During my election campaign of 2019 (for the NSW State seat of Lismore, for the Australian Conservatives), I and all the other candidates were asked by the Northern Star newspaper what we thought of a planned students’ protest march in support of “climate action”. There were several answers and (mainly) non-answers, all of which I have long forgotten. I remember my own. It was, first, climate change is a hoax, and second, they should get back to school and attempt to learn something, including, perhaps, critical thinking skills. (Yes, I know, the chance of them actually learning anything at school these days was, and is, minimal).
Now the dumbest generation, as Mark Bauerlein calls our spirited youngsters, (who don’t know what they don’t know), is taking to the streets again. Not in Lismore this time, as far as I know, but in Melbourne. Where else? The southernmost mainland capital, these days, would give Londonistan a run for its money as an Islamist enclave.
High school students abandoned school to march through Melbourne this afternoon, gathering around Flinders St Station and crowding Melbourne Central. Students donned traditional Palestinian headdresses and wore Palestinian flags over their shoulders, taking to the streets with powerful chants and handmade signs.
In researching his excellent book, Live Not By Lies – whose title, I have been reminded, is a direct borrow from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Rod Dreher had cause to interview the late Sir Roger Scruton. Scruton was speaking of the practice in communist countries of identifying thought crimes to “trap” enemies of the people, when he said, “in my day it was the ‘Zionist Imperialist Conspiracy’”. Plus ca change translation perhaps, as the French say. The more things change …
My preferred descriptor for the modern left – the PGGWC (progressive, globalist, green, woke, Covidian) class – clearly now needs a second “P” at the end, for Palestine. Someone remarked recently on the overlap between “yes” campaign descriptions of white Australians and what Palestine protest marchers say about Israel. Not surprising, perhaps, given the overlap of personnel, many of whom, one suspects, are from Marxist central casting, regularly attending rallies as they work their way through their long list of identitarian grievances. Now they are being joined by their children.
Some of the political class’s responses have been revealing. The current Commonwealth Education Minister weighed in:
Education Minister Jason Clare said "school students should be at school during school hours".
"It's as simple as that," he told Today.
"Schools are being told that there are no make-ups or catch-ups. If students are not at school then it will be considered an absence.
"If you want to change the world get an education and that means going to school."
I would go further. Anyone missing in action from school during the marches should not be welcomed back to the school, ever, except with a medical certificate to explain their absence. A bit like their elders, who, if caught inciting violence in the streets, should simply be shipped back from whence they came. Or Gaza.
Peter Dutton went further than Jason, too. Only a tiny bit further, though.
Peter Dutton slams Victorian student plan to skip school for Palestine protest.
The Opposition Leader said he “completely and utterly” disagreed with students who planned to walk out at lunchtime on Thursday to join a protest in Melbourne’s CBD.
“If your numeracy and literacy rates were through the roof … then it’d be a different story,” he told 3AW.
“But I think this is an indulgence. It’s a political statement. I think the teachers have a greater responsibility to our kids than to allow them out to march.”
A mere “indulgence”? If their maths results were better, then it would be ok? I think not. Not good enough, Pete. The Liberal Party, again, stops short of telling the full story.
But Jason Clare is, perhaps unintentionally, accurate, at least partly, when he says that if you go to school and get an education (sic), then you will be equipped to change the world. He got that bit right, despite his lapse in thinking that what our children get at school today is an “education”. Changing the world is all you will be taught to do. That is inaccurate, too, as it happens. The world has already been changed. For keeps. (No one has yet figured out a way back. Let alone taken his or her strategy to the polity). The world has been changed, in no small way, because the previous generation’s revolutionary beliefs and actions successfully cleaned out the education system and relieved it of its former task of educating the young. The long march through the institutions didn’t forget the schools.
A school protest organiser, Ivy, has claimed:
Schools talk about politics all the time but on this issue we are silenced.
Again, no doubt the first part is true. But I am struggling to see what the second part even means. It is as if school is nothing but a “platform” for voicing opinions. In the case of Ivy’s cohort, mostly, if not totally, uninformed opinions. Students “silenced”? Is the classroom now a domain full of soap-boxes? It used to be a home of teaching and learning, of history and geography, of politics (yes), but politics and a school subject or theme of history, not as ideology.
Back in the day, the mark of a good teacher (at least, one of them) was that, at the end of the course, you knew as little of his personal opinions as you did at the start. Being able to teach, and having good content to teach, also helps. Coincidentally, there has been (yet another) review of teacher education just recently.
Helpfully, the Institute of Public Affairs (through Bella d’Abrera) has done its own analysis of the state of teacher education. Unsurprisingly, the verdict from this, more independent, review is grim.
Teaching as a discipline as taught at Australian universities is now dominated by the study of Critical Social Justice, also known as wokeness.
Critical Social Justice assumes most human interaction in society is underpinned by oppressive power structures based on group identities, such as race and gender.
These theories, now entrenched in Australian universities, were pioneered by Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire as a theory of teaching known as ‘critical pedagogy’. Students are instructed to be politically conscious agents of change to overturn oppressive power structures that Critical Social Justice theorists claim exist.
This audit is a systematic review of 3,713 subjects taught across 37 universities in Australia offering teaching degrees in 2023. It builds on the research methodology used in the IPA’s previous audits of history degrees, The Rise of Identity Politics (2017) and Forgetting the Past (2022).
Almost a third of all teaching subjects are woke. Of the 3,713 subjects currently offered to teaching
students, 1,169 subjects teach Critical Social Justice. These include:
· ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ subjects that assume some students in the classroom will be excluded from the education process due to their group identity.
· ‘Aboriginal Education’ subjects that call on the curriculum to be ‘decolonised’.
· ‘Social and Emotional Learning’ (SEL) subjects that operate as a gateway for woke subjects to be taught in primary and secondary classrooms.
· ‘Sustainability’ subjects that teach an environmental ideology that asserts a sustainable world cannot be achieved without a socially just world.
The teaching of woke ideology accounts for 31 per cent of all teaching subjects on offer at Australian universities, which is equivalent to one-and-a-quarter years of a four-year Bachelor of Education degree.
Fewer than one-in-ten teaching subjects are about literacy and numeracy. Of the 3,713 teaching subjects taught, 371 subjects are concerned with developing core mathematics (218 subjects), phonics (43 subjects) and grammar skills (37 subjects).
This is equivalent of 9 to 10 weeks of classes across a four-year Bachelor of Education degree (less than half a year) that are dedicated to the teaching of core literacy and numeracy skills.
This means that future teachers are required to take three times as many woke subjects than subjects relating to literacy and numeracy.
So, the coming generation of activists have been well and truly prepped for their chosen vocation.
Of course, it is in the now non-taught disciplines of literacy and numeracy where critical skills could be developed, in teachers, then, in turn, in their students. The skills required to be able to develop even a rudimentary understanding of complex matters like international politics (for example). And military history and strategy. The results of the current system do not require rocket surgery to discern. It kind of explains the Ivy generation. A generation which, of course, is, likely, not remotely interested in doing a deep dive into Middle Eastern political history. Or any other history. Purging the desire to learn effectively eliminates the possibility of real education. Of teaching and learning. Create a generation of non-learning, automaton ideologues and you get what we now have.
The current generation has been taught not to seek understanding. It is that kind of age in which we find ourselves.
Not only have we (in stages) turned the formerly adequate teaching program of old into a three-year-long, ideology-driven seminar on French post-modernism – more critical theory than critical thinking – with all of ten weeks devoted to core skills in literacy and numeracy. Where the lessons in “how to teach” appear is even less emphasised. A perfect recipe, (intended, of course), for both intellectual and physical chaos in the classroom. And the place where we have arrived today, with students abandoning their learning-free desks for some thought-free, pro-Palestinian street action. The fruits of many decades of patient, dedicated, strategic, cultural Marxist effort.
The system is well and truly beyond redemption, so those who run the show will have very little to fear from review number one gazillion.
And the mark of a good student was quiet, respectful learning. Respectful of history, aware of unknown unknowns, hugely humble in your ignorance, and content to absorb at least a smidgeon of the bodies of knowledge contained in the “disciplines”. Willing to ask questions and to question, by all means. But to “test everything”, as the late George Pell enjoined us all. Test everything. Especially your own biases and assumptions. Recognise narratives for what they are, including the narrative that Israel is a colonialist hegemon. Well, prove it. Find out, first, how you “prove” something in the humanities and the social sciences. Don’t know how to do that? Well, look it up.
Learn where narratives come from, and their relationship to the origins of the soft totalitarianism to which you and your generation are, sadly, wedded. Find out what colonialism really is. Learn that terms need defining, not just spouting. Join a debating society and win over minds through logic, coherent expression, the development of an argument, knowledge of your subject and, perhaps, even a little wisdom. Learn what irony means. Then you might see how silly you look when you try to claim you are tolerant, multicultural and all about “love”. Use your ears more than your mouth. Back in the day, you were silent, rather than silenced.
Oh, and if your school is simply a set of soap-boxes, then find a better school. One that still teaches history, for example. In order that you might, just might, absorb its lessons. Then when you have found a school that teaches history, get a copy of Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and study it carefully. Then you might begin to see the damage that is done to civil society when half-baked loons who have supped the Islamist kool-aid take to the streets and scream in anger at their perceived enemies. Enemies, as it happens, in a far-off place about which the haters know nought. They probably don’t even know why they are there, screaming epithets and abuse and preaching hatred and violence.
Perhaps one of the terms they will use to castigate Israel is “Nazi”, ironically for people prone to yell “gas the Jews”. Only a week or two back (on 9 November) we remembered that one hundred years ago, a little Austrian Jew-baiter tried to take power in his own, ill-considered attempt at street politics, in a Munich beerhall. A decade later he was actually in power, running Germany. A demagogue’s demagogue. With the backing of the State for his demonic notions, about the Jews and about everything else. And, most disturbingly, with the backing of many of his countrymen.
History matters. Its lessons matter. We must never forget that. We shouldn’t be skipping those lessons. And we ought to explain them to our children and grandchildren. Over and over. In season and out. God help us if 7/10 denialist Ivy is today’s model student.
Footnote:
A Marxist in short pants, writing for The Age, once described me as a “failed” political candidate. He was attempting, sadly for him, unsuccessfully, to get me hauled before the Victorian Supreme Court for contempt, over something or other I had written on the Pell case. I guess we could call him a failed contempt of court activist. In any case, he was technically wrong in calling me “failed”. My aim in standing at that election was to help to unseat an appalling (Brokeback) Nationals Candidate. I did.
Paul Collits
24 November 2023
These students should be made to sit through the video record of the pogrom on the 7th of October. Further hate speech laws should be applied to all participants in these rallies. Immigrant participants should be shipped back to state of origin.
The least schools should do is not alliw these students back to school or ban them from formals and graduation ceremonies. There should be consequences.
All is a vain hope when our leaders cannot even decide what side they are on and join in the chorus for a terrible ceasefire which in the end will has imposed agonising decisions on the Israeli government. Hamas won’t release all the hostages and will move them around to use as a weapon.
The best thing that the Israelis can do is get on and win this war. Israelis will always pay the greater price.
Lord have mercy on our souls.
There are some good schools still, but in country and regional areas mostly. All schools hit the "climate change" indoctrination hard, and too many high schools teach Marxism. I know this first-hand. If I had a young child now, I would probably homeschool. Wonder how long we'll be allowed to do that...