There are some things, Orwell said, that are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them. But “intellectuals” ain’t what they used to be: increasingly, universities are turning out graduates who can barely read or do basic high school maths.
And that’s just the Teaching graduates.
Naturally, education unions insist that the answer is more and more money. But Australia has been spending more and more money on education, year on year – and education standards have been just as steadily dropping.
Clearly, the cause of Australia’s disgraceful decline in basic education standards is not money.
Instead, it’s ideology.
Like so many ills that plague society today, it all goes back to the hippies.
To understand the parlous state of literacy and writing skills one needs to return to the heady days of the late 1960s and early ’70s when English teaching underwent a dramatic and far-reaching revolution.
In proper ‘progressive’, Marxist fashion, education intellectuals threw up their hands in horror at the idea of a hierarchical classroom, with the teacher clearly at the top and children doing as they were told. That’s, like, fascism, man.
Instead of teaching basic literacy skills and ensuring students mastered more complex and difficult tasks in a disciplined, teacher-led classroom environment, English teachers were told to prioritise a child-centred, personal growth model.
It was a progressive, Rousseauian approach based on the assumption that learning to read was as natural as learning to talk.
The whole-language model was adopted to teach children to read, and standard English was seen as elitist, obsolete and guilty of ignoring working-class and migrant dialects. As for writing, teachers were told the focus should be on the child’s creation of meaning and that correcting faulty spelling, punctuation and grammar stifled creativity, spontaneity and imagination.
The results were obvious pretty early on. In the early 80s, I had the experience of coaching a niece taught by whole-language. I noticed right away that she was obviously parrotting the text rather than reading it. My suspicions were confirmed by pointing at a random word and asking what it was. She’d read out the whole block of text, stopping when she got to that word. She didn’t know the word – she was merely counting to its place in a memorised text.
But if whole-language was bad, what followed was worse: critical literacy.
With critical literacy, the Marxists infesting education theory have given up even pretending.
Drawing on a neo-Marxist view of education associated with Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, where capitalism reproduces itself via the education system, radical academics argue English teaching must be empowering and liberating.
Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed was compulsory reading during the ’70s and ’80s, described it as a situation where students must be taught “to perceive themselves in dialectical relationship with their social reality (and) to assume an increasingly critical attitude toward the world and so to transform it”.
The Australian Association for the Teaching of English, the peak professional body representing English teachers, has long championed critical literacy and the need to empower students to become new-age, cultural-left warriors. The pervasive influence of critical literacy, and the fact English classrooms are seen as sites to promote woke ideology, is best illustrated by an editorial in the AATE’s national journal after the re-election of the Howard government in 2004. The editor, Wayne Sawyer, argued the fact so many young people supported a conservative government proved English teachers had failed in their task to produce “a questioning, critical generation” and, as a result, they must redouble their efforts to ensure future voters voted the right way.
Like every other Marxist “critical” nonsense, critical literacy has a plain and explicit aim: bringing down capitalism by brainwashing our kids with ideological garbage.
Associated with critical literacy is the emergence of a rainbow alliance of cultural-left theories including deconstructionism, postmodernism and radical feminist, gender, queer and postcolonial theories. Again, the impact has been to shift the focus of the classroom from teaching standard English and the more formal aspects of the subject to radicalising students and empowering their voices and personal agency.
The Australian
If you’re wondering why a generation of kids worship a scowling, privileged Swedish ignoramus, and shake their little fists and wave badly-spelled signs at climate and BLM protests – there’s your answer.
To borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell, little Jemima can’t read, and she can’t think, either.
And that’s just how the Marxist education bureaucracy wants it.
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