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...instead education?
Judged the impact of the culture wars over the last twenty years or so, the answer is Yes. Instead of education being committed to academic standards, the focus is on promoting an ideologically driven, politically correct view of the world. Left-wing academics, teacher unions and sympathetic governments have all conspired to use the education system to attack the so-called capitalist system and to indoctrinate students with their left-wing ideology.
A basic tenet of this left-wing approach, even though communism has clearly failed, is that society can still be changed by taking "the long march through institutions" like the church, the family and, in particular, the education system. As noted by Bill Hannan, a one-time senior bureaucrat in the Victorian Education Department and the person largely responsible for the failed national curriculum introduced by the Keating federal government: "We don't have to wait for society to change before education can change. Education is part of society. By changing it, we help to change society."
The most recent example of this political bias is an editorial in the Australian Association for Teachers of English journal English in Australia (Number 141). The editor, Wayne Sawyer, argues that because young voters (ex-students) supported the re-election of the Howard government, it is obvious that English teachers had failed in their job to teach social-critical literacy. The fact that young voters voted the wrong way, according to Sawyer, is proof that they are not thinking clearly or ethically and teachers must redouble their efforts to ensure that young people think the way the teachers want.
In schools, the impact of the culture wars has been profound. Subjects like history and civics are rewritten to enforce a politically correct, black-armband view, and feminists and left-wing advocates of the gender agenda argue for the rights of women, gays, lesbians and transgender people. Across Australian schools, in areas like multiculturalism, the environment and peace studies, students are indoctrinated and teachers define their role as new-age class warriors.
One of the most strident and influential ways that the Left has sought to control the hearts and minds of students is through the imposition of political correctness. The expression first gained prominence on American university campuses around 1990 when the Left fought to take over universities, and conservative academics were attacked and vilified for daring to question the thought police of the Left. The Random House Webster's College Dictionary defined political correctness as: "marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving especially race, gender, sexual affinity or ecology".
Education in Australia, at both school and university levels, has also been a victim of the politically correct orthodoxy. Since the early 1990s traditional approaches to learning have been attacked as obsolete, patriarchal and bourgeois. Professor Ross Fitzgerald, noting the impact of political correctness on our universities, said it "was suppressing research, hijacking free speech and being enforced in a dangerously virulent way".
As anyone familiar with the culture wars will know, universities no longer pretend that education should be about what Matthew Arnold termed the "best that has been thought and said". The English Department at the University of Melbourne provides an example. Subjects like literature disappear, replaced by cultural studies as students are forced to choose between such offerings as: "Reading Sexuality", "From Rock to Rave", "Feminist Cultural Studies", "Postcolonial Writing" and "Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life".
Great literature was once valued for its aesthetic and moral value. The impact of "neo-Marxism", "feminism", "postmodernism" and "theories of transgression" (in particular "queer theory") now means that such an approach is considered "Eurocentric", "homophobic" and "patriarchal". So students at the University of Melbourne spend their time "reading diverse cultural forms (the family home, the amusement park) and practices (shopping, fandom)" and learning how "pop-feminist and post-feminist discourses conceptualised the relation between gender, sexuality and embodiment".
Not only has the definition of what are considered worthwhile texts for study (such...
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