law, equality of all people, regardless of race and gender.
Diversity enriches us only when migrants respect that unique binding social contract. There are many cultural practices that should never be tolerated.
This poor excuse for a civics test relies on empty buzz words – protests, fairness, diversity.
Civics lessons should take students on what British historian Robert Tombs described as a rollicking ride about Western civilisation. “The West,” Tombs said, “ravaged continents, burnt heretics, invented the gas chamber and the atom bomb, and almost destroyed itself in two world wars.”
But Western civilisation, when seen as a grand narrative, is also how we learned to end slavery, to defeat totalitarianism, to be ashamed of war and genocide and persecution. It is a story of innovation, one of unsettling change and impassioned debate.
It is, Tombs said, “an action-packed adventure story, not a philosophical treatise”.
That is how civics should be taught at school.
And by the time students reach year 12 they should understand that, as Rufus Black, former master of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne writes in The Importance of a Liberal and Sciences Education: “The triumph of freedom and reason is not a law of physics, it is just an idea that has captured our minds for a tiny period of human history. There is no certainty it will continue to do so unless we choose to argue for its values and ensure that we pass it on as it was passed on to us, hard won from authoritarian rule of many forms.”
That safe room for Jewish students at Macquarie University is proof of our collective failure. Parents, teachers, curriculum writers, politicians, academics, vice-chancellors can all play a part in making sure this is the lowest point of our educational failures. Not just for the sake of Jewish students. For the sake of all of us.
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