It’s obvious the federal Education Minister Jason Clare and the NSW Education Minister Prue Car have no idea about what is happening in the nation’s schools. Peter Dutton is correct when arguing education is now about indoctrination instead of giving students an education that is intellectually rigorous and impartial.
Dutton is also correct when arguing, instead of teaching hostility and division, education should be a unifying force that binds Australians and, without being xenophobic, that promotes nation building and national pride.
For years students have been conditioned to believe society is structurally racist, sexist, classist and oppressive instead of acknowledging, for all its faults, that Australia is truly the lucky country.
The way schools teach what Geoffrey Blainey describes as a black armband view of Australian history proves Dutton is correct. Those old enough will remember the time at school assembly when students stood to attention, saluted the flag and pledged to ‘love God and my country, honour the flag and faithfully serve my teachers, parents and the law’.
The pledge of allegiance has long since disappeared to be replaced by the Aboriginal ‘welcome to country’ and students are taught the arrival of the First Fleet was in invasion leading to genocide.
Ignored are the British Admiralty’s orders to Captain Phillip “to endeavour by every possible means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them”.
The Admiralty also ordered “if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you do so cause such offenders to be brought to punishment”.
While never taught in the nation’s schools arriving with the First Fleet were two books, the King James Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, that ensured the emerging colony evolved into a Western, liberal democracy where freedoms and liberties prevailed.
As argued by David Kemp in ‘The Land Of Dreams 1788-1860’ at the time plans were being made to establish the penal colony Britain was evolving into a parliamentary democracy with a legal system that protected human rights and where the Bible taught all deserve freedom as all are made in God’s image.
It’s no accident what eventually become the Commonwealth of Australia led the world in terms of votes for women, the secret ballot, universal franchise, workers’ rights and a legal system based on the principle of innocent until proven guilty.
Since the Whitlam years, when Al Grassby was the Minister for Immigration, the school curriculum has enforced an extreme form of multiculturalism where, instead of acting as a unifying force, the focus is on diversity, difference and cultural relativism.
The danger, as argued by Douglas Murray in ‘The Strange Death Of Europe’, is that citizens become strangers in their own land and society fragments and communities lose any sense of unity and common purpose.
Given students have been indoctrinated with a negative, black armband view of Australian history and civics and citizenship it should not surprise a 2022 survey commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs discovered only 46% of young people would stay and fight if the nation was invaded.
Universities have also been complicit in indoctrinating students with a negative and gloom-ridden view of Australian society and Western culture in general. The way history, literature and sociology are taught has long been infected with cultural-left woke ideology preaching victimhood and identity politics.
Whereas universities were once committed to a liberal view of education, one where students were introduced to Western culture’s best validated knowledge and artistic achievements, activist academics now argue the purpose of education is to radicalise students.
Students are taught Western culture, a culture that underpins and nourishes Australia’s legal and political systems and way of life, is guilty of white supremacism and Eurocentrism and in literature Shakespeare’s works are condemned as a sexist, racist and heteronormative
As recently detailed by the Australian newspaper’s Janet Albrechtsen, even law faculties are not immune with students at Macquarie University forced to acknowledge welcome to country or else face the threat of failing.
There’s no doubt cost of living, especially the ever escalating cost of gas, electricity and food, is the major issue in the forthcoming election. At the same time proven by the 60/40 vote against the indigenous voice to parliament there is a growing sentiment that enough is enough.
Voters are fed up with cultural-left ideologues presenting a bleak, negative view of Australian history and way of life. Especially with education, parents are also fed up with their children being indoctrinated with cultural-left mind control and group think.
