Dear Graham,

Why just peck around the edges?

This whole sick idea of the state intervening in the "education" of children is wrong. It is about indoctrination, about the imposition of their goals, whatever they may be, into young brains.

There should be no ministry of education at any level of government.
Education and its contents should belong in the sole realm of the family, which may naturally delegate some of the actual day-to-day teaching to competent teachers of their choice which they trust.

The most that the state could perhaps have with it, if at all, is to ensure that poor children are not left without education because their parents cannot afford it, but this ought to be handled anyway as part of a general-purpose financial safety-net.

Well, it most definitely wasn't the work of Conservatives to dumb down education !
Why ? Because there isn't a Conservative in Education, it's all Left !
I wonder what sort of excuses they'll come up with over that mess of their doing !

Here is s definition of the usual dreadfully sane normal human being and the "education" that he or she has been subjected to, or brainwashed by.

The usual man or woman tends to be only minimally human - human only in the gross technical sense, and reduced by all of the usual social influences to a pre-programmed robot of unconscious personal drives, conventional ideas, and social motives, all of which are kept under control by the locally standard social propaganda and its closed system of stimulus-response educational techniques.
The social influences that are generated to "educate" and control human beings in every part of the world are all basically of the kind that is now popularly declaimed as "brainwashing" whenever the educational propaganda or techniques of "others" is being criticized or mocked.
People whose bodies, minds and selves are under the control of the machinery of the State collective are not generally involved with the free pursuit of Truth in any sense at all.

Meanwhile the principal "education" or brainwashing vehicle in the modern world has been TV and more recently I-phone social media.

Everybody becomes what they put their attention on!

Young people spend many hours a day transfixed (and being brainwashed by) screens of one kind or another. This all-pervasive dumbing down of intelligence has been described by numerous authors including Nicholas Carr the author of the book The Shallows and the Rough Type website.

What are young people being taught or brainwashed into being or becoming?

Faithful consumers of course. I shop for my favorite brand-name Logo!

How this is done is described in two books: This Little Kiddy Went To Market by Sharon Beder, and Buy Baby Buy by Susan Gregory Thomas.

At another level we now all "live" in a state of collective psychosis or a media mad world which features and includes the worst aspects of Huxley's Brave New World (and Revisited) and Orwell's 1984.

All of that having been said the content of any school curriculum however well intended or put together is more or less completely irrelevant!

Hi ttbn:- In my experience leftist governments sort of withhold money from the states by attaching conditions to money given to the states.

But conservative governments hand out money without any strings attached.

Hi Yuyutsu:- Democracy is guaranteed to fail if 100% of all families in a society or culture are not on the same page or supporting the same set of morals, ethics & principles.

Hi Daffy Duck:- So we should allow children to grow up dumb & dumber, so that it will be easier for Communist China to colonise Australia, is that what you are saying?

Dear imacentristmoderate,

«Democracy is guaranteed to fail if 100% of all families in a society or culture are not on the same page...»

Your statement is a grammatically ambiguous: did you mean that democracy fails if ANY family is not on the same page as the others or if there are no two families exactly on the same page? And does this failure happen if the above happens in both society AND culture, or just in any one of the two?

At present, different families do have different values and I doubt whether there are any two families in Australia with exactly the same morals, ethics and principles. But then, it is also safe to say that democracy is failing here (not that it has been a great success anywhere else).

Democracy is a tool, not a goal in itself, its purpose is to try to limit the number of people who lose their freedom at the tyranny of states.

If brainwashing in the education-system was successful in reducing everyone to the same morals, ethics and principles, then indeed we would obtain a technical, but sham democracy. The question would then be, all humans being the same, why keep more than one person alive?!

Ants can be very industrious and efficient, but if humans are to turn into ants (and China is indeed heading that way) then what is human life for?

Hi Yuyutsu:- An old lawyer once said to me "if 100% of the population was traditional christian & genuinely attempting to live according to the 10 commandments, almost all of our problems would disappear".

Enlightenment leaders who "wrote the book" on modern western democracy hundreds of years ago, also stated failure was guaranteed without monoculturalism.