I had a thought. Is anybody else writing about the same subjects that I write about on my blog? So I did a Google with the phrase I used in recent blog Education or indoctrination. To my surprise I hit on this story.
Now I've frequently ruminated on how the left wing Marxists have been hijacking our education system but then I think that I'm just being paranoid. In many ways telling myself I'm paranoid makes me feel more secure in that things aren't really as bad as I imagine them to be.
Now I'm looking for reds under my bed.
"Education has to be reshaped so that it is part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system," said the former Labor minister.
And academics around the country have responded.
"A major task for Leftist activist academics is ... to connect education with community struggles for social justice," says Dr Gregory Martin, who was a lecturer in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus. He also happened to be a member of the militant National Teachers Education Union and the Gold Coast branch of the radical Marxist group, Socialist Alliance.
For Dr Martin, education is a channel for conducting a Marxist revolution. He praises radical Marxist educators such as Peter McLaren (a proponent of so-called critical pedagogy) for their work in what he describes as "laying the practical groundwork for the possibility of a revolutionary situation by 'stretching out' a Marxist line into various social movements."
In fact, there is a long list of education academics in Australian universities who hold similar radical views. The evidence-based list with supporting references and documentation was tabled at the Senate Inquiry into Academic Freedom. (A copy is available on the Make Education Fair campaign website.)
As a result, teaching courses in education faculties at Australian universities reflect the same sort of radical thinking.
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7 comments:
I'm quite sure universities are full of socialists- they would have to be. Youth are very idealistic - they see the world as less than perfect and want more "fairness". The unpopular but very intelligent have a personal interest in things being more fair - those that stay within education - professors and teachers - get paid better than average and believe that is fair - but retain much of their idealism because they have never really been out in the real world. Perhaps they had some crappy minimum wage job through school and felt they were worth more...not having a clue what a rat race everyone else faces- or that the business paying that minimum wage isn't making the fortunes they suppose. And so they continue with their idealism. But anyone else who has had to struggle to get ahead and has made something of themselves has no desire to work that hard just to hand half to some lazy bum who doesn't even want to work hard enough to get by - they lose that sense of idealism in the world. Socialism on a large scale just doesn't work that well. We need our most ambitious people to pull us along in their wake and raise the standards for everyone. Unrestrained capitalism can't work either without revolt and violence but we need to retain the best parts of rewarding those who work hard while giving quality education and at least basic health care to everyone. Then all of society is enriched.
Blech!
Yes, many people blog on this subject. Former Leftist radical David Horowitz's very excellent Frontpage Magazine (formerly Heterodoxy Magazine) is a chronicle of the struggle against Marxists in the American University since SDS radicals targeted the system for political takeover in their Port Huron Statement in 1962 (look at the very end of their treatise).
But the problem has been going on for over a century now. Nietzsche's 1872 "Thoughts on the Future of Our Educational Institutions" highlighted the crises which arose in during the development of the German University Model that relegated "classical and liberal philology and scholarship" to the back burners and focused the educational system on research into technologies and providing something more akin to vocational training. The German model was imported into the USA in the late 19th century (Johns Hopkins University) and has been thriving on R&D money and government subsidies ever since.
In the nineteenth century, Universities became "producers" of "new knowledge" rather than archivists and preservationists of the accumulated knowledge of the ages. Hence arose modernity's "prejudice" favoring the "new" over the "traditional tried and true".
And new "philosophies" like Marxism/ Hegelism spread along with these new "scientific" prejudices...
FJ, strangely enough, I can't see anything new in Marxism/Hegelism.Haven't these ideas been disproved yet?
Isaiah Berlin took Marx apart back in the late 50's. He proved that entire body of human languages developed to date would HAVE to operate in a completely different manner were there an "inevitable" historical progression from capitalism to communism. That would render attribution of any/all acts of "free will" impossible.
But then... nobody can "prove" that their is such a thing as "free will" either... only all human languages and cultures are essentially centered around the concept that people are responsible for their own actions, and that everything is NOT predestined.
You guys are hilarious. Every socialist I know is a working class one, at least half of us get minimum wage and listening to you waffle on like a bunch of academic twats reminds me of why I work towards a more just society so that elitist wankers like yourselves aren't in charge.
^^Proof that logical proofs will never work^^
...at least not to convince anyone other than a few elitist wankers. ;-)
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