CORRUPT HISTORY TEACHING

The flap over the U.S. Department of Education consigning 300,000 copies of "Helping Your Child to Learn History" to the trash bin is evidence anew that the federal government should have no role in education. Illiteracy and low scores in public schools are a national scandal, but it's hard to see how federal spending improves anything.....

"Helping Your Child Learn History" was a 73-page booklet published by the Department of Education to give advice to parents of preschool through fifth-grade children. The booklet gratuitously included several favorable references to the infamous "National Standards for United States History," even obliquely suggesting that President Bush supports those standards. When Lynne Cheney, the wife of the Vice President Dick Cheney, spotted those references, her staff communicated displeasure to the Education Department, which then destroyed its inventory of 300,000 copies, or in bureaucratese, "recycled" them.

The University of California Los Angeles professor who had been in charge of the National Standards project found this decision "extremely troubling." He called it "a pretty god-awful example of interference - intellectual interference. If that's not Big Brother or Big Sister, I don't know what is."

Note the inverted mindset of the typical academic. He thinks it is OK for Big Brother federal government to order students to study a revisionist, distorted, and inaccurate version of U.S. history, but it is offensive for parents and citizens to demand that inaccuracies be omitted.

I suppose liberals will soon be whining about "book burning," but as the media say, let's have a reality check. "The National Standards for History" was financed 10 years ago by a $2 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to UCLA to write standards for how U.S. history should be taught in grades 5 through 12. The 271-page result, called "National Standards for United States History," turned out to be so faulty as well as so anti-American that the U.S. Senate denounced it by a vote of 99-to-1. Lynne Cheney, who was National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman when the grant was given, turned into a vigorous opponent, denouncing the volume as "politicized history," which it surely was.

"National Standards" was not a narrative of past events, but was left-wing revisionism and political correctness. Almost every event in U.S. history was described as though it had race or gender motives and effects, and all ethnic groups except white males were portrayed as oppressed and mistreated.....

Left-wing bias showed itself in the skewed selection of historical figures. Dozens of obscure people were singled out for study, while Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Gen. Robert E. Lee, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Gen. Douglas MacArthur were omitted....

Despite the discrediting of the taxpayer-financed "History Standards" project, it is obvious the current crop of academic professionals is determined to drop the DWEMs, Dead White European Males, down an Orwellian memory hole and to replace history with Multiculturalism and Oppression Studies, featuring third-rate writers who attack Western Civilization as sexist, racist and oppressive. Parents should check out the history books used in their local schools.

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IS THE PENDULUM SWINGING BACK IN AUSTRALIA?

We may be living now in that moment when the pendulum of human history is balanced between the ideological extremes it regularly traverses. The extreme pendulum swing provoked by the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and its era of amorality and permissiveness, has finally petered out. Increasing numbers of people are emboldened to question the value of this "progress" and the price it exacted on human dignity and happiness. Just the fact the long-taboo issue of abortion is being discussed in Australia publicly and rationally is a sign the pendulum has moved back towards the centre. The wreckers and deconstructionists of old have had the pendulum yanked away from them.

One of the best jobs of yanking comes from the 12 authors of a brilliant new book of essays, Education and the Ideal. Conceived and edited by Sydney teacher Naomi Smith, it charts the poisonous impact on young minds of modish educational ideologies of the past 30 or 40 years. Christopher Koch writes in the foreword: "If the barbaric tide identified here is not held back, much more will be lost than the ability to understand what human genius is about. What will be lost will be true civilisation and the understanding of beauty." Complaints about "dumbing down" and political correctness are familiar but never before assembled with such authority and in such a contemporary Australian context.

Alan Barcan, honorary associate in Education at the University of Newcastle, says that until the late 1960s the school curriculum was "imbued with a confident, optimistic sense of purpose", concerned with "the building of character and ideas and with the acquisition of knowledge about things". But then a wave of "innovations" swept through. Today, four competing ideologies hold sway: "Critical theory [and post-modernism], a degenerated form of Marxism, [emphasising] the social context of knowledge"; a social justice approach dwelling on "disadvantaged" groups, such as women, minority ethnic groups, homosexuals and Aborigines; a vocational approach; and the "relics of traditional liberal-humanist values".

Interestingly the '70s were a golden age for teachers - numbers doubled, salaries jumped, government invested, and yet, by the end of the decade, children were worse off. By 1990 the green movement had infiltrated classrooms, and after "the collapse of the New Left, some radicals embraced social justice". By 2000, thanks to multimedia and a wider variety of texts, English looked a lot like cultural studies. "Relativism and sociological interpretations had become ingrained in the curriculum." Even physics was not immune, writes Neville Fletcher, former University of New England physics professor. The HSC syllabus, for instance, asks students how our understanding of energy and matter are "influenced by society".

Postmodern relativism so influences the curriculum we cannot rank a work of art based on artistic value because that would be "elitist", writes Dr Barry Spurr, senior lecturer in English literature at Sydney University. Thus King Lear is no better than Ginger Meggs, and Bush Tucker Man videos are as much a syllabus "text" as The Grapes of Wrath. But in the Standard HSC English course, "not one poet from the entire 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is to be found".

Spurr bemoans the "disastrous abandonment" of the teaching of formal grammar in the '60s and says the subsequent degradation of the language was "validated by the Australian anti-intellectual cultural prejudice against the lucid expression of informed and sustained ideas". The result is that Sydney University has had to introduce a remedial subject to deal with students' "grammatical incompetence"......

The book is not all doom and gloom. There is praise for the return in NSW to teaching basic grammar, phonics, writing and times tables. In fact Education and the Ideal is as much homage to good teachers as it is a critique of educational fads. Naomi Smith writes a chapter acknowledging teachers who "hold the education system together whose judgement [students] accept and whose example they are inspired to emulate".

But under the onslaught of all the overlapping -isms of the past 30 years, only mathematics survives with its integrity unchallenged, writes Sydney Grammar's Dr Bill Pender. "Mathematics collapses completely whenever language is misused or logic is ignored." If only that were the case for all disciplines. Imagine how much clearer life would be and how little need for pendulum extremes.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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