FEMINIST DESTRUCTION OF EDUCATION SPREADING

Assistant Education Secretary for Civil Rights Stephanie Monroe has announced that the administration of President George W. Bush is investigating universities that have fewer women in science and math programs than feminists would like. We are more than five years into the Bush presidency, but it appears that former President Bill Clinton's feminist policies are still in force. Is Bush a feminist, or is he just a gentleman who is intimidated by feminists and unable to cope with their unreasonable demands, tantrums and rudeness? When it comes to public policy and personnel appointments, the result is the same.

The gender police have already ruined college sports for many men, forcing the senseless elimination of 171 wrestling teams to reduce the overall proportion of men to women on college athletic teams. Fresh from that attack on masculinity, the new target is math and science departments.

Universities know all too well how this game is played and have every reason to fear the worst. Just one feminist lawsuit can have a devastating effect on most universities, both financially and in adverse publicity. An internal Title IX regulation invented by feminists in the administrations of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Clinton established the "proportionality" of men and women enrolled in a college as the bean-counting goal for the proportion of men and women on sports teams. If the percentage of men on sports teams is too high, then the college can expect to be sued for alleged gender discrimination, even though men are far more interested in sports than women. If the college loses the lawsuit, it must pay the attorney's fees of the feminist lawyers. This encourages lawsuits and has resulted in million-dollar paydays at the expense of schools that rely on donations to stay afloat.

The Bush administration is now getting ready to apply this same mindless mentality to math and science departments, which are predominately male because men are more interested in those fields than women and score significantly higher on math and science aptitude tests. The National Science Foundation has an ADVANCE program that is already spending $75 million over five years to lure more women into science and engineering. Math and science departments have traditionally been based on merit and have produced code-breakers and technology essential to winning wars and preserving our freedoms. Why should we accept anything less than the best in our classrooms or on our athletic fields?

The National Science Foundation confirms that it is starting "a joint effort" with the Education Department "to do Title IX compliance reviews," which spells the end of picking the best and the brightest. Apparently that effort was initiated when Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., demanded that the Government Accountability Office review gender issues.

There isn't a shred of evidence that women are discriminated against in math and science; there are no separate tracks for men's math and women's math. There simply is a higher proportion of men than women who voluntarily choose math and engineering just as more men choose competitive sports. The feminists want a quota-imposed unisex society regardless of the facts of life, voluntary choice, human nature, common sense, or documented merit. And they use the power of government to achieve their goal.

One agitator for compliance reviews, Debra Rolison of the Naval Research Laboratory, reveals that compliance reviews are focusing on the way women students are "experiencing a different climate" in engineering and computer science departments. Boohoo. Bring on Massachusetts Institute of Technology feminist Nancy Hopkins to stage another tantrum and demand preferential funding for women to let them feel cozy in technical subjects.

Feminists expect that their whining and outbursts about alleged discrimination will intimidate men into giving them preferential treatment. Feminists want to rig the system so they will not have to compete with men, but will compete only with other women for a quota of scholarship slots, resources and professorships.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration ignores the gender disparity that is having very hurtful consequences: the precipitous decline in male schoolteachers. The number of male public school teachers has fallen to only 20 percent, and at the elementary school level fewer than 10 percent of teachers are men, giving boys the distinct impression that school is not for them. This nationwide trend is getting worse. Public school unions are dominated by feminists who have weighted teacher compensation in a way that is more attractive to women than men, i.e., toward generous retirement packages rather than better salaries based on merit, especially for teaching the more difficult subjects.

Nor do we hear anything about spending taxpayer funds to force universities to attract more men into the soft liberal arts subjects that now have a big majority of women students.

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Church vilified in Australian classrooms

The Australian Multicultural Foundation recently launched a series of books for primary schools titled Harmony and Understanding. The rationale for the series is to "foster a better understanding and respect for cultures and traditions of Australian society". One hopes that the editors of Jacaranda Press's Year 7 and 8 textbook SOSE Alive 2 will study the Harmony and Understanding material, because they are in urgent need of guidance about what constitutes religious intolerance.

In its teachings about medieval life, the Jacaranda book presents the Catholic Church in a negative light, portraying its teachings as based on fear and its monks as indolent and selfish. As if that's not bad enough, the accompanying CD vilifies icons central to the church's faith. One of the scenes shows a medieval village where a heretic is about to be burned. Close by is a religious figure holding a cross incorporating the figure of Jesus; after clicking on the cross it changes into what appears to be a witch's broom. Whether intended or not, the implication is that Catholicism equates with witchcraft and superstition. In the same scene, several religious figures are shown looking at the figure tied to the stake. On clicking on the head-piece of what appears to be a senior member of the church, it changes into a dunce's cap.

That students are expected to see the church as the villain is confirmed when they click on the word "heretic" inscribed above the victim's head. It changes to "heroine" and there is no doubt where the allegiance lies of those responsible for the material.

The most unsettling thing about the Jacaranda book's treatment of Christianity is that it illustrates, once again, how left-wing thought police have succeeded in their long march through the education system. Forget Woodstock, Vietnam moratoriums and flower power; the cultural revolution of the '70s and '80s was also about the way education was identified as a critical instrument to overturn the status quo. Former Victorian education minister and premier Joan Kirner told the Fabian society in 1983: "If we are egalitarian in our intention we have to reshape education so that it is part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change rather than an instrument of the capitalist system."

Instead of acknowledging Australia's success in providing prosperity, stability and peace, leftist teacher academics argue that society is, in the words of one textbook set in teacher training courses during the '80s, "disfigured by class exploitation, sexual and racial oppression, and in chronic danger of war and environmental destruction".

In teacher training, as noted by Monash educationalist Georgina Tsolidis, teachers were told "to instil in our students feelings of self-worth premised on the value of what these students already knew and the value of what they wanted to learn, rather than the intrinsic worth of what we wanted to teach. Our job was to produce young adults who would challenge the status quo through skills of critical inquiry."

While education has always been concerned with the search for the truth, it is obvious that "critical inquiry" means something different. Since the release of the Keating government's national curriculum during the early '90s, history has been transformed into studies of society and the environment with a politically correct stance on multiculturalism, feminism and environmentalism.

Early European settlement is described as an "invasion", instead of celebrating what we have achieved as a nation, students are taught "black armband" history and Australia's Anglo/Celtic culture is presented as simply one culture among many.

In English, everything from Shakespeare to tissue boxes to Australian Idol is considered a worthwhile text for study as students are taught to deconstruct texts in terms of how those more privileged in society are able to dominate and marginalise others.

Even science teaching has fallen victim to cultural relativism. Instead of recognising the primacy of western science, the South Australian curriculum argues that different versions of science are simply socio-cultural constructs.

The consequences of the long march are clear to see. Students leave school culturally illiterate, with a fragmented view of the world. Worse still, given the politics of envy and the spiritual emptiness of postmodernism, many students also leave school ethically challenged and morally adrift.

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Choice is not a dirty word

An Australian perspective on school choice

The issue of government funding to non-government schools has returned to centre stage. The ALP has decided to get rid of its hit list of so-called wealthy private schools, finally realising that all parents pay taxes, regardless of where their children go to school. At the same time, the federal Government has announced a review of the formulas used to decide how much support non-government schools receive. For many Australian parents, especially those demanding flexibility and choice in their children's education and who are financially penalised for doing so, it is a review we have to have.

One way forward would be to introduce school vouchers, an idea that is not as radical as opponents make out, given that Australia already has a de facto voucher system. All students attending non-government schools, both Catholic and independent, attract some degree of state and federal funding.

Instead of education being centrally managed and funded and the state having monopoly control over the school system, vouchers allow the money to follow the child and, in turn, give parents the freedom to choose between government and non-government schools. Based on figures compiled by the Productivity Commission, the average recurrent cost to state and federal governments of educating a student in a government school is $10,003 a year. The equivalent figure for a non-government student is $5595. Under a full voucher system, all parents would be entitled to the same amount of money, possibly means-tested, to spend on the education of their children and the freedom to choose their children's school. Australian parents want choice in education. The percentage of students enrolled in non-government schools grew from 23 per cent in 1980 to 33 per cent last year. Forty per cent of students attend non-government senior secondary schools.

The benefits of vouchers are many. Empowering parents and giving them increased responsibility and control over educational decision-making is not only good in theory; the closer power resides with people the better. Experience in the US shows it also helps to strengthen community ties and community engagement represented by social capital.

At the moment, school choice for Australian parents is restricted to those wealthy enough to buy into those areas where there are successful government schools or to pay costly fees. Why not give parents on low incomes the same type of choice by providing vouchers? Such is the situation in Milwaukee in the US. And in underdeveloped places such as Puerto Rico and Colombia, voucher systems are targeted at disadvantaged communities on the basis that education represents a ladder of opportunity.

If, as a result of vouchers, more students attend non-government schools, this is also a good thing. In the independent schools sector, excluding Catholic schools, it is estimated that governments save $2.2 billion a year as a result of fewer students going to government schools, money that can be spent on health and other services.

As argued by Canberra-based education writer Mark Harrison in Education Matters: Government, Markets and New Zealand Schools, vouchers also provide increased competition and help break down monopoly control represented by the state system. "The market-based approach relies on choice and competition," Harrison writes. "It relies on increased incentives to perform, improve and change - the incentives of the market - such as the need to attract students and pressure from competitors. Competition provides strong incentives; it punishes mistakes and rewards success and provides continual pressure for improvement."

As so graphically illustrated during Victoria's gas crisis in 1998, when an industrial accident led to Esso-BHP closing down the plant, monopoly control means all are made to suffer when something goes wrong. Think of the damage that whole language and fuzzy maths teaching approaches are causing. Non-government schools are in a stronger position to resist destructive experiments such as outcomes-based education, where students no longer fail and academic studies are a thing of the past. American academics such as Milton Friedman and Terry M. Moe also argue that parental choice represented by vouchers frees schools from provider-capture, where schools are managed more for the benefit of education bureaucrats and teacher unions than for those at the local level.

One of the greatest dangers facing education in Australia is the need to attract and keep highly qualified, motivated and committed teachers. Surveys show that many become dispirited and leave the profession because of over-regulated and time-consuming curriculum and accountability measures imposed from on high. The way teachers are rewarded also promotes mediocrity, with little financial or professional incentive for more able teachers. Vouchers provide a solution in that opening the system to market forces leads to a stronger incentive to raise standards by innovation and rewarding better teachers.

Notwithstanding the arguments in favour of vouchers, there are caveats. First, non-government schools are able to succeed because they have the autonomy to respond to the needs of their communities and to manage their own affairs. In his new book, Vital Signs, Vibrant Society: Securing Australia's Economic and Social Wellbeing, federal Labor MP Craig Emerson argues that the funding distinction between government and non-government schools should be abandoned. But if the price of increased government funding to non-government schools is that they have to succumb to the same type of over-regulation and interference faced by government schools, then that freedom is lost.

Giving parents more power to choose and freeing up the education system will also fail to be effective if all schools, government and non-government, are made to follow the same centrally mandated and controlled state-designed curriculum. While there is an argument that all schools have to abide by a minimum set of regulations and accountability measures, and there may be a common curriculum in areas such as literacy and numeracy, it is also essential that schools are not forced to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach.

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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.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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