I remember being astonished almost 20 years ago when my prac supervising teacher told me she was “ideologically opposed to the teaching of spelling”.
This was during my secondary teacher training. I was a bright-eyed Classics, History and Literature graduate who took it for granted that teaching children facts and equipping them to evaluate those facts was the highest calling for an educator.
I was utterly naive to the educational culture of postmodern Australia.
My supervisor wasn’t just an everyday classroom teacher, either. She had recently been the Head of English at a prestigious GPS school in Brisbane and was widely known and liked by English teachers across the State.
How could an English teacher be against teaching spelling? It baffled and confused me.
Later, I found out how. My supervisor wasn’t just a fringe weirdo with her anti-factual views. She was in the majority.
In the world of Australian school teaching, I was the weirdo!
It turned out that almost no one teaching English in Queensland 20 years ago believed in the explicit teaching of things like spelling, grammar, syntax and composition.
At the time, the fad among Queensland English teachers was a thing called ‘critical literacy’. It was as bad as it sounds. Actually, worse. It was the utter abandonment of reason in the pursuit of a neo-communist ideological vision.
Critical literacy required students to accept that there is no such thing as objective reality, that all reality can only be experienced subjectively, and that this allowed privileged groups – white men – to create a social reality that benefited them at the expense of everyone else.
All that is real is power, and all the social power is held by those with whiteness; therefore, the only moral action possible is to eradicate straight white males.
This was ‘critical literacy’. It dominated Queensland English teaching for 20 years, and it was a Marxist indoctrination scheme developed out of the work of South American identity communist Paulo Freire.
If you want the goods on how much influence the communist Freire has had on Western education, then James Lindsay is your man.
I didn’t know any of this background when I was a fledgling secondary English teacher about to spend the next ten years antagonising my colleagues with my bizarre, old-fashioned affection for facts. I just knew that everyone teaching English in Queensland had gone crazy and that they were making the kids crazy, too.
Those high school students being brainwashed 20 years ago into believing that society is a heteronormative, patriarchal hellscape built on the oppression of brave and stunning lesbian POCs are now millennial middle managers excluding Anglos and Christians from promotional opportunities because of social justice. They learnt not a single fact while in the classroom, but they came out certain without a shadow of a doubt that whiteness must be eradicated.
We see the result of that everywhere. The cultural Marxist wave, which surged through our education system from the 90s onwards, has now crashed on the rocks of reality. Those of us who either avoided the brainwashing or were immune to it now have to live in a society run by crazy people.
It is clear too, though, that the identity Marxist wave has peaked. Even Maoism and Leninism eventually ran out of steam. All utopian ideological mass movements finally lose energy once the horrendous results of their social engineering become apparent.
Now, even the ABC admits that the decades-long movement to deconstruct our culture via education reform has had disastrous results.
The skilled propagandists at their ABC don’t provide all the context we’re going through here, dear reader. Instead, the fake news journalists pretend that what a regional school in Victoria is doing is a novel, innovative approach to teaching literacy that no one has ever thought of before.
All lies. What this article calls ‘structured literacy’ is instead an approach that parallels that used in Australia prior to the 1970s, when radical extremists gave up marching against the Vietnam War and moved into education faculties and classrooms to groom several generations of victims psychologically.
The damage done to our society by the radical ideologues in control of our universities and schools is incalculable. We have several generations now who are not only totally ignorant but are also utterly ignorant of their ignorance. They are the most dangerous type of idiot – the one who imagines only he is wise. And they’re about to take over the levers of power as the Boomers shuffle off stage left.
We cannot change the damage that has been done to our society by the communists through education, but we can do something for our young people today. We need a return to facts; an insistence that not only does objective reality exist, but we must seek it out and explore it if we care to find meaning and purpose for our lives.
The only authentic and valid form of education that provides this is a classical one. It is the method of teaching that was used universally until radical social engineers in the modern period took control of formal learning. It is a method of instruction that is gaining popularity among homeschoolers in Australia and even among some teachers.
Organisations such as the Australian Classical Education Society and podcasts such as Educating Humans are helping to raise awareness that education can be saved if we are willing to use the right tools.
The communists were willing to dedicate their lives to the destruction of Western civilisation through education. We can see that they have been remarkably successful. Only with the same level of determination will we be able to rescue our children and maybe salvage their future.
Originally published at Education Reformation.
