Class war

Unnoticed by those with better things to do, nasty words and class-warfare rallying cries have been ricocheting around a facebook page that serves as a forum for Victoria’s VCE students, with private- and state-school students calling each other “retards”  and “povos”, a teenspeak contraction to describe those from backgrounds less well-heeled.

At The Age, where prospects are so grim there is nothing better to do than smear tosh on forest products while waiting for the receivers, the fact that spotty adolescents swap jibes is considered big news. Not only has that newspaper assigned two reporters to investigate what 17-year-olds say about each other, it features the lamentation of a state school principal on its opinion page. It’s just not fair, moans Berwick Lodge Primary School Principal Henry Grossek, that private schools offer scholarships to the best and brightest while leaving the state system to shape the minds of those with less grey matter to work with. As to the rest of the column, it would make a fine question for an HSC exam, as in ‘What is this bloke on about?’

So why would parents pay large sums to keep their kids out of the public system? The sort of education illustrated by the video at this link will shed some light. Produced by youngsters at Grossek’s very own school, two of its four items reflect his students’ concern for the fate of our CO2-afflicted planet. Apparently, according to the moppets in the first clip and what teachers have imprinted on their little brains, re-cycling milk containers saves frogs from extinction by lowering water temperatures which are “growing hotter every day”. In the fourth clip a pair of somewhat older alarmists turn off the air conditioning because arctic foxes don’t approve.

Given that warmist propaganda now passes for fact in all schools, private and public alike, it would be a surprise if students at fee-paying academies were not being exposed to much the same climate cant and drivel. The difference, as parents footing the bills for their kids’ educations might hope, is that the schools they support are quite likely doing a better, more thorough and comprehensive job of implanting nonsense. One suspects, for example, that a private-school mis-education in global warming goes beyond a jumble of righteous cliches that paint the fate of the world, its frogs and arctic foxes as hanging on old milk cartons being placed in the correct rubbish bin.

Principal Grossek’s yearning for his notion of a better world can be read in full via the link below. After that, this guide to homeschooling might be of interest.

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