Table of Contents
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible…systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police”
George Orwell, 1984
When Orwell conjured a vision of the future, he evoked a boot stamping on a human face – forever. If he wanted to describe the state of modern education, he would merely post a photo of Greta Thunberg. An uneducated, indeed proudly and loudly so, tantrum-throwing, petulant, hyper-privileged adolescent, scowling and bullying anyone and everyone she can, from her family – who became vegans at her insistence – to world leaders who use an ignorant brat as their political voodoo dolly.
Of course, grouchy adults have been moaning about the “young people these days” ever since Plato (at least), but now this time we’ve got the proof. Children today really are stupid cry-bullies.
School students are being groomed for social activism while too many are still functionally illiterate as they leave the classroom.
A new OECD report shows that Australia’s school system has an excess focus on students developing “awareness of global issues”.
Little wonder our students’ performance in the OECD-run Program for International Student Assessment has plummeted faster than almost any other country. More than one in five 15-year-olds don’t have the essential literacy and numeracy they will need to be successful in work or further study.
Well, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? From the Hitlerjugend to the Cult of Pavlik and the Red Guards, totalitarians have relied on using legions of stupid but zealous child soldiers.
There is only so much time in the school day and year. And Australian students already spend more time in the classroom than in most countries. The problem is that this time is not being used well. For decades, teachers and educationalists have warned that the school curriculum has become bloated and overcrowded. Flirting with fashionable but untested teaching trends, entertaining fringe educational issues and bringing woke causes to the classroom are all part of the problem.
Kids know how to tuck their penises and bind their breasts, and how to pester their parents into driving them to a “climate strike”, but they can barely count or read.
The second problem is that, while the curriculum has embraced global issues, it has resisted any effort to reinforce Australian ones. Our students are unfamiliar with our own history, how our democracy works, and have decreasing (or little) national pride.
They’re encouraged to identify as global citizens, rather than as Australians — witness the constant undermining of our national holidays and traditions. Students are often misled to believe our country is racist, sexist, and a selfish polluter.
I once asked my kids if they learned Australian history at school. They rolled their eyes and said, “You mean, ‘Aboriginal history’?” This was the only curriculum they were ever fed – and they knew it was one-sided bunkum. One can only imagine that it will get much, much worse as schools rush to embrace Bruce Pascoe’s nonsensical fantasy, Dark Emu.
But all that is merely the means to an end: turning children into obediently vengeful anti-capitalist globalists.
This is why teachers’ unions are so terrified of standardised testing: they don’t want parents or the wider community to realise what’s going on. It’s also why, when parents’ groups rebel against creepy leftist child-grooming like “Safe Schools” and “Mates and Dates”, education bureaucrats merely stealthily rebrand the same garbage and sneak it back into the schools.
We must put an end to the needless sacrificing of our young learners’ futures in service of progressive globalism. In its place, we need to remodel a rigorous and ambitious education system that doesn’t continue to ignore national aspirations and needs.
If you enjoyed this article please consider sharing it with your friends.
