Covert brainwashing of our kids is taking its toll

A new collection of essays lays bare the price society pays for abandoning Western values.

What are our kids actually being taught? It’s almost impossible to know because students won’t usually tell and their teachers will normally reveal only what they think we want to hear.

If the stats are to be believed, Australia is falling down the international league tables of school performance, despite ever higher levels of government funding. And while a couple of our universities figure in the top 50 rankings, there seem to be more and more students doing variants of lifestyle studies and fewer and fewer doing the hard disciplines.

The book Reclaiming Education: Renewing Schools and Universities in Contemporary Western Culture doesn’t exactly contain scarifying tales from the chalkface because its contributors’ concerns are about other teachers’ classrooms, as their own would be models of old-fashioned academic rigour. But while what really takes place across the nation’s schoolrooms and lecture theatres will remain largely hidden (at least until all classes and lectures are freely posted on the web), the authors draw back enough of the curtain to justify real concern about ideological force-feeding at every level.

Reclaiming Education: Renewing Schools and Universities in Contemporary Western Culture edited by Catherine A. Runcie and David Brooks is published by Edwin H. Lowe Publishing. Supplied

All credit to editors Catherine Runcie and David Brooks for assembling a range of high-quality contributors and contributions ranging from the prolific educator/columnist Kevin Donnelly to Simon Haines, the head of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation; James Franklin, professor of statistics at the University of NSW; the late conductor and music educator Richard Gill; Steven Schwartz, former vice-chancellor of Macquarie University; Greg Melleuish, professor of humanities at Wollongong University and a recent official reviewer of the national school curriculum; and Ivan Head, for 23 years the warden of St Paul’s College at Sydney University. It’s a timely volume because, if education is tending to degenerate into postmodernist brainwashing, as these authors largely suggest, it’s our material wellbeing that’s at risk, as well as our cultural and spiritual wellbeing.

In their own way, all these contributors testify to the long march of the Left through the institutions, a kind of soft Marxist version of the old Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child for the first seven years and I’ll give you the man.” Our youngsters may well be emerging from educational institutions confident, articulate and affirmed in themselves (unless, of course, they betray signs of “toxic masculinity”), but what have they actually learned except that the traditional belief systems of the West should no longer be taken seriously?

You wonder why the traditional notion of marriage received so little public support in the 2017 vote; why hitherto taken-for-granted understandings of gender have suddenly become so fluid; and why even the hallowed idea of free speech now has to accommodate all sorts of politically correct “safe spaces”. This book helps you to understand. It’s because our kids are being deprogrammed by the teachers and by the curriculums that are supposed to impart the best that’s been thought and said.

All of these essays are challenging, and some are gems. One of the best is by David Daintree, who until 2012 was president of Campion College. “Far too many children,” he says, “leave school never having learned to read, write and think straight, before going on to university to become criminologists, sports psychologists — or teachers! The introduction of continuous assessment from the 70s onwards to take the stress out of exams and, as student numbers soared, to make it easier for the less intelligent to get degrees (that of course was never admitted to be the reason) has contributed greatly to the gravity of the situation. Education can now be chopped up into even smaller units or modules for ease of digestion and subsequent oblivion.” As Daintree points out, until a couple of centuries ago, knowledge needed to be collected. Due to the explosion of publishing, it now needs to be culled, so the challenge is knowing what to keep. His plea is for the continued general study of the works that have shaped the Western mind.

Another fine contribution is from Karl Schmude, the former long-serving librarian at the University of New England. Schmude points out the importance of a common educational tradition as the foundation for the moral and intellectual values that are required for a culture to endure. Like Daintree, he’s scathing of the modern tendency to premature specialisation, which not only produces narrow and unimaginative “experts” but makes any general public conversation hard to maintain.

“The concentration on vocational knowledge,” he says, “does not fully equip students for the experience of life. It does not supply a cultural breadth and depth, nor does it nurture the intellectual flexibility needed in the workplace and beyond, in the way that an educational grounding in the liberal arts can do. A professional degree has no time or capacity to deal with the ultimate realities that affect human beings — love and beauty, adventure, struggle, suffering and death — which inspire or haunt their lives. It focuses on the ‘how’ questions … rather than the ‘why’ questions”, which, of course, are the ones that matter most. “The person who knows ‘how’,” he points out, “will always have a job (but) the person who knows ‘why’ will always be his boss”.

Another contributor, David Furse-Roberts (disclosure: he’s helping to edit a collection of my speeches), cites Sir Robert Menzies’ affirmation that “history and literature must enter into any education; for they are the chief record of man and his ways”. Sir Winston Churchill, likewise, thought that a knowledge of history was essential because “in history lie all the secrets of statecraft”. Yet the study of literature has all too often become the treatment of “identity”; while history is invariably episodic rather than narrative and similarly suffused with identity studies.

What can be done? Politicians don’t get to appoint university and school heads, let alone academics and teachers, or to set curriculums. Our education system is more a reflection of our society than a product of political decision making. All that elected leaders can do is speak up for common sense at every opportunity and be ready for the inevitable push-back from the academic establishments that have let it go.

Recently, some Liberal students asked me what might they do to armour themselves against their left-wing lecturers. My response: familiarise yourselves with the bigger story of which we Australians are but part. And a good place to begin is to read and regularly re-read the New Testament (it’s our core document) and to read cover to cover Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples,because you can’t understand us without knowing that.

Reclaiming Education: Renewing Schools and Universities in Contemporary Western Culture, edited by Catherine A. Runcie and David Brooks, is published by Edwin H. Lowe Publishing.

Tony Abbott is a former prime minister and on the board of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.