Top Marx for our educators

By Aussiegirl

And this is precisely what is happening in our own schools. The enslavement of a free people will not come from an invasion from abroad, but from the enemy within, which seduces and brainwashes our children into a self-loathing and self-defeating philosophy of lies and propaganda. Look to what your children are being taught in school. The battle will be won or lost there -- in the education of future generations.

Giles Auty: Top Marx for our educators | Opinion | The Australian

NOT long after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, I was lunching in London with a fellow journalist when a third colleague approached us. "Have you heard they have just tracked down the last communist cells to exist anywhere in the world?" he asked. "You would never guess where they were located: in Beverly Hills, the BBC building and the staff rooms of our universities." At which our source of supposed information departed, hugely amused with himself.

I recalled this silly interlude yesterday while scanning some of the apposite remarks made about education by our Prime Minister on ABC radio in Brisbane (see Cut & Paste). John Howard is absolutely correct in seeing post-modernist influence behind the dumbing-down of the English syllabus and in the growing disrespect shown for significant literature. But does he - or most parents - appreciate fully the extent to which Marxist ideology hides behind the mask of postmodernism?

Communism has never achieved even 2 per cent of the total vote in Australian federal elections. In the sphere of public education, however, the grip of ideas that have their origin in Marxist theory has never been greater. Children are now regularly indoctrinated in Australia's public schools with political ideology that is the opposite of that supported by their parents. Add to this an accelerating decline in quantifiable standards of learning and achievement and you see why a sizeable migration to private education has been taking place for years. [...]
It may be instructive for parents who remain understandably in the dark about any supposed need to analyse language largely or solely in terms of power relationships to understand why their children should be obliged to view the written word in this one-eyed fashion.

The originator of these ideas was a French Marxist historian/philosopher who died 22 years ago and whose entire life was consumed by a corrosive hatred of the kind of conventional, middle-class, "bourgeois" values that tend to obtain in modern Western democracies such as Australia.

The man in question was Michel Foucault. Was this paragon truly the possessor of an exceptional, visionary and supremely balanced mind whose theories of life and society should be accepted by the rest of us - including parents of hundreds of thousands of children now attending Australian schools - without question?

When not exercising his supposedly superior vision of the true nature of bourgeois Western societies, Foucault was a promiscuous masochist whose areas of interest were in torture, drug-use and totally anonymous sex. His spiritual hero was the Marquis de Sade.

As well as seeking the destruction of conventional Western capitalist societies, the admired philosopher had a parallel penchant for destroying himself, attempting suicide a number of times and finally succeeding in dying prematurely at the age of 57 from a sexually transmitted disease. [...]