As I’ve written several times before, Australia seems to be simultaneously cursed and blessed with two Scott Morrisons.
On the blessing side, there’s Scott Morrison the international statesman, resolutely standing up to China’s bullying. But the curse is his evil twin, the Scotty from Marketing of domestic politics. This is the Scott Morrison who retreats with barely a whimper from every cultural incursion of the far left and who shuffles meekly along in the wake of the power-drunk Covid Dictators in the state capitals.
Of course, it may be that Morrison’s apparent strengths are really the strengths of some of his best team members. In foreign policy, there is the formidable pairing of Marise Payne and Peter Dutton.
On the domestic front, one of the few Morrison ministers willing to take the fight to the far-left in the Culture Wars is Alan Tudge.
Education Minister Alan Tudge says the board of the country’s schooling authority must substantially rewrite its draft national curriculum, warning he will not endorse the proposed document amid concern student outcomes would be harmed.
Writing to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s acting chairman Norm Hart, Mr Tudge criticised the proposal for supporting “ideology over evidence” and presenting an “overly negative view” of the nation in the study of history and civics.
That’s putting it mildly.
The draft curriculum doubles down on the education ideology: “Child-led”, “inquiry-based” learning in place of explicit teaching, and Whole Language over phonics, vocabulary and comprehension. It also paints a hateful picture of Australia in particular, and the West in general, as irredeemably racist, sexist… every -ist under the Marxist sun.
In short, the draft curriculum is a blueprint for doing more of what has seen Australia slide catastrophically down the international education rankings for decades. It’s a model for a genderation (pun intended) of dumb, ignorant, wokesters.
The warning comes as the ACARA board meets on Thursday and Friday to discuss feedback to the highly anticipated update of the Australian Curriculum […] its release in April, however, sparked a torrent of criticism, including from high-profile historians, academics and reading specialists.
Among the most scathing criticism was from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, whose membership spans leading universities, government agencies and industry, which called for any ongoing review of the maths curriculum to be halted pending further consultation[…]
According to Mr Tudge, the curriculum should seek to be ambitious on students’ learning outcomes and should prioritise evidence-based practices, particularly in reading and maths.
“However, to my great frustration, evidence-based practices have not been consistently embedded in your current draft,” he said. “There is still too much emphasis on whole-language learning of reading and insufficient emphasis on phonics.
“Thirty years ago, determining the best way to teach reading may have been a legitimate debate, but it is not now. The evidence is crystal clear … that the teaching of phonics is vital.”
But if the draft maths and English curricula are ideological garbage, the history and civics are even worse.
The minister also urged the ACARA board to re-examine the draft history and civics curriculum to ensure that it provided a balanced teaching of Australia’s liberal democracy that has made the nation attractive to millions of migrants.
“Your draft, however, diminishes Australia’s western, liberal, and democratic values,” Mr Tudge said. “The overarching impression from the curriculum is that the main feature of western civilisation is slavery, imperialism and colonisation.
“Important historical events are removed or reframed, such as the emphasis on invasion theory over Australia Day. Even Anzac Day is presented as a contested idea, rather than the most sacred of all days where we honour the millions of men and women who have served in war, and the 100,000 who gave their lives for our freedom.”
The Australian
Alan Tudge has proven to be one of the few in the increasingly teal-coloured Coalition with the guts to take on the far-left’s Long March through the Institutions.
He has attacked the left’s pieties which have doomed generations of Aboriginal kids to failure, spoken out about anti-free speech and anti-Jewish universities, and the lunatic call to scrap “English” from the school curriculum.
Tudge has also spoken out against capital-M Multiculturalism, “a separatist model” which demeans Western liberal values. To the point that, “It takes years for some Western countries to even take a strong position against something as barbaric as female genital mutilation.”
Maybe Scotty from Marketing should listen to him more and start ignoring the “bed-wetters” who pretend to be Liberal but act like Greens with more expensive suits.
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