How the West was airbrushed from history. By Nick Cater. On how the woke would use the proposed revisions to the Australian national curriculum to propagandize our children.
The first thing foundation students are expected to learn is that “English is one of many languages spoken in Australia” and should be taught alongside the “oral narrative” traditions of Australia’s First Nations peoples and Asian texts. …
Among the dozens of things about language children are supposed to absorb by the end of Year 3, for example, … they must understand the phoneme–grapheme relationships that apply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language words. The requirement to write using “joined-up letters of consistent size” is number 33 on the list.
The familiar black-armband view of Australian history is amplified and exaggerated, beginning with the use of the term “invasion” to characterise European settlement and continuing with repeated references to dispossession, White Australia and the denial of civil rights. While these themes are undeniably part of Australian history and their legacy has yet to be resolved, viewing the entirety of modern Australia through that prism denies the exceptional character of life on this continent, the only one other than Antarctica that has never hosted a civil war.
Every trace of the Judeo-Christian tradition has been expunged. The history curriculum contains eight references to Islam but only five to Christianity, all of them dating back to the Medieval period or before. Christianity is the world’s largest and fastest-growing religion, yet we are asked to assume it had no effect on human history after 1750 and is irrelevant to Australian civic life.
There is a single passing reference to the Enlightenment, but none to its defining contribution to Australian settlement. The concept of liberalism, Australia’s defining principle since 1788, appears not at all. …
The woke lie mostly by omission. They would leave students with no idea of where our values, language, ideas, and successes come from:
Year 7 students … are asked to evaluate “the extent to which Australian values, including democracy, freedom, respect, inclusion, civility, responsibility, compassion, equality, justice and a ‘fair go’ are consistent with human rights”. They are not encouraged to be curious about where these admirable values came from or why they are deeply embedded as civic principles without any requirement to codify them in a bill of rights. …
Let us assume that the reference to equality is actually a reference to egalitarianism, the principle that every citizen deserves equal respect and deserves every opportunity to thrive… It explains why Australia has the largest number of migrants as a proportion of the population in the developed world. The freedom and opportunity afforded by Australia attracts people here and discourages them from leaving.
The flowering of this principle in the Scottish and English Enlightenments led to the abolition of slavery. It fed the high ambitions of Australian settlement, a place where convicts could earn freedom and British institutions would be recreated and refined. It is inseparable from its Christian origins.
The curriculum’s advisers have fallen for the common misunderstanding of secularism as the absence of religion, rather than the freedom to live by any faith or none. They prefer to believe that the Christian gospel played no part in Australian civil society rather than recognise Jesus Christ’s instruction to love one’s neighbour as one’s self as part of our great civic inheritance.
Read it all.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
