See earlier from Phil Shannon: An Australian Reader Reports On Higher Education In The Antipodes: “Indigenous”, “Race”, “Gender”, Blah Blah Blah

From: Phil Shannon [Email him]

The authorities charged with the latest six-yearly review of the Australian school curriculum have just emitted their proposals and, if I could borrow John Derbyshire’s eloquent phrasing, it is all about a blackety-blackety-black black black blackety-black makeover of education in Australia.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), a federal government body, has recommended that education in Australia (up to Year 10 high school) should obsess about how an evil, white-supremacist European civilization has visited nothing but “dispossession, disease and destruction” on Australia’s Aborigines [Australian curriculum advisors think maths is systemically racist and boomerangs led to the invention of propellers, AdvanceAustralia, July 2, 2021].

This woke enlightenment is to be achieved by overlaying the “cross-curriculum priority” of “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Culture” on every discipline from Math to Physical Education. As well as inculcating national self-loathing by white Australians, the curriculum will instruct students on how “contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are strong, resilient, rich and diverse” i.e., students will be indoctrinated with a bowdlerized, sentimental, Rousseauesque version of Aboriginal prehistory where intertribal violence, cannibalism or harmful superstition never existed and where alcoholism, drug dependency, domestic violence, child abuse, criminal overrepresentation, below-average IQ and other tasteless problems don’t exist now.

What has sparked this latest eruption of Good Think? Here’s an answer—the faceless academics of ACARA are full-on Diversity loons and many of their advisers are undisguised Aboriginal activists.

Here are four of them:

• Luke Pearson believes that posters saying “Stop Killer Cops” should be displayed in classrooms so that children “can have an understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement and understand that there is a lot of racism within policing in Australia,” whilst “f … your flag” is a pedagogically suitable tweet.
• Chris Matthews is a self-described “Aboriginal mathematician” (oh, like the ones that advanced beyond a primitive counting system all the way up to 10 and who went on to invent trigonometry, logarithms and differential calculus? Those ones?), who argues that the teaching of (White Man’s) Math is systematically racist because it “devalues indigenous culture.”
• Theresa Sainty believes that Australia Day (Australia’s national day, which celebrates the arrival of the British First Fleet in 1788) should be mourned as ‘Invasion Day.”
• Cindy Berwick insists that we should teach aerodynamics through the boomerang “coz the boomerang actually led to the invention of propellers, which then led to flight, then led to, you know, the invention of drones, which now patrol our coastlines, and save us from sharks…”. (oops, slightly awkward that insight, as even the dutifully-woke Australian Museum says that “the boomerang does not work like a propeller at all” and that It was not until the 1970's that a complete mathematical model was worked out).

Never mind, as Australia continues its international slide in core competencies down to 16th in the world in reading, 29th in Maths and 17th in science, and as critical thinking skills are made redundant by pre-digested Critical Race Theory, the next crop of Indigenous Grievance Studies graduates should be a real world-beater.

Phil Shannon is a veteran Australian working class socialist, latter-day VDARE.com supporter and former high school Math/English teacher (thankfully retired, given the above).