Sign In
0 Items (
Search
Comments (13)
The plea published in The Age and the SMH by Melbourne-based teacher Farah Khairat arguing teachers have every right to advocate on behalf of the Palestinians in the Gaza war illustrates how teachers, instead of being balanced and impartial, are intent on indoctrinating students with radical, cultural-left ideology.
Khairat argues she is entitled to present a one-sided, highly emotional account of the war in Gaza to her students — an account where the Palestinians are the victims and Israelis the criminals and there is no mention of Hamas’s evil and barbaric attack killing Jewish women and children. Ignored are the Israeli women raped and abducted, the babies killed and mutilated. Instead, Khairat writes of “one Palestinian child killed every 10 minutes”, “dozens of teachers and school staff killed” and “children’s bodies covered in dirt, rubble and blood”. She also argues teachers should be allowed to politicise the classroom by “expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause” and students allowed to wear a Palestinian scarf (keffiyeh) while at school.
In response to departmental directives not to discuss the Gaza war in the classroom, Khairat argues “As an educator, I question the appropriateness of feigning ignorance on such critical matters. How could I pretend not to be knowledgeable on this topic”. Confusing her personal opinion of Israel and her primary duty to educate students in a balanced and objective way, she writes “I refuse to stay silent because trying to sweep this under the rug is just another form of oppression. To be silent is to be complicit”.
Given Khairat is a member of the Teachers and School Staff for Palestine Victoria group, it’s understandable she has such a jaundiced and one-sided view of the Gaza war. What is inexcusable is that like-minded teachers have abrogated their responsibility as their students’ guardians. Rather than indoctrinating students with their personal political views and enforcing cultural-left mind control and groupthink, the role of the teacher is to educate students to be knowledgeable and able to evaluate arguments is a rational and balanced way.
Critical, in this regard, is for the teacher to ensure when it comes to controversial and heated issues, all sides of the debate are aired and students are given the privilege to formulate their own beliefs free of coercion.
That pro-Palestinian teachers are so prejudiced should not surprise. At least since Joan Kirner, a former Victorian premier, argued at a 1983 Fabian Society meeting schools must be part of the socialist struggle to overthrow capitalism, the classroom has been captured by neo-Marxist inspired ideologues. As argued by a book set for teacher training, “the process of education and the process of liberation are the same” and in a society “disfigured by class exploitation, sexual and racial oppression and in chronic danger of war and environmental destruction”, teachers must decide whose side they are on.
The peak body representing 185,000 teachers, the Australian Education Union (AEU), has long since given up any pretence of being a professional organisation focused on improving teachers’ pay and conditions. The AEU, after Australia committed troops to the war in Iraq, argued students and teachers should strike against the invasion and that students have every right to wag school and join the protest organised by the School Strike 4 Climate group. Whether the rights of LGBTIQA+ students, the Yes campaign for the Indigenous Voice, or opposition to governments funding Catholic and Independent schools, the AEU is guaranteed to advocate an extreme left agenda.
Proven by the Victorian branch of the Australian Association for the Teachers of English telling teachers to advocate Yes for the Voice referendum and its promotion of critical literacy, where students are made to deconstruct literature in terms of capitalist hegemony, the barbarians are no longer at the gates.
How history is taught in schools has especially been captured by the cultural-left. The First Fleet is described as an invasion leading to genocide and Western civilisation characterised as oppressive and guilty of white supremacism. Instead of nation building and promoting patriotism, students are presented with what Geoffrey Blaney terms a black armband view, where there is little, if any, chance of students learning the significance of Judeo-Christianity or the nation’s Westminster-inspired parliamentary and common law systems.
It should not surprise parents across Australia are either starting or have already established their own community schools committed to a classical, liberal/arts education — schools were teachers, instead of being cultural-left propagandists, are impartial and balanced. An education, instead of mind control and groupthink, that initiates students into the West’s best validated knowledge and artistic achievements and where students are taught to think rationally and logically, free of emotion and cant.
Dr Kevin Donnelly is a senior fellow at the ACU’s PM Glynn Institute and editor of Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March
Khairat’s idea that teachers should be allowed to advocate for Palestine is a perfect example of why teachers should not be allowed to advocate for Palestine. (“Israel” rated two mentions and “Jew” not at all in Farah World). Interestingly, I submitted a comment when I first read the article the other day, but when I returned to see if it had been published, the comments link had been pulled from the page. I’m tipping too many comments had pointed out the article’s, ahem, shortcomings.
Why would the paper choose to publish such a blatently poor excuse for indoctrination of school kids. They’re usually more subtle about it.
I’m glad they did. I’d like to think the ‘journalist’ felt exposing the depths of Marxist infiltration of our child’s compulsory, taxpayer funded, indoctrination facility was a service to the public. I’m more than a little sceptical and certainly not surprised.
Fortunately, not all of our Yoof are so easily gaslit.
“teachers have every right to advocate on behalf of the Palestinians”
I assume that Ms Khairat’s support for the right to advocate includes teachers who want to advocate for Israel and its citizens – or does the right to advocate belong to one side only.
Actions have their consequences and the Hamas terrorists seem to have had little appreciation of the Western way of war. A lesson they are now learning the hard way.
Or who want to advocate for the return of the cane in schools, or the lash and capital punishment in court-determined sentences?
Causation is not established but the precipitous decline of the West coincided with abandonment of traditional corporal and capital punishments. Imagine if there were a media-generated social consensus in favour of caning in schools. It might be a new golden age of education. Islam, numerically and in terms of its global extent has, in the same period, flourished.
“How history is taught in schools has… been captured by the cultural-left”. Not only history but also the teaching of literature, art, and even the sciences. However, the word “captured” is not really correct – “dominated” would be better. I say this because State schools, as socialist institutions, naturally conform to cultural-left ideology. The correct remedy is not just to start independent community schools. Conservative policy should aim to demolish the entire State school system.
The old mantra that the State system is “free, compulsory and secular” is typical socialist propaganda. The system is not free – since it is funded by the taxpayer – and is actually very expensive, since it has to be managed by a bloated and invariably incompetent bureaucracy. It may well be compulsory, but the exercise of such compulsion is not within the proper remit of government in a free society. It claims to be secular, but this really means militantly exclusive of Christianity (and other religions). It is not secular in the sense of not teaching a values system and worldview (it always teaches atheistic socialism).
In a democratic nation, the State should have only a minimal role in education. What socialist officials invariably believe is that they – not the biological parents – are really the proper guardians and educators of the child. It is important that parents decisively reject this trend. Parents must assert their sole right to fully control the education of their own children.
I agree that ‘the entire State school system has to be ‘demolished’ (along with the ABC) – there is no way to now reform those two institutions so deeply has the marxist march through them penetrated. These are institutions which defy our constitution with the teaching of ‘Racism’ against ‘white’ people and the grooming of sexuality/ gender beliefs unsupported by science. Proven false Indigenous and Australian history are also taught and promoted. Our education system is now run by the Teachers Union just like our State Health and Police departments are also run by their respective unions.
Now, if this had been a left-wing activist journal, we’d have seen the subject teacher’s phone number, e-mail address and home address, along with her employer’s e-mail details in the article to enable a ‘pile-on’ by her opponents.
Maybe playing nice has its disadvantages…but escalation is not what we do in civil society.
Such a pile on would only serve to emphasize our powerlessness since her intellectual position is the reigning orthodoxy in the bureaucracy to which she is beholden. Things are very different for conservative dissidents.
Clearly, the teachers are showing remarkable restraint, when they should be fighting for justice. In view of the Palestinian genocide, and the earlier (and still ongoing) Australian one, they should be telling the perpetrators, all those privileged, White kids, to get out of their classrooms, now, to go home to their parents, and demand to be repatriated to Europe ASAP. Australia should be available only to the Victims of Historical Injustice, not a place for colonialist oppressors. Who cares about educational standards, when there are other, far more important, issues at stake?
The education of Australian on TikTok :
https://www.memri.org/tv/chinese-social-media-video-tiktok-won-big-for-palestine-jewish-elite-information-cocoons
https://www.bitchute.com/video/U2-ZOBDhsk4/
The education of Australian children – and their teachers – on TikTok : https://www.memri.org/tv/chinese-social-media-video-tiktok-won-big-for-palestine-jewish-elite-information-cocoons https://www.bitchute.com/video/U2-ZOBDhsk4/