Every day, it’s as if Einstein and Orwell collaborated on a pithy quote: “Two things are infinite: the universe and the ability of intellectuals to believe foolish things”.
The latest — though certainly not the last nor, sadly, the least moronic — eructation of academic cretinism is a proposal to scrap “English” from the Australian curriculum.
English would be renamed as a subject in the Australian curriculum and kids instead taught “Language Arts” under a radical proposal from a leading academic.
“Leading” seems to be a bit of a stretch, here. “Justly obscure” might suit better.
In a major address at the recent Australian Association for the Teaching of English conference, former Queensland school teacher and University of Melbourne senior lecturer Dr Melitta Hogarth described the use of the name English as an “act of assimilation”.
She offered alternatives, such as “Language Arts” or “Languages, Literacy and Communications”.
For once, the Morrison government is finding something resembling a spine in the Culture Wars.
But the idea was shot down by Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge, who told The Courier-Mail in terms of changing the national curriculum he would be “firmly rejecting such nonsense”, claiming it would “lead to the dumbing down of our kids”.
“This is not just political correctness gone mad, but it actually makes me angry that such views are in our universities’ education faculties – the place that trains our future teachers,” he said.
“Everyday Australians are just sick of this sort of rubbish that infects our universities.”
Naturally, this idiotic proposal is couched in the bien pensant code of the woke academic: it’s all “colonisers”, “First Nations”, “oppressors”… well, you know the drill.
The only mercy is that, being an Australian stupidity, we’re spared the onslaught of Te Woko.
“The power of the coloniser within colonial Australia is clear when we consider how essential to the teaching and learning and schooling in Australia is the privileging of Standard Australian English […] and just to make sure you didn’t know who the oppressor was let’s call that subject English.
Maybe, just maybe… because that’s the name of the language being taught?
But, sure, go right ahead and teach kids in a language spoken by a handful of people in the arse-end of the Western Desert, and not the most widely-spoken language in the world, the lingua franca of international discourse and business.
Just don’t blame us when they’re left scratching around in the dirt because they can’t get a job anywhere.
Dr Hogarth told The Courier-Mail her provocation for renaming the subject was “first and foremost to identify that there is no definitive English language but many Englishes”.
No, there most definitely is a definitive English language — just pick up an Oxford dictionary, if you have trouble grasping that concept. The rest is just a mish-mash of pidgins, creoles, dialects and slangs.
“Within the rationale of subject English, it refers to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the country but then counters this by stating that you need to be able to communicate in Standard Australian English,” she said.
Courier-Mail
Which is not something that’s ever troubled the average academic.
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