Playing the Radical

Something is seriously wrong with our public education system. Few voices can be heard to dispute this. But as the problems in public education grow, so too does the strength and power of the Australian Education Union. What sort of beast is the AEU and how has it played its part in the growing crisis in education in Australia?

The AEU has become one of the most powerful trade unions in Australia. Its 165,000 members contribute $45 million a year in membership dues alone. While overall union membership has been in virtual freefall now for a decade or more, with fewer and fewer workers seeing any point in membership of trade unions, the AEU has both maintained its strength and has increasingly become an authoritative voice of left-wing ideology within the union movement.

The education unions were not always militant organisations, and militancy did not come easily to teachers, but the Left has traditionally found it simple enough to capture union positions and control union apparatuses. Removing militants from union dominance, however, is usually a more difficult process than simply running an alternative ticket in an election. A great many factors come into play, not the least of which is apathy, and on more than a few occasions the democratic processes within trade union organisations have been a little blurry.

The AEU can seem to defy interpretation. Is it a union in the purest sense of the word, or is it a professional lobby group? Is it an arm of the education department, or is it an organisation for the development of curriculum? To answer the question, “What is the AEU?” is to see the real power and disturbing nature of this “free association” of teachers.

The AEU has clearly-stated policies regarding its role as a union, in the traditional, industrial sense of the word. It unambiguously states that it represents the industrial interests of its members. This traditional approach and perception of the role of a union may lead it to a range of political positions but is all legitimate union business. Much of the work of the AEU is, however, anything but traditional union business.

The AEU has moved well beyond a traditional role of championing workers’ rights, pay and conditions. There is a clear political essence to its work and thinking. This is not out of place with the aspirations that Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had for the union movement when he produced his critique on “economism”. The revolutionary Left has long had a political, tactical and philosophical dilemma when it comes to the union movement. Industrial action was seen as a weapon in itself and one which would weaken the class enemy, but to not link it to political action was seen as diminishing the revolutionary potential of the working class.

Gramsci, along with many Marxist theorists, believed that too many trade unionists had settled for a reformist, gradualist approach, in that they had refused to struggle on the political front in addition to the economic front. While Gramsci saw the trade unions as one organ of a counter-hegemonic force in capitalist society, the trade union leaders simply saw these organisations as a means to improve conditions within the existing structure.

The AEU’s transformation from a relatively conservative voice for teachers into a radicalised and politicised organisation of considerable strength needs to be viewed alongside the political manoeuvring among the organised Left of the time. Gramsci and his followers sought to wage their war on cultural hegemony as a means of achieving socialism. It was to be a revolution in the state rather than against the state. Cultural hegemony, for Gramsci, had been achieved through the church, family, media and importantly education. The way to revolution was to weaken these institutions. His views were energetically taken up in the late 1960s by the New Left.

The major player on the Left for much of the twentieth century in this country was the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). The party began to assess its future and re-examine its tactics in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It broke from the Soviet Union and followed what was labelled “Euro-Communism”. This position sought neutrality from the major socialist blocs of Moscow and Beijing. The new position was far more in line with that of Gramsci, and his works gained both popularity and immediacy among CPA leaders. This shift would have repercussions for the education debate long after the demise of the CPA.

By the early 1970s the CPA was turning its attention more to the politics of feminism, the environment and Aboriginal issues. In 1979 it published a new political program for the party (Towards Socialism in Australia) which addressed these issues in some depth and saw education as fertile ground. It spoke of the need to change the nature of education and that “pressure to conform” led to an acceptance and support of many school students for the system. It spoke of how students “suffer” from authoritarian relations in the schools and from an education designed to make them accept their roles in society. With regard to university students it spoke of students struggling against the way education is shaped and of how they were demanding greater educational democracy and reform of curricula and teaching methods. It took special note of how these students were playing a role in various social movements and were providing activists and leaders to these movements. The party looked to encompass this approach into its work.

The CPA disappeared from the Australian political scene a little more than a decade after producing this document. Its members had already been involved with the various “social movements” or were activists in the unions. Many simply maintained their political and ideological work without a formal party structure.

Numbers of ex-Communist Party members have since risen to prominence. Stuart Macintyre, Professor of History at Melbourne University and now responsible for drafting the new history curriculum for schools, is just one example. The left-wing historian’s work includes The History Wars and is infamous for deriding “conservative” views of history as being caught up with “the tyranny of the fact”.

The teacher unions also “benefited” from the ideological input and energies of many ex-CPA members.

While the AEU is not engaged in revolutionary struggle to overthrow the state, many of its activities are at some remove from the traditionally recognised and accepted business of a trade union. If the unions, in Gramsci’s vision, were to play their role in attacking the hegemonic culture of the day, then they would have to become much more closely linked with the revolutionary organs seeking to transform society. As there is, today, no such organisation to lead the struggle for social transformation, then the role of the union becomes ambiguous. These leaderless long marchers can never achieve the goal that their ideological mentor set. In the case of education in this country all that can be achieved is confusion and chaos.

The reality might be quite different from the vision of Gramsci, or of his 1960s disciples of the New Left, but it is a fact that there has been a battle of ideas and a struggle for power within the cultural organs of the state. The Left today is in virtual control of the universities, their ideology has infused the education departments and bureaucracies, and the education union itself has grown into a powerful voice for left-wing causes and acts as a conduit between the Left intellectual academic base on one side and the teaching force and children on the other.

Pat Byrne, a past president of the AEU, was not shy about the political work undertaken by the union in the area of education policy, describing how they

have succeeded in influencing curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities. The conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum.

The union has successfully blurred any boundaries as to what is or is not union business. When the union begins to play a significant role in determining what is to be taught in schools, how the curriculum should look and the very purpose of education, then the waters have been so muddied as to make it impossible to view the AEU as anything resembling a traditional union, and the political power it wields is far beyond that of a traditional union.

From the various policy documents that the AEU produces it is obvious that the union sees its brief as far broader than merely acting for its members’ working conditions and pay issues. Considerable detail is given, for instance, to developing policy initiatives relating to the education curriculum, but should this be the role of a trade union? The AEU’s Curriculum Policy adopted in 2007 states, for instance, that the social purpose of schooling is to assist in overcoming inequalities between social groups and to develop in students a capacity for critical thought in order to help create a better global future. In nailing its colours to the mast in such an obvious fashion the union leaves little doubt that it sees its role as one of changing the course of society. The political dimension to all this is well beyond the brief of a union for teachers.

The influence of the muddled combinations of New Left, neo-Marxist ideology and postmodernism runs through this document. When speaking of the “contested nature” of the curriculum the union asserts that knowledge is never absolute, is always open to interpretation and that it is often constructed by powerful groups to serve their own interests. Later in the same document we hear that “knowledge and the organisation of knowledge are always in a state of reconceptualisation, and curriculum development needs to reflect this”.

While talking of this “reconceptualisation” of the curriculum, the AEU inevitably speaks of the rapidity of change, ignoring the obvious fact that the entire century just completed was one of phenomenal change. Change and adaptation to change are uppermost in the thinking of the union as it states that there is a need to look at curriculum needs of students who will be spending their lives in a world of rapid change. “These circumstances require a curriculum which develops different concepts of knowledge from those of the past.”

Knowledge, we are told, is never absolute and so we need to develop different concepts of knowledge. This alarming view of the purpose of education has been accepted not only by the AEU but by academics and curriculum developers within education departments.

That this organisation, whose stated reason for being is to support the best interests of its members, can so happily go along with this relativist view of the world should be a little worrying. By contributing in such a decidedly political way to curriculum debate and development, the AEU can only serve to make life more troublesome for teachers and impossible for their students.

By buckling on such ideological armour the AEU inevitably leads its members further from the ideal of teachers and teaching as described by Albert Einstein when he said that “it is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge” and closer to the view of the world described by Stalin as one where writers and artists were “engineers of human souls”. The language of authoritarianism fits rather well with this philosophy of eliminating “elitism”.

Attention is given a little further on in the AEU’s Curriculum Policy document to the issue of “Civics, Citizenship and Values within a Social Justice Framework”. This section offers what seems sound advice to those who would develop learning materials for schools, but with a couple of interesting inclusions. They state, for instance, that students must develop a “sound” basis for making judgments about local, national and international issues. This is all well and good, but what the reader must take into consideration is that according to the AEU, knowledge is and can never be absolute and is always open to interpretation. Relativism, that little blessing that the postmodernists have endowed us with, then screams a warning to us all. Students must develop a “sound” basis for making judgments, but by whose criteria? Is what is to be regarded as “sound” to be as open to interpretation as any other issue? I fear that such is not the case and that the AEU may well see a few absolutes.

The AEU’s response to the Iraq war is a case in point. A Federal Conference of the AEU passed a lengthy resolution condemning Australia’s involvement. In the lead-up to having the resolution passed, the Federal Executive issued a background paper for delegates. The rights and wrongs of the war and of this country’s involvement are really not the issue but some of the sentiments in the Executive’s paper are rather shrill:

Australia’s interests are not best served by servile responses to US policies when Australia’s relations with our region are the worst they have ever been and face a rising tide of hostility in some large neighbouring nations … Australia’s security is best achieved by building strong regional alliances through mutual development programs and independent defence and mutual security arrangements which are not tied to the US military apparatus given its current aggressive stance.

The same background paper makes the claim that “the Howard government used the Bali tragedy to promote militarism and xenophobia”, which appears a little difficult to substantiate. A media release followed urging teachers to discuss these issues in their classrooms and to support and encourage students who took an anti-war stance. Is this really an example of assisting students to develop a sound basis for making judgments?

The AEU, as a free association of workers, is entitled to hold its views, as are workers anywhere. But the legitimacy of using the classroom to seek to impose on others a highly charged set of political tenets is another matter.

The AEU is affiliated to the ACTU. The ACTU sees its own role in decidedly political terms. This was brought into sharp focus during the 2007 federal election campaign. The ACTU, through its Rights at Work campaign, ploughed millions of dollars into the election campaign. The AEU contributed handsomely to this campaign, both financially and actively on election booths, playing no small part in the election of the Rudd government. All of this may be legitimate activity but again it begs the question as to just what the AEU is.

When a union becomes involved in partisan politics it is reasonable to assume that it will be from the Left and in support of the ALP. Under normal circumstances this should be of no concern. The AEU, however, can never be seen in quite the same light as other industrial unions. If building workers or maritime workers express a political view, it remains “in-house”. It is more difficult to keep the politics of the AEU out of the classroom and, as has been shown by its position on the Iraq war, the union actively sought to bring a particular political position into the classroom.

The AEU has enormous influence in curriculum development and as an effective middleman operating between the universities and those in education bureaucracies. This extraordinarily powerful position makes the AEU unique in Australian social, political and educational life.

When, in 2003, a Teacher Education Review was conducted, the AEU naturally made a submission. In keeping with their philosophical position that knowledge is relative and in a constant state of “reconceptualisation” and in line with the new orthodoxy towards the study of history, the submission demanded that “all undergraduate teacher education programs build in significant and assessable mandatory Indigenous Studies units”. This “mandatory” area of study was to include a compulsory study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, “prior and subsequent to invasion and in the languages of the indigenous peoples of this country”.

There are two significant problems associated with this. One relates to the languages aspect and hardly needs any elaboration apart from the obvious point that it never could be a serious idea for anyone apart from those inside AEU offices. All teachers are to be trained in a range of Aboriginal languages! Which languages? Who is to teach them to the would-be teachers? Who will be learning them in the schools when there is already such antipathy to languages other than English? How will this sit alongside the federal government’s push for more Asian-language teaching; and all this after the debacle of the Keating push into Asian education?

The second small problem arises from the use of the outlandish term “invasion”, which may have currency in some quarters but is so patently an inaccurate assessment of the motivations for European settlement of Australia.

There has been a consistency in political approach within the leadership of the AEU. To be able to make the call for all teachers to be skilled in Aboriginal languages and to refer to European settlement as invasion merely continues the development of a general political line begun years earlier. Its predecessor, the Australian Teachers Federation, had long been a champion of combating “elitism” in education and “inequity” in whatever shape it deemed it to be.

The 1988 Curriculum Policy of the union, for instance, makes the call for curriculum provision to take account of the special claims of Aboriginal people who have been dispossessed by European settlement. The same document also demands that the curriculum should address the “pronounced inequality in the distribution of social, economic, cultural and political resources and power between social groups” and of the “role of the economy, the sexual division of labour, the dominant culture and the education systems in reproducing inequality”. Such a policy could sit happily as part of the maximum policy position for most hard-Left parties, but the union is demanding this for classroom practice!

Among the “social movements” that the Left has become involved in, those relating to gender issues have consistently remained on the top of the agenda. It is a fact that the inequalities that women faced in society and the workplace needed to be addressed. It is also perfectly clear that enormous ground has been won in successive campaigns. The world of school education is just one example. Today 70 per cent of teachers are women and increasingly the leaderships of schools are in the hands of women. The position of girls in educational outcomes has also changed dramatically. Many people have pointed out that the outcomes for boys have been less fruitful.

The successes of this struggle for equity have been largely put to one side in the continuing quest for relevance. The politics of protest must always have a focal point. A struggle which has been won obviously has less political importance than the one which still has to be fought.

As a consequence, the AEU adopted a lengthy policy on “gender equity” at its Federal Executive meeting in May 2008. It repeats the line that gender is a social construct and that children “learn” how to be female or male. The fact that there are conflicting views about this remains irrelevant to the ideology being espoused. Gender, the AEU states:

is socially constructed and is fundamental in the development of self concept and in shaping the range of experiences and opportunities available to women and men … Gender is dynamic and is influenced by class, religion, culture, geographic location, family and community.

The question of boys’ education remains an issue to be dismissed by these ideologues, despite the fact that there is compelling evidence to suggest that there are problems. The AEU maintains that this is just a “conduit for anti-feminist beliefs” and that a “disturbingly common fallacy is the argument that the focus on raising girls’ achievement has led to a neglect of boys”. What is disturbing in all of this is that the AEU appears quite content to ignore the logic that it is both poor policy and poor politics to replace one form of oppression with another.

There is compelling evidence to suggest that single-sex education, or at least single-sex classrooms in a coeducational institution, work well. Such research, like so much else which does not fit the blinkered thinking of the AEU and their ideological bedfellows, is ignored.

In keeping with earlier Left thinking which elevates the “social movements” to the top of the political agenda, the promotion of homosexual political issues has come to dominate much of the thinking of the AEU. We live in a tolerant society where difference has become less of an issue. The past decades have seen a dramatic change in how society regards homosexuality, but rather than stepping back and acknowledging these changes, the Left maintains a pessimism that is depressing in the extreme. Things are never good enough for the Left and no reform will ever satisfy.

In this spirit of negativism, the AEU produced another lengthy policy specifically relating to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. This policy, adopted in 2003, turns its attention to the “discrimination” it perceives in “heterosexism” which, the AEU asserts, “describes the pervasive assumption of heterosexuality which is common to language, the law and other institutions in Australian society”. There is an assumption, according to the AEU, that heterosexuality is “natural” or “normal” and that this leads to a position of invisibility for many non-heterosexuals.

The churches are singled out for special mention in this policy, some of them condemned for their “un-Christian” approach. We live in a secular society where freedom is allowed for voices of religious belief and non-belief. Such interventions on the part of the union do nothing but push people into corners, but it would appear that difference can be “celebrated” only according to criteria established by the Left.

Curriculum, according to this policy, is to be written in “non-heterosexist” language because “homosexuality and bisexuality need to be normalised”. This, it is implied, will assist in the battle against homophobia. From the perspective of someone who has worked for decades in public education, it would seem that just the opposite is the case. While the broader society may have softened its approach, homophobic attitudes have never been higher amongst high school students. This may not be seen in any physically threatening way but the language and opinions of many students are certainly more obviously anti-homosexual. It might have something to do with the incessant discussion of such issues.

The social engineering agenda which has occupied the minds and activism of the AEU now for so long is often derided as ludicrous and divorced from reality. Despite this the Tasmanian Department of Education in 2003 issued a lengthy document entitled Guidelines for the Use of Non-Discriminatory Language—Language Matters. Language, the document points out:

is one of the major forms of communication and as such plays a powerful role both in contributing to and in eliminating discrimination. Discriminatory language can inhibit or prevent the achievement of the highest quality for all students.

The reader of these guidelines is shown how not to trivialise, discriminate, patronise or to stereotype in nineteen jargon-rich pages. No more shall the unwary use a term like disabled or handicapped but rather will now speak of people with disabilities. The document, which ought to be an insult to the intelligence, is prominently placed on the AEU’s website.

The union and employer complement each other in so many ways. The personnel of the AEU and many of the bureaucrats in the education departments effectively come from the same pool. The circle of radicalised university academics producing compliant teachers who, in turn become academics, AEU functionaries or bureaucrats within the education department, is a self-replicating one.

To speak of the AEU inevitably brings us back to the universities and of how they have become pale imitations of what were once institutions devoted to intellectual debate and disputation. When teachers in a university, a place of learning, become preoccupied with maintaining politically acceptable positions, then the very purpose of the university becomes clouded.

Many universities in this country have increasingly become places of social engineering and for moulding of opinions into what is deemed to be politically correct. As Pierre Ryckmans asserted in his 1996 Boyer Lectures:

a true university is anchored in values. Deprived of this holding ground, it can only drift at the caprice of all the winds and currents of fashion, and, in the end, is doomed to founder in the shallows of farce and incoherence.

The realities of university life today might make many feel that education is foundering “in the shallows of farce and incoherence”. The world of the university campus has become so politicised that students are being encouraged in some instances effectively to toe the line or be marked down, and heaven help a student who foolishly clings to outmoded conservative views.

A campaign was launched in 2008 called Make Education Fair. The organisers claim to have received reports from students of all political persuasions who support their assertion that academics have been using their classrooms to promote a left-wing political perspective. Perhaps their most disturbing claim is that some teacher education staff have become so disenchanted by the bias they see in the curriculum that they have left the profession.

While the Make Education Fair organisation may have a political perspective of their own, the point they make remains valid: that there is a clearly observable political agenda and students either conform or face a difficult road. Students at universities want to succeed and want to be well thought of. It is easy to comply and easier still if the line being given to them is a familiar one. With the politicised nature of the school curriculum, the student entering the university is merely continuing along a familiar path to a familiar tune.

Something dramatic needs to happen if education is not to continue its current slide into irrelevance. From time to time federal governments seek to address the crisis. John Howard, with Brendan Nelson as his Education Minister, launched a campaign to tackle the problems but faced such overwhelming opposition from state governments and the intransigence and hostility of the education unions that the reform agenda failed.

In 2008 Rudd, with Gillard as his Education Minister, began a process remarkably similar. The response from the AEU was swift and predictable. The Tasmanian President of the AEU, Leanne Wright, immediately declared that it was time for a fight and that educators are ready for an “all-in brawl”. Predictably she also claimed, in the Hobart Mercury, that teachers were deeply concerned about what they saw as a competitive and discriminatory reform agenda.

Paul Kelly, writing in the Weekend Australian on the same weekend, remarked that education remained in the front line of Australia’s culture war and was in a sense its deepest ideological strand. Australia now ranks a dismal twenty-third among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development industrialised nations for finishing Year 12 or equivalent trade qualifications.

Half a million Australians between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are neither in education nor in full-time work and 50,000 leave school early every year. As Julia Gillard stated in the same edition of the Weekend Australian, “the nation cannot afford to have one in five young people not contributing … it is simply unacceptable for teenagers not to have the life and work skills necessary for getting and holding a job”. The figures for Tasmanian students failing to complete Year 12 now stand at more than 50 per cent. Australia, as an advanced economy in an advanced world, simply cannot tolerate these sorts of figures.

These figures do not include the atrocious statistic of 9 per cent of all children in the Northern Territory who drop out of school before completing their primary education, or the 6 per cent of Tasmanian children who are in the same boat, or the 3 per cent of all Australian children who fail to go on to high school.

The AEU will continue to fight its ideological war against “elitism” in education and to struggle for a socially just and equitable world free of exploitation, and for a school curriculum which will play its role in transforming society. The longer they are permitted to wage this struggle, the more damage they will do to those they seek to serve. Australian children cannot afford this struggle, parents cannot afford this struggle, and the economy clearly cannot afford this struggle.

Teachers deserve better than a coercive union which places political aspirations and manipulation of ideological power ahead of the actual needs of its members. Children in schools need to be allowed to excel. Parents need to feel confident that their children are being given every opportunity to do as well as they can. Employers need to know that the young people coming through our schools are capable and competent and that the education system has developed these young people and not held them back. It is clear that power needs to be taken away from the backward-thinking apparatchiks and returned to teachers and parents for the sake of education and for the sake of generations to come.

The deep connection between the AEU and the education bureaucracies makes fundamental reform of the education system that little bit more difficult. Each part of the circle reinforces and informs the others, and all serve to stultify and bureaucratise schools and teaching. Teaching has suffered at the hands of this growing bureaucratisation of the curriculum and teachers are forced to spend more and more of their time in often pointless administrative roles. When teachers are effective they are engaged in actions which are anathema to those of the bureaucrat. The bureaucrat’s role is that of a functionary and seldom requires the worker to make judgments. The teacher must make judgments. The teacher who accepts the role of functionary effectively ceases to be a teacher.

Today more than 30 per cent of our school children are enrolled in private and Catholic schools and the numbers continue to grow. The growth in enrolments in small Christian schools continues. This is not because of any upsurge in faith but because there is a lack of faith in what public education is able to offer.

What appears to have escaped the attention of the AEU and their ideological allies is that the incessant meddling with education has served no good purpose among those it is supposed to serve. The most often heard lament of teachers when talking about their work and the difficulties they face day to day is the level of disengagement that exists among students. Decades of change, of making the curriculum more “relevant”, of “reconceptualising” knowledge, has led to a mire of apathy. The attempts at social engineering, of moulding young minds to fit acceptable models of politically correct thinkers have failed miserably. Adolescents are today no closer to fitting anyone’s ideal than they ever were. The new radical elites will gain few new disciples and society will pay the price for yet another inadequately educated generation.

Children deserve so much more. They need a sound basis to take their part in the real world and not the fiction that is being devised by these radical elites.

The AEU is at the very core of the problem facing education in this country. We are forced to tolerate an unwieldy bureaucracy alongside a ludicrously left-wing union. Both parties get in the way of reasonable educational outcomes for children. Parents must be given the right to have a direct say in the education of their children, and yet they are effectively sidelined by the “we know best” superiority of the “expert” caste.

The more the AEU plays the radical card, the more it weakens public education. The weaker public education becomes, the greater the numbers of parents seeking choice for their children. The more the call goes out for choice, the more strident is the voice of the AEU criticising choice and seeking ways to cut funding to private and Catholic schools. The radicals of the AEU are playing a major role in the destruction of public education. Parents will go on voting with their feet and the demand for choice will grow.

William Briggs has taught in Tasmanian high schools since the late 1970s. This article is taken from a book he is currently writing, provisionally titled Look What They’ve Done to Our Schools: The Left’s Long March of Destruction.