Education Reformation

In a now famous 1984 interview, Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov said that it takes roughly fifteen-to-twenty years to subvert a nation’s morale (a process he called ideological subversion) via the education system.

As he put it, “Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years it takes to educate one generation of students… Marxism/Leninism… is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students.”

I frequently speak with parents who are dismayed about what their children are learning at school. A recurring theme is the need for schools to get back to basics and focus on the fundamentals of education instead of producing politically-correct social justice warriors. Now more than ever, many parents, students, and even teachers feel that the schooling system gives students the conclusions they're supposed to reach, rather than helping them reach their own conclusions through sound reasoning.

For example, I’m often told that discussions on gender identity and climate change alienate and vilify those who hold a contrary opinion to the approved narrative. The idea that such topics are areas of focus in the first place is, when you think about it, quite strange. This is not a new concern but, as we seem to have reached “peak woke”, the need for a more robust and grounded approach to education is becoming ever more apparent.

One approach we could take in the future is to disband the national curriculum and return oversight of the education system to the states and territories, as Tony Abbot and I discussed on my podcast last year. After all, when Labor introduced the national curriculum in 2010, we were told that it would be a world-class “back to basics” system.

However, it seems that students’ grasp of the basics is declining, not improving. As Dr Bella D’Abrera of the Institute of Public Affairs has written, “just 15 per cent of students are exceeding [NAPLAN] expectations… the majority of Australia’s Year 9 students use punctuation at a Year 3 level.” No doubt, social media and smartphones have contributed to this, but it’s fair to say that there is a problem with our education system.

A centralised bureaucracy overseeing education is convenient for those wanting to teach students broadly from an activist curriculum, but apparently not for improving literacy.

The age at which children are engaging with the education system is decreasing, too. In South Australia, the state Labor government has recently celebrated its $715 million spending package to provide pre-schooling for three-year-olds. While there are parents for whom there may be few other options, we ought to be concerned about the state’s tendency to get its hands on children so early. Again, this is convenient for those who view the traditional nuclear family as an institution to be subverted rather than respected and supported.

We should be striving to reduce the cost-of-living so that there is less pressure for both parents to work in the first place. Of course, that would mean the state gets less tax revenue from parents.

An education reformation is needed in Australia if we are to help future generations. Young people emerging from our school system are unnecessarily ridden with angst about the so-called climate crisis. The school system is ill-equipped to handle youth mental health challenges and arguably exacerbates them, given the ideological perspectives schools enforce.