Our schoolkids just doing as they’re told

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke.

The Australian Education Union’s decision to endorse students wagging school and taking to the streets for the climate day strike on Friday illustrates, once again, how education has been captured by the cultural Left and how politically correct ideology rules the classroom.

The AEU says students as young as 10 have a democratic right to “take direct action” and that they must be taught to ­“become innovators and agents of change in a rapidly changing world”.

Not unexpectedly given its neo-Marxist leanings, the AEU attacks the Morrison government for its “continued denial of climate change and lack of action” and says teachers must support students to be at the forefront of ­“action to tackle climate change”.

Significantly, the AEU has form when it comes to promoting student direct action.

In 2003, following the 9/11 attacks in the US and the start of the Iraq war, the union called on teachers to discuss the outbreak of war in the classroom and to “support students who take an anti-war stance” and “participate in peaceful protests”.

And the AEU is not alone in its campaign to turn students into new-age, cultural Left warriors.

Thousands of academics and teachers in Britain, Europe, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have signed open letters applauding students missing school to protest about man-made global warming.

Of course, the letters also promote a radical, deep green view of global warming without any willingness to accept or acknowledgment that the science is far from settled and that there are alternative points of view.

After referencing David Attenborough’s quote, “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our ­civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the ­horizon”, the British ­academics proudly proclaim “we stand in solidarity with the children going on the school climate strike”.

In Australia, a letter signed by about 600 academics says “the Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by the late 2030s” and students must act “to counter the ubiquity of corporate interests and climate denialism in Australia”.

Hundreds of New Zealand academics, researchers and teachers have added their names to an international list supporting students and endorsing their intention to become new-age climate warriors and to wag school this week.

Significantly, the open letter says the world must switch to renewables on the basis that climate change is falling heaviest on those most at risk, including indigenous communities, people in developing countries and children and ­future generations.

Ignored are the millions living in India and China whose improved standard of living relies on cheap and reliable coal-driven power and who will suffer if mines like Adani’s Carmichael in Queensland don’t proceed.

Friday’s worldwide climate day strike perfectly illustrates how ­extreme the push is to empower students to control not just what is taught in the classroom but also to engage in public debate and to take direct action.

Student engagement, authenticity and empowerment are now the catchcries across our schools. And what parents have to realise is that Friday’s strike is just the most recent example of how the cultural Left is using the curriculum to ­indoctrinate students with its neo-Marxist and postmodern ideology.

No longer is education about teaching the basics and what Victoria’s Blackburn Report describes as “our best validated knowledge and artistic achievements” in a balanced and impartial way.

Instead of being objective, teachers are pressured to indoctrinate students with politically correct views on issues as diverse as climate change, gender and sexuality, feminism, domestic violence, indigenous culture and history, multiculturalism, refugees and immigration.

The national curriculum incorporates hundreds of references to indigenous culture, spirituality and history and there is rarely a mention of the debt owed to liberalism as a political philosophy or the fact that Christianity and the New Testament underpin our political and legal systems.

Programs like the Safe Schools gender and sexuality program, still alive in Victoria and Western Australia, says LGBTIQ+ life­styles must be normalised even though 98 per cent of Australians are heterosexual and identify as women and men.

Worse still, by pushing a curriculum based on postmodern theory, where knowledge is a social construct, everyone is entitled to their own version of the truth and emotions outweigh being ­rational, generations of students are leaving school incapable of properly evaluating conflicting claims to the truth.

Relativism and subjectivism are widespread as even students barely literate and numerate are considered expert enough to decide what constitutes global warming, whether it is man-made and, if it is, what constitutes the most effective way to address the situation. Abe Lincoln said “the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next”.

How prescient he was.

Kevin Donnelly is a senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University and author of How Political Correctness Is Destroying Education.