Indoctrination Posing As Education In Queensland
'Class Revolution' by Andrew Bolt The Courier-Mail, 10/6/2000

The Queensland Education Department is indoctrinating our children with left-wing values, warns Andrew Bolt

IF QUEENSLAND'S teachers really feel like striking, they should strike against the astonishing syllabus they've been told to teach unsuspecting children.

Astonishing, you ask?

Yes, when teachers are told in two subject areas to teach positive things about Greenpeace, the anti-democratic organisation whose stunts often involve deliberate law-breaking.

Yes, when the syllabus suggests teachers tell their students all about two Asian communist leaders but only one Australian explorer.

Yes, when students in Year One and Two are already being blooded in the war against sexism, being told to study "perceptions of gender roles in various settings", "equality of opportunity" and "stereotypes related to work roles".

Yes, when the syllabus ruthlessly pushes strong environmental views and teaches next to nothing about the economy that pays the bill.

In fact, the Beattie Government's education experts have launched the most radical attempt in Australia to indoctrinate children in key left-wing-values.

Or, as the syllabus itself puts it, teachers must teach the

"key values of democratic process, social justice, ecological and economic sustainability and peace."

Teach the good opinions. And don't fuss too much about facts.

The syllabus I've drawn these examples from is for a unit called Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE), which kind-of teaches what you and I once called history, geography and social studies, and on which students must spend around 90 minutes each week.

The tragedy is that it is deeply flawed by some of the fashionable academic theories that have already so devastated our universities— postmodernism, feminist students, moral relativism, Deep Green pantheism, blah blah blah. .......The hostility of the new syllabus to our society — which, we must remind ourselves, continues to be one of the most free and prosperous in the world —is emphasised from the outset, when the document defines its four key values.

For example, it says

"social justice seeks to challenge the inequalities inherent in social institutions and to deconstruct dominant views of society."

The "dominant view" it tries to deconstruct is almost certainly yours, dear reader. By Year 8 or 9, your children will be taught about "Australian identity myths", and it won't be pretty.

The syllabus also reveals that, in the Education Department at least, Earth worship has taken hold.

Western civilisation has advanced spectacularly in the belief that the Earth is ours to use. To use wisely, of course, but indisputably to use.

But the new syllabus — drawn up by the Queensland School curriculum Council and endorsed by the Education Department — won't buy that. It tells teachers that the

"key value of ecological and environmental sustainability ... is based on a belief in the integrity of natural environments." and emphasizes "the need to protect environments for their intrinsic value."

Get your hands off that ore, you naughty man. Don't touch that tree.

You may feel that all this mumbo-jumbo is far-fetched and irrelevant. But think of this: this is precisely what the Beattie Government now wants all children to learn, from Years 1 to 10.

Want to know just how woolly and tree-hugging this syllabus gets?

In explaining yet another "key value"— that of peace — the syllabus tells teachers that

"peace applies to relationships between people and the environments that have a regard for the spiritual dimension of life".

Pardon? If I understand this right — and it's not easy to do so — does this mean that I can be at peace with a rock? Or at war with a hill?

This new syllabus doesn't even pretend to hide its hostility to the traditional disciplines and knowledge which underpin the glory of Western culture. That's clear just from the titles of the four strands of the SOSE curriculum.

For example, what you once knew as history is now called "Time, Continuity and Change". What you called geography now poses as "Place and Space". Social studies is rebadged Culture and Identity". And heaven knows what "Systems, Resources and Power" once was, but it is now stuffed to the gills with pro-environment preaching.

WHY the renaming? Who knows for sure, but it's allowed education ideologues to drop content-based teaching of traditional subjects and switch to teaching of mere opinions without alerting parents to what they are up to.

Here is just one of many examples to show what I mean.

The syllabus tells teachers that Year 10 students must achieve five core things with " Place and Space " (geography, remember).

They are: using geography skills and "criteria" to "develop conclusions about the management of place"; "create proposals to resolve environmental issues in the Asia-Pacific region"; do an "environmental action" project; and use maps (hooray!) and tables to "express predictions about the impact of change on environments".

The last one of the five gets right to the point:

"Students make clear links between their values of peace and sustainability and their preferred vision of a place."

Maybe you're thinking now that surely—surely—all this teaching of environmental values, sweet though that may be, is balanced by some teaching about building an economy which will actually feed, clothe and house us.

Well, yes it is. Sort of.

In the strand called "Systems, Resources and Power" there is indeed a subject called "Economy and Business". Finally, you cry. Until you start reading the syllabus description of the "core content" of this subject.

Here's what it says Year 1 and 2 children should learn, for example.

"Stereotypes related to work roles (change in traditional notions of women's and men's work). Equality of opportunity."

And that's it.

For Year 7, the core content of this course on the economy and business is this:

"Management of an enterprise to assist a community or international aid project (UNICEF, 40-Hour Famine, Queensland Cancer Fund, lifesaving, Guide Dogs for the Blind).

Full stop. Get the picture?

You didn't? Well, just to reinforce the message for other Year 7 students who weren't paying attention, there's another subject called "Access to Power", which teaches all about human and environmental rights campaigns, and urges teachers to spread the word about Greenpeace, animal rights activists and anti-nuclear protest groups.

This relentless pushing of faddish peace and environmental waffle is nothing short of a disgrace.

Mind you, the ideologues who have inflicted this on teachers and students have anticipated the criticism and try to inoculate the students.

Year 9 students, for instance, are told to

"express how dominant and marginalised identities are constructed by media and other influences".

They are urged when reading things like this to beware of "cultural bias, author's intention, hidden agendas" and other signs of an unsound mind.

But in a syllabus full of low points, surely the deepest is found in "Time, Continuity and Change" (yes, history), and specifically in a subject called "People and Contribution".This subject, which runs through from Years 1 to 10, suggests 30 people, movements or achievements worth studying.

NOW, it's easy for weaselly apologists to claim that criticisms like this take things out of context, so I'll quote the full list of worthies the Curriculum Council and Education Department would suggest your children study.

It's a long list, but please read it because it says better than anything else where lie the hearts of the people who now control education in Queensland:

Pat O'Shane, Mandaway Yunupingu, Landcare, Greenpeace, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, trade unions, Caroline Chisholm, Matthew Flinders, Victor Chang, Eddi Mabo, the civil rights movement, Arthur Calwell, Emily Pankhurst, Nelson Mandela, Henry Parkes, Enid Lyons, Philippines people power, rural communities, women in the forces, Aboriginal stockmen and women, Michelangelo, King John, the Snowy scheme, Italian sugar cane farmers, Waterwatch, Tidy Towns, Keep Australia Beautiful, John Flynn and Fred Hollows.

If you need me to spell out what that list means — the greats it doesn't mention, from Captain Cook to Curtin, Menzies to mining — then no wonder the Beattie Government thought it could get away with this devastation of education in this state.