So, another new national Australian curriculum is released: is it the fix for declining standards we’ve all been waiting for?
It’s a start. But it’s a timid pushback at best against the woke-ist rot.
Children will be taught about their “eco identity’’, safe dating and giving clear sexual consent, in a new national curriculum that combines back-to-basics rigour in maths and English with “woke” schoolwork.
It’s fashionable to bash teachers for declining school results — and in too many cases, it’s true that too many dropkicks have taken teaching as an easy option — but the truth is that a great many teachers are just as frustrated as the rest of us. Teachers, after all, have to teach within the curriculum set for them by education bureaucrats — which is where the real rot spreads from.
I’ve talked to many teachers and many young people wanting to be teachers, and they all say the same thing: they don’t want to teach this bullshit, but they have to. Teachers are quitting in droves, saying that their passion for the job has been destroyed, because, “It’s not education any more: it’s Re-Education”.
Such garbage starts at the top — at the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). Even when the government of the day tries to pull the woke bureaucracy back into line, it’s one step forward, two back.
Aboriginal perspectives of a white invasion will be taught alongside concepts of a Christian and Western heritage in a more balanced bid to end the “culture wars’’, in the ninth version of the curriculum, published on Monday for classroom teaching from next year.
Respectful relationships will be taught from the first year of school, with teenagers instructed how to clearly give or deny consent to sex, and told about the “role of gender, power, coercion and disrespect in violent or disrespectful relationships”.
Mindfulness and positive self-talk will be covered in the new physical education curriculum, which explores the “eco-identity’’ of students.
What the hell even is an “eco-identity”? Is it tree-hugging taken to another, creepier level? The mind boggles.
It’s not all bad, it must be said.
The 2022 curriculum is more clearly written than the 2014 version, and provides more practical outlines and examples of subject content for teachers to use in classrooms, with less jargon […]
Civics and citizenship has been simplified for high school students, with more explicit teaching about the origins of Australian democracy, and its Christian and Western heritage […]
In high school, maths and science content has been aligned with exam questions for the Program for International Student Assessment.
But the woke-ists aren’t giving up so easily.
History lessons have been made more balanced and relevant to Australian students, with a new “deep time” strand focusing on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and the impact of European arrival, including the concept of an “invasion’’.
“The occupation and colonisation of Australia by the British, under the now overturned doctrine of terra nullius, were experienced by First Nations Australians as an invasion that denied their occupation of, and connection to, country/place,’’ the document states.
For a document that purports to teach history, its own jargon is a-historical nonsense. Australia was never “invaded”. That is, in fact, the whole basis of native title: that Australia was settled, not invaded. If it really had been invaded, then native title would have been extinguished by right of conquest.
“First Nations” is also a nonsensical import jargon. A nation is defined as “a large group of people having a common origin, language, and tradition and usually constituting a political entity”, and “community of people inhabiting a defined territory and organized under an independent government”. There was no common language and certainly no political organisation or government in pre-European Australia. There were no nations in Australia prior to January 1, 1901.
Modern Australia is the first nation on this continent.
This may seem like legalistic pettifogging, but this stuff matters. If teachers are being forced to teach “history” that is tendentious garbage, what hope for their students?
Australia has plunged to 29th place in mathematics – down from 11th in 2003 – and has slipped from eighth to 15th place in science and from fourth to 16th place in literacy.
The Australian
The new curriculum is an improvement, but nowhere near enough to correct this dismaying slide.
