‘Failing Our Students with a Failed Curriculum’

The curriculum is always controversial and this version has attracted some pretty strong invective from the right leaning commentariat.

Apparently, it is infused with green, leftist politics and is concerned more with indoctrination rather than education and the consequence is that students in Australia are falling behind their international peers.

Conservative think tank The Institute of Public Affairs reports that, ‘The education of Australian students has shifted from a system based on knowledge and facts, to one of skills underpinned by an ideologically driven, thematically integrated curriculum that prioritises Indigenous issues, sustainability, and social justice to the detriment of everything else.’

“Australian students should be learning how to read and write, yet the latest version of the National Curriculum is indoctrinating them with identity politics, critical race theory, and radical green ideology,” said Dr Bella d’Abrera, Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation at the The Institute of Public Affairs.

The Institute of Public Affairs’ new research report, De-educating Australia: How the National Curriculum is Failing Australian Children, finds that Version 9 of the National Curriculum, implemented this year, is irreversibly failing generations of young Australians.

“Children being taught according to the dictates of the Australian National Curriculum stand no chance of developing the vital skills they will need to succeed in life,” Dr d’Abrera said.

“The cross-curriculum priorities permanently embedded in the National Curriculum mean that political indoctrination is almost impossible to avoid, no matter which school your child attends.”

Their research also shows that ‘children are being actively inculcated in radical green ideology under the guise of the ‘Sustainability’ cross-curriculum priority.’

“Children are being taught that a ‘sustainable’ world cannot be achieved without a socially just world, and that the economic, social, and environmental systems of Western Civilisation are harmful both to the planet and to people,” Dr d’Abrera said.

“In every learning area, from Italian language studies, to Design and Technology, and to Mathematics, children are being recruited as activists into the climate change cult, and are being told that only they can save the planet.

“No wonder there is an outbreak of a new condition called ‘eco-anxiety’ among Australian children.”

The National Curriculum is also designed to re-position how Australians think of themselves and their country, by focusing on the importance of being ‘global citizens’ rather than ‘Australian’ according to the report.

“By the time they leave school, Australians will be convinced that the modern state of Australia was founded on the principles of white supremacy and oppression. They will believe that Australia is systemically racist, and that Indigenous Australians are, by virtue of their race, oppressed,” Dr d’Abrera said.

“By teaching our children to be ashamed of Australia’s past, we only alienate them further from their country. And, in the meantime, they continue to fall further behind schoolchildren in Finland, Singapore and Shanghai, who are actually taught mathematics in maths classes.

“Ultimately, it is impossible to have a government-endorsed curriculum that remains free of politicisation. The National Curriculum is a political manifesto, and it needs to be abolished.”

To download the report click here