Why education has been captured by the Left (letter)

by John Kelly

News Weekly, November 24, 2007
Sir,

While acknowledging the Left-wing capture of universities, schools and teachers' unions in Labor states criticised by Mark Lopez (News Weekly, October 27, 2007), a correspondent in The Australian (October 31), responding to the same article, challenged the author to explain why "conservatives" have been so ineffectual in resisting leftist hegemony on the educational front in "the culture wars".

I suggest several reasons:

i) the climate of relativism encouraged in schooling by social engineering and the accompanying imposition of political correctness through curriculum revision in recent decades, facilitated through the expansion of educational bureaucracy;

ii) the implementation of "affirmative action" policy in tertiary, secondary and primary teaching appointments;

iii) the preoccupation of "conservative" teachers with the practice of classroom teaching itself, rather than the politics of curriculum;

iv) the irregular procedures that preclude debate in key learning area curriculum meetings;

v) the unprofessional ignoring of considered correspondence and the effective unaccountability of incumbents in the educational bureaucracy.

John Kelly,
Tranmere, SA