Any analysis of what happens in schools and how children are raised in todays world that does not mention the all-pervasive influence of TV,
of 24/7 advertising (or more correctly propaganda), and the fact that young people, beginning as young as TWO tears old, spend heaps of time in front of or using electronic screens of one kind/size or another, has not even begun to address the problem of how to raise sane, healthy balanced children. And how many young boys and teenagers come to school tanked up and thus hyper-active on ENERGY drinks such as Mother, V, Red Bull, Rock Star and Monster. All of which create the situation in which many children and young people, especially boys, have minimal attention spans.

TV is THE most powerful culturally formative influence in todays world. Indeed the anti-"culture" created in the image of TV now rules the entire world, and that anti-"culture" is completely indifferent towards the well-being of both human beings and Earthkind altogether.

Old style "education" is comletely powerless against that onslaught!
Especially for kids from the lower socio-economic classes.
Some references:
This Little Kiddy Went To Mark - how "education" has been taken over by the benighted ghouls from the corporations that now rule the world
http://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb/kiddy.html
Also:
Consuming Kids The Commercialization of Childhood
Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman
And this reference in which the author describes how our entire techo-"culture" systematically destroys the intrinsic psycho-biological intelligence of our children, beginning with the medicalization/hospitalization of child birth/
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/JCP98.html
The authors book Evolutions End is one of the most disturbing books that I have ever read.

Ah that old holy cow the Bible!
As if introducing it to most young people in todays Western world is going to make the slightest bit of difference to anything. For most students it will be nothing more than a bit of junk floating around in their psyches, along with all the millions of pieces of other information and propaganda that they are bombarded with from the moment they are placed in front of a TV screen as babies or toddlers.

And are you going to point out that the "God" of the "Old" Testament is essentially a monstrous despot who justifies executing people for what in todays world are absurd reasons. See Levicticus for example.
And that that "God" was used as an excuse to commit genocide against the enemies of the Jewish tribes. Some dim-witted Christian apologists even argue that such genocide was quite "reasonable". One such propaganda hack is even lauded by some as being one of the foremost Christian "philosophers" in todays world.

And are you going to tell young people that at root the "New" Testament is deeply anti-semitic, and that it has been used to justify the persecution of the Jews (the Christ-killers) for over a 1,000 years, which INEVITABLY resulted in the nazi holocaust (the "final solution" to the "problem" of the Jews).

Then again I suppose we could offer the completely dim-witted Accelerated Christian Learning curriculum as an alternative to main-stream education. A system which is used quite a bit here in Australia. A system which obviously ill prepares its brain-washed victims to live with any kind of informed intelligence in todays instantaneously inter-connected globalized multi-cultural Quantum world.

Daffy Duck.
Most kids these days barely watch TV and from the age of about ten social media takes over so they are forming their value systems from direct interaction with the community (literally the global village)rather than the corporate media.

The other point I'd like to make is that globalisation has made Australia less diverse, not more since the people emigrating here are functionally citizens of the global West before they step onto the plane. Immigrants want a Western education for their kids to give them the best start in life so there's little point in promoting multiculturalism in education, who is it meant to improve?
If the politicians want Australia to continue as it is then they need to promote one set of values in education and one only, if they want society to fracture along ethnic lines then fall apart like it has in the U.K and Scandinavia then they have only to copy their "dumbed down" relativistic education programmes.
What's obvious after forty years of Third World immigration is that if there's a cultural vacuum caused by a breakdown in the transmission of the values of the host society the children of migrants will always adopt yet another culture and weld it onto that of their parents, lately that's the American Negro "ghetto" style.
If kids emerge from the school system at 17 literate and speaking like Christopher Pyne instead of sounding like a Detroit drug dealer with an IQ of 70 then at least we'll still be able to converse with them and take over their their development from there.

i think many (mostly from the left) are scared their kids might retain or learn the values that their parents trashed. You would think that naturally parents would want what is best for their kids. Being indoctrinated with socialist dogma appears more important to many.

Or indoctrinated with fundamentalist religion.

Or fundamentalist Atheism...or fundamentalist Liberalism....fundamentalist Feminism...fundamentalist Homosexualism and so on
There's no solution to the problem but to cut out all arts, civics and humanities training from government schools and replace it with sport, philosophy and debating.

all dat money spend by kevvy and Julia on da edmacation revolutions...really suks. We shoulda ave negociated a bettor outcums and gave us money for new flat screens tvs. eh?

Yes, the Fundamentalist Whatevers can be tiresome. However, Long is demonstrating his concern with the monopoly that the left has on Australia's intellectual institutions. He is highlighting that there is not an equal playing field in the current marketplace of ideas.

Well said, Tosca. BTW, as you would know, Tosca, Ruggero Raimondi sings a great Scarpia.

It's great to see liberalists and traditionalists starting to make their case more forcefully. For decades now we have sat back and watched the Left's long march through our institutions. Like all authoritarians, the Left knows instinctively that controlling what young people think is immensly important. It sometimes takes decades before people overcome the brainwashing they receive in schools and universities. The fact that 'academics' can't differentiate between a literature which reveals something about the human condition and an advertisement which tries to sell washing detergent just betrays the fact that there are no longer any academics in the social sciences. Only second rate cultural marxists and activists.

Interestingly, 20 years of psychological research confirms that children learn best to read through phonics. While I'm not a fan of Miranda Devine, she's right in this instance. Of course, she'd be more persuasive if she'd learn to actually employ fact checkers or, I don't know, do something radical like consult an actual expert in the field.