The Democracy Deficit in Australian Schools

When the referendum on the Voice to Parliament failed nationally and in every single state, what was the response from the media and cultural elites who had relentlessly championed the proposal? In many cases, it was to vent their anti-democratic spleen against the wishes of the Australian people. There was a rush to define the result as somehow illegitimate, due to the alleged racism, stupidity or ingratitude of Australian voters.

ANTAR, an Aboriginal advocacy group, called the result an “unparalleled act of racism by white Australia”. (Someone should have told them how badly “Yes” did in the multicultural areas of capital cities.) Guardian columnist Lorena Allam had an even lower opinion of those who exercised their democratic rights by arguing against the proposal. Her trenchantly anti-democratic take on the “No” campaign included the following assertion: “It was vitriolic, mean-spirited, full of misinformation, driven by racism, petty grievances and conspiracy theories based on fear and ignorance.”

For the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council, Australia itself was a sham, with no real legitimacy or authority. As they forthrightly phrased the matter, “It was never in the gift of these newcomers to refuse recognition to the true owners of Australia.” Yet if one’s position is that this is “stolen land” and the Australian state is illegitimate, why bother seeking the approval of newcomers in the first place? They seem to be implying that democratic votes are only legitimate when activists get the outcome they want. Apart from the hypocrisy of this stance, it shows a profoundly anti-democratic temperament.

In short, the more “Yes” voters vented their spleen, the more I was struck by the seething hostility of many on the progressive Left to anyone who didn’t agree with them. Of course, we are all disappointed by election results from time to time, but this went much further. Many young progressives felt the need to denigrate and demonise those who wouldn’t support their proposal, showing a contempt for the core processes of liberal democracy.

As a high school teacher, I began to wonder why many of the younger generations have grown intolerant of divergent political views, a change evident in their willingness to label dissenting opinions as bigoted, hateful or the product of privilege. My conclusion is that there is a profound democracy deficit in modern education, and fixing it should be a major priority for conservatives and traditional liberals who haven’t been sidelined by woke activists. Democrats are more made than born, and Australia has been doing a terrible job of making democrats out of young people for a couple of generations now.

So, how did we get here? Secondary schools have been doing a disservice to young people by not teaching them about the processes and norms of liberal democracy. I will soon offer an outline of what students should be learning about democracy and evidence-based thinking. Yet the picture is not merely one of neglect; democratic values and evidence-based reasoning have also been replaced by an increasingly intolerant successor ideology—a hodgepodge of identity-based navel-gazing and performative empathy for members of protected classes. This new orthodoxy yabbers constantly about diversity and inclusion, but this is usually a mask for its illiberal and anti-democratic agenda—namely, the promotion of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) dogma to the exclusion of all other perspectives.

In theory, this shouldn’t be a hard problem to fix, as the basics of a liberal democratic education have been debated and discussed by educators for decades. Sadly enough, academics in the 1940s and 1950s seemed much better informed about this question than the ones who have controlled universities in recent decades—another example of the pernicious effect that the left-wing radicals of the 1960s have had on academia. Reviewing mid-twentieth-century educational materials, we find that education academics saw an important role for teachers in inculcating the principles of liberal democracy in students. Consider these examples:

The democratic process is marked by the ultimate submission of issues by majority vote. (George Hartmann)

The true democrat values freedom of speech, of religion, and of other individual action, not only for his own sake … but as an ideal. (Warren Beck)

Apart from diversity of beliefs, interests, and faiths, freedom is meaningless. Democracy is a friendly, co-operative way of living whereby conflicting ideas and aspirations can be resolved into tolerance. (Philip Cox)

In an era of suspicion of election outcomes (think the 2016 and 2020 US elections), the weaponisation of cancel culture against people who stray from dogma, and boycott and “resistance” campaigns against parties and policies one disagrees with, it is obvious that acceptance of these liberal democratic norms is in serious decline. Far from accepting the majority vote and affirming “diversity of belief” (the classical liberal position), many young people now reject any democratic result which does not advance their own agenda and priorities. Progressives are happy to accept democratic processes (such as the same-sex-marriage plebiscite) which advance their political agenda, but have no intention of accepting votes which don’t go their way. Tellingly, over the last decade in Australia, most of the academics championing liberal democratic values in education have been conservatives like Kevin Donnelly and the late Brian Crittenden, a professor at La Trobe University. Crittenden’s 2006 article “Liberalism and School Education” offers many insights into what a truly liberal democratic secondary education looks like, presciently ringing alarm bells about the kind of education Australian students are receiving in the 2020s.

One of Crittenden’s key recommendations is that students encounter a broad variety of materials and perspectives:

Liberal education at school provides a broad introduction to those major aspects of literate culture in which human beings have most significantly expressed their intellectual, imaginative and emotional capacities. This experience enriches the students’ personal lives by making them aware of the varied dimensions of public reflective culture beyond the narrow limits of each one’s own immediate experience and background.

He is clear that there is also a democratic impulse behind this project, noting that a liberal education equips students with “a sense of the values and historical perspectives that form the basis for acting intelligently and responsibly as citizens of a democratic society”. He recognises that intellectual diversity should be the hallmark of a liberal education, insisting on a “balanced range of intellectual perspectives”.

Using Crittenden’s paper as a yardstick, we can readily measure the shortcomings of secondary education nowadays. Consider the 2023 to 2025 Literature syllabus for senior students in Queensland, which seems determined to out-woke the other states in its monomania for pushing queer, decolonial and indigenous writing, overwhelmingly of very recent vintage.

Hiding behind the mask of “diversity”, this curriculum panders shamelessly to far Left ideologues, with precious little intellectual diversity in sight. The curriculum does not include a single male poet published before the twentieth century, yet it canonises a number of indigenous scribblers who specialise in decolonial agitprop. Typical of these is “marginalised” Harvard graduate Alison Whittaker, whose time at the Gendered Violence Research Network did not stop her from signing the Statement of Solidarity with Palestine—a document which disgracefully ignores the suffering of Jewish women raped by Hamas soldiers. (Indeed, it doesn’t even mention the pogrom and mass rape of October 7 before stridently accusing Israel of genocide.) If you wonder what sort of poetry this Hamas apologist is offering Queensland’s brightest English students, I offer you a representative sample:

That dawdling off-trend meme,
white guilt. To survive among it; well,
               it’s naff to say, but compul-
                              -sory to do. Indentured blakwork,

something like:
               nine to five, forgiv-
                              -ing you.

If this gibberish is not to a teacher’s taste, he or she could always opt for the verse of non-binary indigenous poet Ellen van Neerven (pronouns: they/them). Yet if he is hoping to find greater intellectual diversity in Mx van Neerven’s work, he will certainly be disappointed. For even according to the curriculum itself, Ellen van Neerven’s poetry amounts to a laundry list of grievances against “racism”, “capitalism” and “trauma” (presumably with an intergenerational flavour). Those looking for intellectual diversity will have to content themselves with the knowledge that van Neerven’s loathing of capitalism has not prevented her from publishing books of verse in a capitalist economy, nor from accepting filthy lucre from the ly woke judging panels of Australian poetry awards.

If the impression of a far Left echo chamber isn’t yet clear enough, the curriculum also includes Kae Tempest (formerly Kate Tempest), a non-binary performance artist (pronouns: they/them) who is interested in “poverty” and “identity”; Maya Angelou (whose civil rights activism is mentioned as a reason for her inclusion on the literature syllabus); Pablo Neruda (a brilliant poet who was also an outspoken supporter of Stalinism, a gross error of judgement which the QCAA grotesquely reconfigures as “advocacy for social change”); and Lionel Fogarty who, we wearily learn, is known for his “activism and advocacy for First Nations peoples”. There are a couple of token conservatives, including former Quadrant Literary Editor Les Murray, but they are seriously outnumbered by non-binary and indigenous poetasters of the last five minutes. And while Murray’s work is often cryptic and full of ambiguities, the same could not be said of the didactic works of Angelou, let alone Whittaker or Fogarty. Indeed, far from the broad and varied range of perspectives advocated by Crittenden, we have a narrow and biased selection of Critical Social Justice agitators, whose idea of poetry is denouncing various -isms with emphatic self-righteousness. There are no ambiguities to uncover in Whittaker’s denunciations of “indentured blakwork”, nor is there anything for the student to do but applaud when Angelou declares things like, “I am the dream and the hope of the slave. / I rise / I rise / I rise.”

Yet what else should we expect from a system in an advanced state of ideological capture? Teachers work in an environment where unions are more animated by campaigning for pet political projects than fighting for the working conditions of teachers. They work with colleagues who include land acknowledgments and pronoun preferences and non-binary flags in every single work email. They share a staffroom with colleagues who wear rainbow lanyards around their necks to show solidarity with LGBT+ students and then spend their spare time on Reddit forums debating whether or not to add a Free Palestine badge as well. That there might be any discrepancy between the LGBT+ lanyard and support for Hamas, a group which has executed jihadists so much as accused of homosexuality, never seems to occur to them.

When I started teaching in the 1990s, I had to sign a written oath that I would not abuse my position as a teacher to campaign for any political parties. Yet progressives have long since worked out how to get around such restrictions. Rather than campaigning for the Australian Greens, for example, you simply tell your students to write persuasive speeches about climate change and net zero. Rather than telling them to vote for the ALP, you assign students sympathetic op-eds about important bits of their policy agenda. In theory, conservatives are just as likely as progressives to assign materials which reflect their personal values but, in reality, there is an uneven playing field. So, while I have colleagues who routinely include lessons on the need to move Australia Day from January 26, it would be risky to assign an opinion piece against the proposition.

If a left-leaning student lodged a complaint about the lesson with the executive, it is likely they would side with the student. In other words, the broad range of perspectives advocated by proponents of liberal education has become a non-starter in Australian schools. The New South Wales Department of Education recommends Stan Grant’s blatantly ideological speech “Racism and the Australian Dream” as a “resource” for Year 11 students, and its Queensland counterpart has included it in recommended unit plans for juniors. There is a wild imbalance here. Do you think there is any chance that the speeches of Jacinta Price or Warren Mundine at the National Press Club would be recommended as teaching resources? I cannot even imagine a situation where they would recommend something as anodyne as Coleman Hughes’s speech “The Case for Racial Colorblindness”, because it includes reasons for rejecting the “race-conscious” approach of left-wing identitarians. CSJ is a totalising ideology which aims to impose its narrow perspective to the exclusion of all others.

I have focused on my own subject area of English, but the same perspectives are being pushed in every part of the curriculum. Consider this statement from the Australian curriculum: “The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures cross-curriculum priority is designed for all students to engage in reconciliation, respect and recognition of the world’s oldest continuous living cultures.”

Does this really sound like an invitation to engage with a broad range of perspectives or is it force-feeding the party line on indigenous history to students? If you are still undecided, consider the following admonition regarding the valuable contributions made by indigenous Isaac Newtons: “The elaborations acknowledge that Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have worked scientifically for millennia and continue to contribute to contemporary science.”

Is this an undisputed fact or an assertion? Notice the tension between the previous assertion that Aboriginal Australians are “the world’s oldest continuous living culture” (which implies a static and unchanging culture) and the notion that indigenous people were dynamic scientists making technological breakthroughs that would presumably lead to cultural change rather than continuity. What we are dealing with here are unsupported assertions (many of them contradictory) being force-fed to students as truth. According to the Australian curriculum, indigenous people were both mystical beings in harmony with their ancestors and canny scholars working tirelessly to advance scientific knowledge (a process which never produced pottery, let alone metallurgy). Anyone who cannot recognise this as CSJ dogma, a kind of secular mythology, is likely to be indoctrinated themselves. In fact, it is the kind of intolerant groupthink which liberal education was supposed to disrupt. This is precisely the danger Kevin Donnelly has been warning about for years. As he wrote back in 2017:

In a closed society conformity prevails and beliefs and customs are enforced without question. Individual thought gives way to group mentality, and innovation and change are punished as heresies that jeopardise the safety of the group. The purpose of education—rather than seeking wisdom and truth—is to enforce whatever particular ideology is needed to guarantee that those in control remain in power.

We are now even more in the thrall of CSJ ideology than we were in 2017. Each update of the syllabus brings a greater focus on the evils of the West and the unparalleled scientific achievements of indigenous scientists. Because teachers are so uninformed about this “marginalised” knowledge, schools bring in trainers to do workshops on indigenous mathematics, gender ideology, anti-racism and dozens of other pseudo-academic fads. Afraid of being labelled as racist or transphobic, teachers remain silent and what Donnelly termed “closed society conformity” tightens its grip on the profession.

The situation could be usefully reframed as a crisis of democracy in our schools. When conservatives advocate education about Western values and civilisation, progressives immediately equate the West with genocide, as if the Aztecs, Islamic caliphs and Japanese Imperial Army had enjoyed nothing but peaceable relations with their neighbours. Democracy is not as tarnished a concept as “Western civilisation”, so it may get more traction. We should insist that students learn that liberal democracy is based upon reasoned argument and a variety of perspectives and that the absence of debate is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes. With this in mind, we should insist on the right of students to gain a range of perspectives whenever social or political questions are raised. If students are assigned Stan Grant’s “Racism and the Australian Dream”, they should also be asked to read Jacinta Price’s speech about the scourge of indigenous family violence. If they are told to read the speeches of celebrity feminists like Emma Watson, they should also be exposed to speeches from dissenting voices like Christina Hoff Sommers, a thoughtful critic of the women’s movement, who memorably stated about the gender pay gap: “Want to close the wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering.”

The fact that such balance is now unimaginable in schools is itself an opportunity. It can be used to highlight the double standards which now plague the education system. It can expose the deeply entrenched bias of the education bureaucracy. And, most of all, it can be used to highlight the democracy deficit which now plagues our schools. We cannot create a democratically inclined population by putting young people on a drip feed of gender, anti-racism and postcolonial ideology. Unless we return to the values of a liberal education, we run the risk of creating a polarised and dysfunctional state.

Raymond Burns is the pseudonym of a teacher with many years’ experience teaching in Australian high schools. A number of his articles have appeared in Quadrant, including “The Frankenstein’s Monster of Disability Studies” in the December issue.