Nice article.

It is an interesting time with education.

My own experience in the 1990s with university, especially looking back, is that the subject matter was pretty tame in terms of depth and complexity.

Employed in the sector, I felt the situation was even worse with regard to most so-called professors.

I have a 12 year old daughter who scores above (outside) the top category of the Naplan test, so I am interested to see how her education of key issues like race and inequality play out over time.

All I can do at this stage is tell her that each issue has many perspectives, and that solutions to race and even global warming are complex and not issues that are easily fixed.

Fortunately her fascination with the Soviet Union and communism has mellowed somewhat recently with a few lessons of its many shortcomings.

As for CRT, I find it to be another simplistic theory that does not really explain much, but serves a particular agenda seeking to rewrite history.

Indoctrination at school is the domain of Labor !

Good piece as retired ₩Prof of energy. It is the university education that frightens me. TODAYD Profs are interested in career an fame. They also have become polarised and largely left wing. When I got my first post lecturing there were great multi day week discussions from all sides of an issue. If I did now what I did then. I would be sacked for insabotdination.

A very good article, I found myself nodding in agreement as I read it. The statement you make that "Parents know more about their child's education now than they did before the pandemic" is spot on and the Liberal Party needs to strike while the iron is hot, before we all go back to a 'normal' existence. CRT is an interesting theory to explore at tertiary education levels but has no role in guiding educational outcomes for Australia's youth.

Meanwhile back in the good old days of the fifties when I was "educated" beginning in primary school everyone was brainwashed (especially later on by TV) to accept their proper place in the one-dimensional world of Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver and the The Saturday Evening Post the one-dimensional zombified state of the thus mass-produced normal dreadfully sane every-person was accurately described in the song Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds - Little Boxes Made Out of Ticky Tacky, Little Boxes All the SAME.

In one way or another we were also taught by popular comics, story and history (his-story) books that the white man was born to rule. Back in those days we celebrated Empire Day - rule Britannia, Britannia rules the seas - blah blah blah.

On TV, in particular the only "good" American Indian was a dead one, the darkies were more of less sub human and only fit to serve their white-skinned "superiors", so too with the China men. As far as I remember I never ever saw a white skinned serving either a darkie or a china-man, except perhaps as part of the missionary project to bring Jesus and "civilization" to the godless heathens or barbarians.

Daffy Duck,

yes, in a lot of ways you are right.

I just feel education should be a constant evaluation of our strengths and weaknesses as we progress.

At school, we never had time for fancy discussions on race or "our place in the world".
We were too busy with algebra, science, history, maths, geometry etc.
History was about the Kings and Queens of England and the Parliament
and how the parliament got control of the government from the King.
Then it was all about 1770 & Cook and 1788, and the states forming
the Commonwealth, then the wars 1 & 2.
If someone queried if he was a boy or a girl we would have pulled his pants down.

Then to work and we apprentices were expected to assist our tradesmen
with whom we worked often with the maths as they were Great Depression
and wartime graduates and missed much schooling.
It was bootstrap the economy time.

Australia has a very grim future.

Not necessarily ttbn, it depends on how soon the majority of people
understand that solar and wind will NEVER work.
If we link the eastern grid to the WA grid and expand both with a
high capacity grid network, Australia might just be big enough to work.
Even then we might need a bit of quick start backup.
The greens will not wake up even when the electricity network totally collapses.

Australia has a very grim future.
ttbn,
Depends really on what people want for Australia. The Left simply wants to hand it over to people who won't consider others & the Conservatives are too soft to deal with the Lefties.
The future will only be grim for those who believed that they'd never run out of other people's money !

I am happy that Graham Young made the connection that leftist ideology among white people is predominantly a cause of the public service. It also includes academia but there is a link between academia and the public service.

Democracy has many enemies and some of those enemies reside within the upper echelons of the public service. There is this idea among many public servants that they can cure all the ills of the world, if only penny pinching democratic governments would give their departments enough money to do the job. They dream of a government "Of the public service, By the public service, and For the public service."

Which is about a good a definition of Communism as you can get.

Government departments are notoriously left wing and these departments love exercising power beyond Parliamentary control. When governments deport dangerous criminals, government departments can somehow over rule them. "Human Rights" legislation run by government bureaucrats routinely nullify parliamentary legislation.

Like the ABC, many government departments are getting out of civilian control because they think that they are the masters of the people and not their servants. By adopting CRT, gender specific pronouns, and promoting transgenderism to schoolchildren, the public service teachers gave parents two fingers and unequivocally displayed to them just who was boss. But in Virginia, a majority of the electorate gave the leftist public servants two fingers right back again.

Democracy is a real inconvenience to the sort of utopian world the public servants envisage. And if they can not overthrow democracy, at least they can rot it out and make it unworkable. The left once used class to divide society into oppressors and victims, but now they have hit on race. They shamelessly promote anti white racism and pander to any minority group, no matter how offensive, unproductive, or kooky they are. They also never cease promoting grand visions for the future, like combatting supposed HIGW, which more often than not become economic catastrophes.

The mirage that America is some kind liberal democracy is laughable. Its a one party state, where they party has two heads. I disliked Trump, not because he was an "R" man and not a "D" man, but because he was an idiot, and Biden was lesser of an idiot. All mainstream American Politian's support the military industrial complex, otherwise they wouldn't be mainstream. I really don't care who is the governor of the state of Virginia.

The latest gripe from those on the right is education is becoming too liberal and no longer embraces their hogwash of nonsense as the teachable "facts", DD has made a good post on that. According to the hard right fellas they have abandoned their cloak of bigoted racism, class divide and narrow mindedness in education, and have replaced it with open neoliberalism teaching. I don't think they have, I think they are unhappy that they are no longer in full control of education.

LEGO,
Hear, hear ! Spot-on Graham Young !

One in six Australians works in the public service. Presently - and there is no end in sight - Australia is controlled by state health officials. Politicians are in thrall to these pen pushers who know little enough about their own discipline, let alone what makes a society work. Their hysteria and obsession with 'saving lives' will be the death of Australia unless the people we elect start making decisions on the broader aspects of survival.

I’m wondering what indoctrinated kids will make of the signs that say ,
‘CRT Your local bloke”?

AJ insubordination is spelt as I've spelt it. So, you were a professor of energy? Interesting!

So, setting aside your predilection or coal-fired power? What in your professional opinion is the best way to decarbonise an economy without coal or tanking the economy?

And given thorium is the most energy-dense material on the planet and four times more abundant than uranium! And all the bugs now ironed out of cheaper than coal MSR thorium!

What advice would you give on the topic raised? Burn and export more coal perhaps? And if we had to replace all our coal exports with other energy exports? What would you suggest? Interested in your "expert" opinion.
Alan B.

Paul 1405. As a slightly left-leaning centre left liberal. I think I agree with your educated erudite opinion.

I believe children should be taught facts that must be supported by factual evidence and science! Not popular opinion, myth and legend nor party political propaganda, regardless of where it comes from.

Even from a (straight as an arrow) PM who incredibly, never ever lied in public office to the public. But like honest Abe, confessed he'd done it, when asked, who chopped down that cherry tree.

It's very easy not to lie, when you can simply avoid answering any question that may seek, holding someone to account?
Alan B.

Alan,
As a Life member of “The Australasian Society of Pedants”, I feel compelled to point out that it was George Washington who confesses to cutting down the cherry tree not Abe.
(and it could be a myth about George).

STOP LYING ISSY! You know as well as I do it was Rufus Coops the first President of the grand republic of the good old U.S. of A, who chopped down grandma's tree. BTW, it wasn't a cheery tree, it was a pomegranate tree. The Yanks were at war with the Poms at the time, so they took to anything Pommy, such as trees. BTW President Coops didn't chop the tree down, well he sort of did, he used a tomahawk he swapped from the Chickasaw Indians for a strings of beads and a keg of 'firewater', all for a lousy tomahawk and the island of Manhattan.

Hope that has been a valuable history lesson for you.

Paul,
If you took history it didn’t work, try Caskarra.

Thanks, Ise, yes you are right it was George Washington, not Abe. I "corrected" my correct comment on George Washington, wrongly to Abe, wondering as I did so who would correct me! A good education is based on facts and corrected errors! Thank you for helping me make a very important point! Have a good weekend.
Alan B.

Alan,
Any time I can be of help!

Interesting how supposed libertarians of the right or conservative bent want to regulate more stuff?

Uncomfortable with how the US is always used as an example to aspire to; no matter how suboptimal, while radical right yet conservative libertarians seem paranoid about education, science and empowered citizens, in general, reflecting the deep seated eugenics roots or social pecking order?

Fact is CRT is not taught in US schools nor widely in higher education but simply more a framework for some analyses, not all.... similar to LGBT or gender are restricted to niche courses (as useful as mediaeval history for employment outcomes).

However, the teaching/learning theory framework or taxonomy that many have used (indirectly) in an attempt to nobble the independence of higher education curricula and content, has been Bloom's Taxonomy (also used K-12). It's a hierarchy of implicit skills to be learnt i.e. know/remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create or synthesise.

Kevin Andrews signalled the desire of his peers, although tertiary educated themselves, is that students do not need to learn skills of 'analysis' nor beyond, just the lower K-10/VET level; leaving Australian higher ed on par with Turkey, Hungary and Russia.

Hardly aspirational for research, the nation or economy but would produce less stress for LNP MPs, donors and gatekeepers with citizens knowing their place and not challenging the status quo?

Back in the fifties when kids were watching "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver", which taught kids good social values, kids were not killing kids. Juvenile homicide is now the USA's fastest growing crime statistic.

Today, kids learn through rap songs how a real man rapes his mother, bashes his hoe, becomes a youth gang member, kills other gang members, regards women as body parts, and takes every drug imaginable. Dying of an overdose is the fashionable way to go for pop stars today.

TV was once touted as "the greatest educational tool ever invented." It is that, but today we don't care what values our kids are being educated in.

Kids from low income families who are not real bright living in single parent families, with no male role model present, are being educated to think that real men are violent men, who get even with their enemies with a gun, a knife, or a box of matches. What intelligent people see as on screen exaggerated parodies of life that is amusing, dumb kids see as a script for how to behave as a hero.

On screen bad guys are always depicted as being self assured, having lots of money, nice cars, the most sexy girlfriends, fashionable clothes, and the best lines. And then we wonder why kids with IQ's 70-85 want to emulate their heroes?