Opinion
“Simpsons did it!” is a South Park joke that just keeps coming true. After all, a topical satire which has run for 35 years, 761 episodes, a feature film, and videogame and comic book adaptations, is inevitably going to cover nearly every topic imaginable. 9/11, the Trump presidency, even Nobel Prize winners and football games: all have been “predicted” by The Simpsons.
Then there’s “Girls Just Want to Have Sums”, where Springfield Elementary trials a segregated girls’ math class. Hyper-intelligent Lisa is dismayed to find that the “feminised” maths is a load of feel-good gobbledegook which has nothing to do with maths at all.
Wait until they make her do “indigenous maths”.
Deeply embedded in the K-10 mathematics syllabus is the ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures’ cross curriculum priority, which ensures ‘students can engage with and value the histories and cultures of Australian First Nations Peoples in relation to mathematics’.
So — no counting above 20, then?
In Year 1, teachers attempt to explain to the kiddies why 2 + 2 = 4 through First Nations Australians’ dances. In Year 2, the point is hammered home again, using ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances to understand the balance and connection between addition and subtraction’.
For those students who still have not caught on, their teachers will explain through ‘First Nations Australians’ cultural stories and dances about how they care for Country/Place such as turtle-egg gathering using number sentences’. In Year 4, teachers explore ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances that show the connection between addition and subtraction, representing this as a number sentence and discussing how this conveys important information about balance in processes on Country/Place’. Just in case you thought this might be the last time children are subjected to the silent snake or cassowary dance, think again. The Year 5s are investigating ‘how mathematical models involving combinations of operations can be used to represent songs, stories and/or dances of First Nations Australians’.
And we wonder why students’ numeracy just keeps plummeting.
It is in secondary school, however, that the architects of the mathematics syllabus really get down to business. From Year 7 onwards, students studying statistics are introduced to the notion of reconciliation between ‘First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians’. They are told to look at ‘secondary data from the Reconciliation Barometer to conduct and report on statistical investigations relating to First Nations Australians’.
Will they get to do statistics on how frequently Aboriginal children are beaten and raped by their families, compared to non-Aboriginal children? How much more likely an Aboriginal woman is likely to be the victim of domestic violence? The rate of criminal offending in the Aboriginal population compared to the non-Aboriginal?
Perhaps they’ll learn how much of their parents’ taxes are spent on Aboriginal programs?
Somehow I doubt it.
Every Australian parent should know that their children are being subjected to overt politicisation in maths classes courtesy of the national curriculum. They should also know that the technique being used was developed by Brazilian Marxist, Paolo Freire, who proposed that the only true education is political education and that all teaching is a political act. When Freire talked about literacy, he meant political literacy, rather than actually being able to read and write.
His view was that the teacher’s role is not to educate in the traditional liberal education sense of the word, but to bring about what he termed the ‘conscientisation of the student’ by awakening their consciousness to the real political condition of their lives. Freire claimed that conscientisation could be achieved in the classroom by ensuring children are taught to see structural oppression in all aspects of life.
Spectator Australia
Watching the whining brats stamping their little feet at a “school climate strike”, it appears he’s succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Home-school your kids.