Australian students are ignorant but woke: just the way the Long March left intended.
That’s the depressing conclusion to be gleaned from the latest assessment of Australian secondary students’ knowledge of civics – the basic skill set of a liberal democracy.
Most secondary students lack the basic knowledge and skills considered necessary to become active and informed citizens, nationwide testing has revealed, amid signs that young people are also losing interest in political news and world affairs.
Civics might seem a dry affair, but in a nation that’s a federation of states run by parliamentary democracy, with compulsory voting, civics is anything but irrelevant. Case in point: during last year’s bushfire crisis, many people, egged on by the media, shrieked that “Scott Morrison should do sumfin’!”, in complete ignorance of the fact that emergency services in Australia are entirely within the remit of the states.
Results from the latest national civics and citizenship assessment reveal that achievement has stagnated, with just 38 per cent of Year 10 students demonstrating a proficient level of knowledge across topics including democracy and Australia’s system of government, citizens’ rights and legal obligations, and national values[…]
A report from the 2019 assessment, due to be published on Thursday, revealed that only 14 per cent of the primary students were able to correctly describe the relationship between democracy and voting, while just 36 per cent knew that a referendum was decided by “the people of Australia” when asked via a multiple-choice question.
Among Year 10 students, 45 per cent were able to correctly answer the same multiple-choice question, however only 19 per cent could correctly identify two modern-day democratic principles after reading a short description of the Magna Carta and English law.
Still, they might be dumb, but they’re useful to the left.
While knowledge has waned, however, the assessment found that activism among young people is on the rise[…]
Both Year 6 and Year 10 students perceived pollution as the biggest problem affecting Australia, closely followed by climate change and water shortages.
And, of course, they’re properly woke.
Students also demonstrated increasingly positive attitudes towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and Australian diversity, while a significant number of Year 10 students said immigrants should be encouraged to keep their cultural beliefs, practices and languages.
Good little globalists, all.
Mr de Carvalho said[…]it was pleasing to see young people engaged in social activism, such as the role of peaceful protest, but it was equally important that it be built upon a foundation of knowledge and understanding of the political process[…]
“We really need to value the fact that we live in a democracy, that everyone gets a say in making laws and policies, and we would really miss it if it were gone.”
Mr Carvalho said it was important that young people learned to engage intellectually with people who might hold views different from their own.
Good luck with that. You’re dealing with a generation of brainwashed ideologues who don’t just hate democracy, but have been conditioned to believe that hearing different views from their own is literally violence. That’s why they’re such violently intolerant little shits: they think that punching someone in the face is literally the same as saying something they don’t agree with.
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that…they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages”
George Orwell, 1984.
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