Teachers are integral to the broadening of students’ social views

Unlike their predecessors of the 1970s, today’s schoolchildren are prepared to debate differing points of view.

When I started teaching in the early 1970s, I was appalled by the lack of engagement of students in world issues and general indifference to significant social issues. By the time I retired as a leader of an inquiry-based teaching department dealing with multi-disciplinary approaches to current affairs, students were researching, debating and arguing their points of view.

At no point in my 45 years as a teacher did I see any Marxist brainwashing occurring, and if I had seen it I would have stamped it out. The opinion that teachers are part of a Marxist plot to corrupt the minds of the malleable is absurd and a figment of the imagination.

Roger Bridgland, West Hobart, Tas

Teachers who think of themselves as social justice warriors are teaching kids to be hypocrites.

If these kids really wanted to do something about climate change they would turn off their classroom airconditioners, turn off their TVs at home, walk or ride a bike to school, learn to add and multiply in their heads instead of wasting batteries in calculators, and made their own sandwiches instead of buying manufactured pies and pasties.

And learn to communicate by dialogue rather than writing slogans.

Richard Waddy, Lynwood, WA

In step with the unions

Nick Cater makes many significant points concerning the disconnection between Labor’s energy policy and the interests of Australian workers (“Jobless queues beckon for workers who vote Labor”, 3/12). One is that the leaders of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union are prepared to sacrifice their members’ jobs and households, in order to be in step with Bill Shorten’s commitment to 45 per cent renewable energy.

Remember the CFMEU’s silence when members’ jobs disappeared in the Andrews government’s forced closure of the Hazelwood power station. Another is that a recession would actually be in the interests of the white-collar unions, whose members are largely employed in the public sector, which would have to expand to meet the economic crisis.

And don’t forget that Bill Shorten has boasted that he will run Australia like a union leader.

John Morrissey, Hawthorn, Vic

Compelling arguments

John Capel (Letters, 3/12) suggests that “those who oppose the concept of climate change come up with a more compelling argument”. I can’t know what he would find compelling, but these facts work for me.

First, climate change is natural, has been happening since the dawn of time and has produced severe ice ages at times and no ice at all for about 75 per cent of Earth’s history.

Second, nothing unprecedented or dangerous has happened to the climate with the 40 per cent CO2 increase since 1880. Third, if CO2 was a problem, wind and solar wouldn’t fix it. More detailed facts and arguments all fit within these three statements. The most convincing of these facts relate to past climates and today’s solar and oceanic variables, not changes to concentrations of a trace gas.

Doug Hurst, Chapman, ACT

Cape York experience

Vast amounts of money have been spent raising the living standards of indigenous communities for little benefit (“Dumped welfare program ’a success’ ”, 3/12). Noel Pearson’s Cape York initiative is an exception, devised with knowledge of the people and problems involved and with local supporters who have brought results.

My experience in the Queensland public service suggests that the main issue for the Labor government and bureaucracy is that it is not under their control: they see the success of the program as secondary to this.

Michael Cunningham, West End, Qld