School education
As a casualty of the culture wars, education is indoctrinating students with PC language and group think, writes Kevin Donnelly in this edited extract from Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March - an anthology about the origins of the culture wars.
“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” - Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States of America
As argued by Abraham Lincoln, what happens in a nation’s schools has a dramatic and far reaching impact on society as students are future citizens who will decide who governs, what policies are implemented and how society is shaped.
One of the primary ways the cultural-left has been able to impose its politically correct ideology on Western societies including Australia is by taking control of schools and influencing what is taught, how students are assessed and how teachers and students interact in the classroom.
While young people are influenced by family, peers, social networking sites and the broader media it’s their school experience that sets the foundation for how they live their lives, interact with others, the careers and professions they follow and how they relate to broader society and the world in general.
To parents with school age children and the broader public it’s obvious education has become a casualty of what is often described as the culture wars. A struggle, as noted by the British conservative politician Michael Gove in Celsius 7/7, that began with Germany’s Frankfurt School in the 1930s when Marxist inspired academics shifted their campaign “away from economic arguments and towards cultural ones”.
As a result of the cultural-left’s success in winning the culture wars, instead of being impartial and balanced and the curriculum being centred on the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom and truth, education is being used to indoctrinate students with politically correct language, ideology and group think.
One example is the neo-Marxist inspired Safe Schools gender fluidity program that teaches primary and secondary age students girls can be boys and boys can be girls and compared to being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer or plus ( LGBTIQ+) there’s nothing preferable or beneficial about heterosexuality. A second example involves the Australian Education Union encouraging students to wag school and take strike action over climate change and a third is the way the curriculum undermines the strengths and benefits of Western civilisation by promoting multiculturalism and cultural relativism.
Students are also taught to believe all men are misogynist and that societies like Australia are riven with structural sexism and unconscious bias against women and girls. Despite their rights to full citizenship and the billions spent every year on Aboriginal services and welfare, students are taught society is awash with structural racism and the arrival of the First Fleet represents an invasion leading to genocide.
Instead of competition and rewarding students based on ability and merit they are told everyone deserves success and it is wrong to have winners and losers. Instead of providing a ladder of opportunity where concentration, hard work and commitment lead to academic success students are told the education system is inequitable and unjust where wealthy, privileged Catholic and Independent school students are always unfairly advantaged.
In literature, instead of encountering those enduring novels, plays, poems and short stories that say something profound about human nature and the world in which we live students are taught to deconstruct and analyse texts in terms of power relationships, identity politics and victimhood. In today’s postmodern, new-age classroom SMS messaging, graffiti, movie posters and computer games are on the same footing as Shakespeare’s plays and the novels of Jane Austen and David Malouf.
Teaching grammar, spelling and syntax has also been jettisoned in favour of free expression and creativity and instead of learning to read based on a phonics and phonemic awareness approach teachers are told to adopt a whole language model based on the mistaken belief that learning to read is as natural as learning to talk. As a result generations of students, especially boys, are leaving school illiterate and educationally disadvantaged.
Whereas English once involved teaching clear thinking and the importance of logic and reason when evaluating arguments and different points of view, as a result of critical theory and postmodernism students now judge arguments according to how they feel. Postmodernist theory denies words have readily agreed meanings and argues how individuals relate to one another and the wider world is subjective and relative.
As detailed by the American academic Richard Tarnes, those committed to postmodernism believe “human knowledge is subjectively determined by a multitude of factors; that objective essences, or things-in-themselves, are neither accessible nor positable … The critical search for truth is constrained to be tolerant of ambiguity and pluralism, and its outcome will necessarily be knowledge that is relative and fallible rather than absolute or certain”.
In history, instead of learning about Australia’s origins and evolution as a liberal, democratic society and the significance of Western civilisation including the ongoing debt owed to Judeo-Christianity, teachers are told they must decolonise the curriculum and rid it of European essentialism and white supremacism.
In the Australian National Curriculum teachers are also told they must teach indigenous science on the basis science is a cultural construct and there is nothing preferable or superior about western science. In the science classroom throwing boomerangs is considered as great a breakthrough as open heart surgery, allowing planes to stay in the air and putting a man on the moon.
This is an edited extract of a chapter from Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March edited by Dr Kevin Donnelly AM. To read the full essay and other contributions you can purchase the publication here.