Beware the Left's Trojan horse
August 25, 2005
School teachers should leave their political bias at home, writes Miranda Devine.
You don't have to look far for evidence to back Peter Costello's claim that many of the nation's teachers are left-wing and anti-American hangovers of the cultural revolution. Of course he could have said the same about many academics and journalists, but that is another story.
Costello made his point in a speech at the Art Gallery of NSW on Saturday night to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum, saying teachers trained at universities in the 1960s and '70s, when Australia was very left wing, carried ideological baggage which they were passing on to students. Anti-Americanism was part of this because the Left "believe capitalism is evil and that the US is the home of capitalism".
There were predictable splutterings of outrage in the letters pages before the head of the Australian Education Union, Pat Byrne, popped her head up to prove Costello's point, and then some. Her response was measured: "What's important is that children are taught there are two sides to any argument and the power of critical and analytical thinking."
But in an earlier speech about public education posted on the Queensland Teachers' Union conference website she had declared: "We have to start by being on the progressive side of politics." She disclosed her "brief" at the teachers' conference was to "talk about public education and give John Howard a couple of whacks". And: "This is not a good time to be progressive in Australia; or for that matter anywhere else in the world. We need look no further than the election results here and in the US and … Britain."
The sentiments are much the same from the revolutionaries of the NSW Teachers Federation, whose annual conference last month declared: "We are engaged in a battle of ideas with the Federal Government about the future and fabric of our society. As inequality increases in our society and notions of redistribution disappear our role as teachers and unionists is critical to positive change."
A resolution from the conference was to: "Liaise with the growing NGO movement, such as AFTINET [an anti-globalisation network] and the anti-war movement, to oppose neo-conservative policies such as economic rationalism."
An earlier declaration, from the 2003 conference, included an admiring definition of the concept of "proactive solidarity … which characterises the NSW Teachers Federation". It is "the force that causes us to band together to overcome the injustices of domination and oppression. It is a powerful historical force, evident in the class struggles that dominated the politics of the late 19th century and early 20th centuries".
As Kevin Donnelly, a former Coalition staffer and author of last year's Why Our Schools Are Failing, wrote in Quadrant magazine in April: "Left-wing academics, teachers unions and sympathetic governments have all conspired to use the education system to attack the so-called capitalist system and indoctrinate children with left-wing ideology."
Judging by the new wave of youthful conservatism, the activists may have subverted the curriculum but have not been wholly successful in brainwashing their charges. While many individual free-thinking teachers have remained valiantly unpolluted by '60s leftist ideology, there is no doubt that the political wing of teachers, made up of their various unions and associations, is a museum piece of pre-Berlin Wall socialism untouched by reality.
As Costello says, a central plank of this ideology is anti-Americanism, which found expression in protest against the Iraq war, which teachers' unions heartily endorsed. The view that the anti-United States sentiment fashionable around the globe hasn't taken hold in Australia is hard to maintain. As Costello points out, the results of a Lowy Institute poll last year found that only 19 per cent of Australians felt positively towards the US.
The danger of anti-Americanism is that it "can easily morph into anti-Westernism - particularly we've seen that with terrorists", he said this week. "They don't really draw distinctions between Americans or Britons or Australians; they just like to hit anybody who they consider to be a part of the West."
Antipathy to the US, as the Hungarian-born American academic Paul Hollander wrote in his seminal 1992 book Understanding Anti-Americanism, may be rooted in genuine historical grievances, or resentment of the pervasiveness of US mass culture. It may stem from "envy, resentment, dogmatic leftism, simple-minded anti-capitalism or mindless utopianism".
It is also a reaction against modernity. "To the extent that Americanisation is a form of modernisation, the process can inspire understandable apprehension among those who seek to preserve a more stable and traditional way of life. [Who are unhappy] about living in a basically secular excessively individualistic society which, while providing a wide range of choices and options, offers little help for its members to make their lives more meaningful."
His words look prophetic after September 11, 2001. Since those terrorist attacks on the US, anti-Americanism can be seen as a "Trojan horse" with the power to undermine the West's belief in itself. It provides the intellectual justification for Islamic jihad terrorism, and by devaluing Western culture, it creates vulnerable recruits at home for radical Islamic imams.
Consider that the London suicide bombers were British citizens, comfortably middle-class, British-educated, mad on cricket and Elvis Presley. Like New York's September 11 bombers, they were young Muslim men at home in Western culture.
As the French social science professor Olivier Roy wrote this month in Le Monde, they all had a secular upbringing, and none was radicalised in a madrasa. "Almost all of them became born-again Muslims in the West … The young second-generation Muslims radicalised in the rundown suburbs and inner-city slums of Europe are motivated by their situation, not Iraq. They have not been sent to fight somewhere: they fight where they live and where most of them were born."
Rootless and conflicted, these young men are unable to identify with the old culture of their parents and nor can they embrace a Western culture which is ambivalent about itself and riven with moral uncertainty. They become ripe pickings for radical imams.
If Australians are taught that the Western values they have inherited are no better than the values of any other culture, no matter how primitive, and that America is the world's most dangerous terrorist, then radicals offering certainty will flourish.
