Most of us were lucky enough to make it through the education system largely unharmed. Today, parents are terrified that if they send their kids to school – even a religious private school – those children may come home wanting a surgeon to cut off their reproductive organs.
This is not an exaggeration or conspiracy fear-mongering.
The path to the disingenuously named ‘gender affirmation care’ begins in preschool and continues all the way to Year 12 where children are not only supported in their natural confusion about their changing bodies, but encouraged to embrace those feelings and take medical steps to trap themselves in a permanent pre-pubescent state.
Ordinary people need to stand up and fix our culture. There is no hero or government leader who is going to fix things for you.
Be your own hero. @ellymelly pic.twitter.com/1nvXMpqBIN
— Billboard Chris ?????? (@BillboardChris) May 8, 2024
Gender indoctrination is very real, but there are other forms of harm on offer within the Australian school system.
Of concern to the wider body of parents is relentless political indoctrination. The Education Department, the authors of the curriculum, and a large percentage of teachers being produced by the university system, have developed an obsession with turning kids into activists instead of active members of society.
Political activism has been injected into every subject, like a food additive misleadingly named as ‘diversity’ or ‘inclusion’, that no one realises is there until it manifests some fatal disease such as a subscription to the eco-fascist Climate Change hysteria. By the time children throw soup at history’s famous works of art, their minds have already been lost.
While some topics are obviously the junk food of the school curriculum, full of harmful ideological propaganda and dogma, it has also been hidden in traditional subjects such as Science, Maths, English, and the Arts.
A sharp decline in teaching quality is exasperating the situation. The last decade has been so bad that universities have finally crumbled to public pressure and decided to do something. Many readers will have fond memories of their teachers, but I challenge you to spend a few minutes scrolling through LibsofTikTok where you can judge for yourself the declining standards.
In a last-ditch effort to salvage the system, teachers will now be required to learn basic skills to manage a classroom – skills that used to be standard across all classrooms for hundreds of years.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said, ‘…we are reforming the degree that student teachers do at uni, to make sure teaching students are taught the fundamentals about how to read and write and how to manage disruptive classrooms.’
Forgive me for asking but how did students qualify to study teaching without possessing basic skills in reading and writing?
The detail isn’t much better.
‘Indigenous trainee teachers will be exempted from tough new entry rules for university and be tested on Aboriginal language ability instead, in a bid to bolster the First Nation teaching workforce.’ – The Australian.
Merit for some, but not for others. Leaving race as the standard for which the bar of skill is set is not only disappointing, it’s a continuation of everything that went wrong with progressive education. Instead of accepting lower standards, parents would probably prefer extra attention be given to make sure these teachers reach the same level as their peers. Saying ‘we will accept a lower standard because we need more teachers’ condemns the most disadvantaged students in Australia to classrooms led by the lowest performing educators. That’s a cycle to nowhere and a poor lesson to teach children.
Even good teachers have struggled with the destructive ‘student-led’ philosophy that swept over schools in the late 90s. The whole ‘learn at your own pace’ ‘don’t stress the kiddies out with tests’ mentality has left a generation so poorly educated that teachers have to focus on politics instead of performance. Children need direction. They require boundaries. They respond to rigid structure and firm expectations.
From the second wishy-washy ‘learn at your own pace’ nonsense was announced, the public knew it would end here – with mediocrity, failure, and disaster. The Minister says that teaching practices will change from the disastrous ‘student-led inquiry’ to ‘explicit instruction’ – also known as the basic education practice that every other generation in history has enjoyed.
‘The research evidence shows why the use of self-directed approaches as a starting point for novices is ineffective and should be avoided,’ said the Minister.
What happened previously is a form of child abuse. Parents who spend their days at work desperately trying to pay for this education, keep a roof over their heads, and food on the table are at a loss about what to do about a morally bankrupt school system.
Should there be consequences for the education theorists and government departments for the immense harm done to education standards and the children forced to take part in this experimental learning?
Why isn’t the Minister apologising to decades of children who have had the quality of their lives reduced as a consequence of a poor education?
A few weeks ago, I asked the Speccie family to share their personal experiences with the modern school system – either as parents, students, or grandparents.
One single dad from a country town with a daughter in the early years of high school has begun homeschooling. He said this came about for a number of reasons but mostly he realised that the education system was not fit for purpose. Subjects were being taught ‘through a lens which quells independent thought’. ‘How to think’ had been replaced by ‘what to think’ with students dissuaded from questioning approved narratives.
Worse, class disruption has reached the point where kids have become ungovernable and learn nothing. For boys in particular, this is a natural response to the frustration of failing, which they are doing in increasing numbers. Strict discipline used to help boys push through this emotion, but discipline is almost entirely absent leaving teenagers to seek out male authority figures on Twitter and TikTok. More often than not, they end up in the arms of Andrew Tate or other influencers.
‘Unfortunately, it seems as though learning has become a chore when students are expected to answer in a certain way or face educational consequences such as being marked down for expressing differing views, no matter how eloquently.’
He added:
‘They say kids missing school adds up to lost education, but kids missing learning opportunities while in school is probably immeasurable.’
Another Speccie reader wrote in about the message parents are given at the start of their child’s orientation. ‘School these days is very different to when you went to school. We urge you not to get upset by the new way of learning and to trust us and go with it.’
As time went on, they noticed that there was no longer any ‘pressure to succeed’, even in gifted and talented courses. When it came to completing homework, parents complained that there needed to be a unified stance from the teachers to encourage children to do the work. The parents were told that they needed to ‘protect the feelings of the less advanced students’ and that a ‘single, low standard would be applied to all children’. This prompted many to enrol their kids in extracurricular tutoring.
It’s not only parents who are concerned. A teacher on leave following Covid mandates expressed frustration that the ‘joy’ of the job has been sucked out. ‘It’s micro-managed to every degree and soulless. The kids are different too. They’re so challenging…’
One Asian parent added that there are cultural differences, with Asian families insisting on a parallel curriculum where they go to the trouble of duplicating work after school. Those who do not spend extra time and money supplementing the school course – as is a cultural norm in some communities – will see their children fall behind at a faster rate.
While it is admirable that parents invest extra resources picking up the slack, the taxpayer spends more money than ever per child on an education system that has never been worse.
Australians deserve value for money when it comes to education.
They should have absolute confidence that they can send their children to school without them returning home indoctrinated into some fringe and dangerous radical political ideology.
All of us expect the Education Minister to do his job and make sure that standardised testing remains a measure not only of our kids, but of their teachers.
We educated our children better with blackboards and chalk – and that’s the truth.
Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
