SCHOOLS:
Cultural left rules education

Forget the cultural-left bias and PC group mentality of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. When it comes to a pervasive ideological commitment to the left, nothing beats Australia’s education establishment.

One day after the Coalition’s victory Monash University’s David Zyngier, in a piece written for The Conversation, bemoans the fact that the Australian people have chosen a conservative government.

Such a government, according to Zyngier, will destroy Australia’s education system by imposing a neoconservative agenda involving: a back-to-basics curriculum, a funding system that favours non-government schools, a history curriculum based on a “white armband sanitised approach” and a model of education where government schools will be forced to compete.

Tony Taylor, another academic from Monash University and again posted on The Conversation, also fears the outcome of the election when he portrays Tony Abbott’s misgivings about lack of balance in the national history curriculum as “personally-motivated, ideological interference in the history curriculum”.

The change of government, argues Taylor, means that state and territory schools will be forced to teach a “triumphalist view of the past that uncritically highlights the achievements of a free market economy, Western civilisation and Christianity”.

One reason why the cultural left has been so successful in controlling the education system is because the majority of Australia’s professional bodies, subject associations and teacher-training academics are hostile to a conservative view of education epitomised by choice and diversity, an academic curriculum, meritocracy and traditional styles of teaching.

Extract from Kevin Donnelly, “Cultural left rules education”, ESI blog(Educational Standards Institute, Melbourne), November 9, 2013.