When I worked in educational support, I soon came to the conclusion that there may be professions with a more grotesquely outsized sense of their own importance, but, outside of politics, it was hard to think of any. Sure, there are still good teachers out there, but the evidence suggests that they’re getting rarer by the year.
Yet, despite delivering year on year of ever-declining results, these self-aggrandising ninnies demand more and more money – our taxes – for doing what is on the face of it a pretty shit job. In 10 years, Australia’s spending on education increased by 50 per cent – and scores on the PISA international index just kept falling.
But it’s not all the fault of the teachers. After all, they can only teach as they’ve been taught at university. And what they’re being taught at university is, not to put to fine a point on it, utter bullshit.
The result is that the people who would likely make good teachers are dropping out in frustration, leaving behind the dullards who are too dumb for even a gender studies degree and feeble-minded Marxists who really believe the horse shit they’re being fed.
The politicisation of teaching degrees in Australia is genuinely, to borrow a Trumpian phrase, a case of the deep state. What happens in teaching faculties is hidden from public view, imposed on students who just want to get a degree so they can teach. Most don’t want to make waves.
My own son, from high school, had a clear vision of his future: complete a bachelor’s degree, then a masters of teaching and get a job at a good school teaching his specialty subject.
The first weeks of his masters course destroyed that dream. One of the first units he was hit with was, ‘Confronting Your Whiteness’. It got worse. Not a word on practical stuff, lesson planning and classroom management, just reams of woke bullshit. ‘I can’t go along with this shit,’ he said. He made it as far as his first classroom placement then dropped out.
He’s not alone.
Amelia was just 18, fresh-faced and excited to be at uni, studying a bachelor of education. She wants to be an early childhood teacher. Her first semester at QUT included a compulsory core subject called Culture Studies – Indigenous Education.
Along with every other student, Amelia had to do the “privilege walk”...
It’s basically an old-school Maoist Struggle Session. And it doesn’t end.
Over four years, Amelia says, “in every single class, all of our course content, all the announcements, at the start of every single unit of learning, there’s always some sort of acknowledgment of country. You’re not marked on doing it but it is very much encouraged without them even saying that” […]
“In order to pass, you literally had to write: ‘Before I learned about this, this, and this in my cultural study subject, I had racial beliefs and racial views. I was a racist, pretty much. And now over this semester that I’ve learned this, this, and this, I’m no longer a racist and I’m going to be a teacher who’s not racist.’ ”
What can you expect, when teaching departments are crammed with credentialled cretins like this:
Margaret Lovell described herself in an academic paper in May 2024 as “a third-generation white coloniser descendant born and raised on unceded Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide, South Australia). As a white educational researcher, how I understand race and racisms and my racialised position in relation to its ongoing impact is an essential step toward decolonisation.”
Lovell is a star contributor to Curriculum Perspectives, the flagship quarterly journal of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association.
ACSA is an influential voice in setting school curriculums in Australia. Its latest journal includes these articles: “Applying decolonising practices to change curricular practice”; “Decolonising through ReCountrying in teacher education”; “A failed Voice, failed curriculum”; “Encampment pedagogies: lessons learned from students for Palestine”; “Activist education response to the Palestine crisis: A Jewish anti-Zionist perspective”; “ ‘Talking back’ free Palestine movement work as teaching work”; “Palestine in the classroom”; “ ‘I hope you love it’: poetry, protest and posthumous publishing with and for Palestinian colleagues in Gaza during scholasticide”. And this: “Intersecting settler colonialisms: Implications for teaching Palestine in Australia” […]
Lovell says: “Pre-service teaching curricula must include deeper levels of knowledge of ‘race’ and racisms, exploring the connection between whiteness and white privilege, and colonisation.”
And we wonder why education standards are collapsing?
The few remaining academics with half an ounce of sense are quitting in disgust.
Ben has been involved in teaching teachers for more than two decades. He’s on his way out, sick of the dead hand of bureaucracy and the inundation of Indigenous politics into the faculty at the expense of teaching core skills to new teachers.
“The poor little students,” he says about our primary and high schools. “They’re getting teachers who aren’t qualified within their discipline. They don’t know about maths, science, literacy, but they can talk about trauma or sustainability or indigenous issues. They don’t have any behaviour management skills. And we wonder why our NAPLAN results and PISA results are appalling.”
Home school your kids.
