Let’s Stop This Woke Agenda In Our Schools…
Woke:
adjective
INFORMAL•US
So there you have it!
When certain people talk about their hostility to woke folk, then what they’re actually saying is that they don’t want people to be alert to injustice in society, especially when it comes to racism.
Now, I’m often conscious of the fact that I’m an older, white male who takes his privilege for granted, so it’s good to know that I shouldn’t be woke and that I can get some sleep at last because I’ve reached an age where I like to take naps in the afternoon… Actually, I think I was always at that stage but during my twenties, it was due to the fact that I’d missed sleep owing to having a somewhat more interesting time of things in the evening, but I digress.
As someone who’s spent a large part of my life in classrooms, I’m always intrigued when I hear politicians like Hollie Hughes talk about how teachers are indoctrinating kids and that there’s a Marxist agenda in schools. I guess it makes a change from the Trotskyist agenda that we had when I was growing up, but Hughes overlooks two important facts:
- It’s almost impossible to indoctrinate a teenager. They naturally resist most things adults tell them.
- Most of my time has been spent trying to indoctrinate kids. Not with any little red books, but rather into doing things like wearing a uniform, turning up on time, completing work and being civil to the people they don’t like. Even if I had time to alert them to inequality, I’d have about as much success as I have in trying to stop Jackson from telling Cedric that he’s a loser.
Don’t get me wrong here. I do tell Jackson (not his real name) not to pick on Cedric (unfortunately his real name) and while I can stop him from doing it in class, as far as indoctrinating him into being an all-round decent guy who leaves the less fortunate alone, well, let’s just say that if teachers could do that, then nobody would be voting for Hollie Hughes and everyone would be leaving Matt Canavan alone.
Some things kids will naturally believe their teachers about things that don’t matter like Maths and Science, but when it comes to matters political, they generally either follow what their parents have told them or else they have thought for themselves and neither group are just going to abandon their position just because I tell them that I disagree. I remember many years ago one of my nieces told me that the Bay City Rollers were so much better than The Beatles and argued her position passionately. These days, she has a slightly different perspective but that didn’t come about through my well-reasoned points about how the sixties were greatly influenced by the Fab Four who were bigger than Jesus… Well, it stands to reason. There were four of them so naturally, they’d be bigger.
Anyway, it’s like that in class. Even if I had a mind to enlighten students about the politically correct way of doing things, it doesn’t change the minds of those who’ve been brought up to be racist or sexist.
English classes look at how language is used to frame arguments and it’s not easy to get teenagers to divorce themselves from the issue at hand and just look at how the article is presenting it.
“Yes,” I tell them, “you may believe that the person in the article is worse than Hitler, but put that to one side and look at how the choice of words is leading people to that conclusion. It doesn’t matter at this point whether that conclusion is true or not, we’re just looking at the way the media uses words and does things like writing some of the letters in a different type to make them stand out. For example, ‘nEVILle’ isn’t the normal way his name is written…”
“But sir, he is evil so what’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem. We’re not judging him. His guilt or innocence is something we need to leave alone for the moment…”
“I think he should be left alone in a cell with someone who’ll give him what he deserves...”
“That’s ok, but we’re just looking at the language here.”
“I’d like to be in the cell when it happens so I can give him a couple of extra kicks.”
“Ok, can you see how the way the paper is presenting things is feeding into that perception.”
“Nah, my dad said that they knew how to deal with people like that when he was a kid. They used to put them in stocks and let people throw things at them.”
“Is your dad two hundred or something?”
“What d’ya mean?”
“Never mind.”
Of course, when Hollie Hughes told us that the kids were being taught Marxism by teachers, I did have to check that “Mad As Hell” wasn’t back on and that she wasn’t a promo for it. It would be nice if a journalist could ask her to define Marxism because, in my experience, all the teachers I know are more concerned with their mortgages and their bills than plotting the armed revolutionary overthrow of the system…
Actually, I don’t think Marx advocated armed rebellion either. I think he was a bit more bookish and merely argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat was inevitable. Perhaps I should look things up so that I know a bit about what I’m talking about before I pontificate… Although that doesn’t stop a lot of people in the media.
To define Marxism in simple terms, it’s a political and economic theory where a society has no classes. Every person within the society works for a common good, and class struggle is theoretically gone.
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15 comments
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Garth
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RoadKillCafe
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GL
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Phil Pryor
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wam
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Josephus
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Canguro
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GL
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David Baird
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Trev
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Arnd
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Arnd
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Arnd
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leefe
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Rick Pass
Return to home pageI have problems with your post.
I find it difficult to understand that un-Woke people do not want others to understand injustice in society. Can you clarify this nonsense.
I am a white male and I consider it Woke (racist) to believe that I am privileged. You should extend your afternoon naps.
Holly Hughes offered some reality that must be pursued.
As an educationist you should understand the Marxist protocols.
Marx was a revolutionist; history has recorded the destruction and genocide.
Child indoctrination is a starting point of Cultural Marxism.
Yeah, well, Hollie Hughes is a legend in her own lunchtime, an undiscovered genius, so perceptive, really an undiscovered unwoke genius and, really, unwokeism is the way to go, ignorance is all, to be admired, to be praised. Really, to denigrate the Marx Brothers, jeez Garth, fair crack of the sav, I really liked Harpo..in my memory, Marx were comedians, oh wait, you refer to a different Marx, ok. Really trying here to be really unwoke, take more afternoon naps, really apply myself to be considered a braindead dickhead which I am really achieving, no wuckers, we need to stick together, Garth, old son, unwoke and ignorant the way to go.
Wokeness – political correctness rebadged.
Someone named Garth has problems, and not merely with a post. Holly Hughes issued a skullfull of shit that is based on mediaeval romanist superstition and self romancing lies. Stay awake, any time of day, to be actually aware. Marx was a very original scholar and all round intellectual, as you may or may not comprehend. He apparently killed nobody, nor advocated violence. In the London of his ageing, he was known everwhere as good old honest Marx. Child indoctrination is the policy of political and social perverts, murderous catholics, homicidal USAns, and many other defectives. So, who or what are you and will you develop? Hmmnn?
Not bigger, rossleigh, remember the dad, his son and the holy ghost? Then add the virgin, sundry saints, the pope and mobs of bishops? Till the 70s politics, was only in the school staffroom, was confined to ming pro or anti or sir bolte/sir playford with the left pictured by an ugly man with horn rimmed spectacles and famous for a white Australia – two wongs don’t make a white. Then a spate of the powerful, dunston, bjelke and whitlam, What a trio for the media to develop their destructive apparatus. (Bjelke controlled the media for 15 corrupt, lying years and the other two suffered) These set us all talking and the gap between conservative and progressive teachers broadened. I can remember a ridiculous assumption, I had held since school. Intelligent people supported, dunston and whitlam. Wow the changes were coming but in those days only exam matriculants became teachers. So were clever and I found people I had assumed were labor were not only in playford’s camp but also could not think to seek evidence. They were absolutely opposed to ‘thinking’. There is an unacknowledged factor that I see as affecting the automatic respect for teachers held by students pre-70s. The income of the police far outstripped that of teachers.
ps I have been watching korean soaps and our year 9 students are animals is echoed in korean culture.
pps
garth is guilty of being an abuser of his neurons. Indoctrinations has been around children well before school starts and takes years of constant reinforcement. Oops he may have been a private school boy for whom his experience is in papal indoctrination?
Marx believed the people would overthrow their rulers but thought that would happen in developed societies eg England first. So determinism and social movements both . In practice in Russia it was a disaster. The Northern European social democracies seem the least pernicious. Soon as a leader of the revolution emerges corruption and delusions de grandeur arise. There is a lot to be said for anarchism instead , because it is grassroots decision making as eg in so called non industrial societies. However history shows that eventually as populations grow and security forces proliferate dictators arise whether in Marxist or fascist societies and sometimes the two work together. Sartre wrote that all revolutions deteriorate . There is a cycle of revolution then a new elite of oppressors, in most societies. East Germany was a surveillance society with free holidays and medical care. Which is happening in capitalist societies too. It is true that poverty is much worse in non Nordic capitalist societies. To me it seems that whatever the bigotry armies are far more dangerous than ever, surveillance more efficient, control more subtle. I like to observe the huge posters of seductive half naked leering young beauties in our shopping malls. Seduction, armies, soma for the populace. At least in Hungary the people drank real fruit juice. But then came Coca Cola. One slavery or another. Agree that a good teacher teaches basic logic and decodes ideology. Many techniques. The word woke as used constantly in the Australian newspaper means telling the young about past massacres and wars, slavery and subjection of all kinds, and that is what many articles in the murdoch rags condemn, I find some of this article a bit naive. Animal farm and all that. Humans are greedy. We need a wealth /windfall tax, good state health services etc but all advanced societies other than the Nordics seem to me cruel and somewhat boorish. I recall colleagues from Hungary shocked at the high medical fees capitalist societies levy in the West, as I recall too the brainwashing of communist children. Social democracies work best but there has to be a culture of honesty and public service. After the Panama papers the Icelandic pm resigned but no one in Oz called for Turnbull to do so. There is no solution. Marx could not reconcile his determinism with his call for proletarian revolt . Industrial societies are efficient police societies. Dystopian novels are becoming somewhat prophetical , in different ways. Vulgar , destructive consumerism here, a bloody dictator there…. The author of this text needs to read The God that Failed.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the anarcho-capitalist economist, in his book Democracy: The God That Failed, concludes that “democracy is the primary cause of a wave of decivilization sweeping the world since World War I, and that democracy must be delegitimized.”
He characterizes democracy as “publicly owned government”, and when he compares it with monarchy—”privately owned government”—he concludes that the latter is preferable; however, [he also] aims to show that both monarchy and democracy are deficient systems compared to his preferred structure for advancing civilization—something he calls the natural order, a system free of both taxation and coercive monopoly in which jurisdictions freely compete for adherents.
In his Introduction, he lists other names used elsewhere to refer to this concept of “natural order”, including “ordered anarchy”, “private property anarchism”, “anarcho-capitalism”, “autogovernment”, “private law society”, and “pure capitalism” [Wiki]
Sounds like an eminently sensible approach, cf. the current rash of cluster-f*ck governments around the planet struggling to accommodate the challenges of managing complex societies amid a rapidly changing background of environmental stressors.
Texas, a microcosm of current American madness.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/01/texas-board-education-slavery-involuntary-relocation/
To be woke’, as Phil says, is simply to be AWARE. As if that’s something truly egregious. The glib, pejorative use of ‘woke’ is simply cheap smartarse-ism. But then, Holly Hughes is a cheap smartarse, obviously, and if that’s the best she can do she’s clearly content to stay in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition for some time to come.
Texas is kinda woke. The preference by some is to couch history in terms of ‘slavery’ rather than ‘involuntary relocation’. Smart people – can think @ speed of drying paint. Was it Shakespeare said, ‘To be a slave or to be involuntarily relocated to be a slave, that is the question.’
“Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde …”
or the English version:
“Arise ye workers from your slumber …”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale
Though I always thought – and now more than ever – that the rousing call to “wake up” at the beginning of The International packs a bit more punch than the nice, polite, but unbearably pedantic and nit-picking “lefty wokism” that continually trips over its own convoluted top-down attempts better to integrate the oppressed and dispossessed into the very system that oppresses and dispossessed them in the first place.
Canguro,
it’s off topic, but I’ll give it a shot anyway: As anarcho-communist, I simply cannot understand how articulate and educated thinkers like Hopper can possibly subscribe to anarcho-capitalism. The maintenance of the principle of property necessarily requires taking recourse to violence.
I don’t see any way around Proudhon’s dictum that “Property is Theft – but possession is a right”.
Sure, it is philosophically imprecise, not to say outright dodgy – as Marx went to great lengths to point out.
But it is a damn sight catchier than “Das Kapital, Vols. I – III*.
Canguro,
it’s off topic, but I’ll give it a shot anyway: As anarcho-communist, I simply cannot understand how even highly articulate and educated thinkers like Hoppe can possibly subscribe to anarcho-capitalism. The maintenance of the principle of property necessarily requires taking recourse to violence.
I don’t see any way around Proudhon’s dictum that “Property is Theft – but possession is a right”.
Sure, it is philosophically imprecise, not to say outright dodgy – as Marx went to great lengths to point out.
But it is a damn sight catchier than Das Kapital, Vols. I – III.
Garth:
“I am a white male and I consider it Woke (racist) to believe that I am privileged.”
Being woke is not being racist.
Pointing out that you are white is neither woke nor racist.
Pointing out that as a white man you have privilege in a society that is dominated by white men is not racist, it is simple fact.
Enjoy the nap you need to digest those three points. No doubt it will be a long one.
Hi folks.
I’m new here. First time caller, no time listener, so to speak.
It seems to me that the debate is a bit confused. The idea that some kind of woke culture/Maxist/Leninist/Mao Zedong Thought is being forced down the throats of poor little Australian kiddies misses the whole point. It’s as silly as believing that the ABC is left wing. Mainstream education under any political system is at all times, in all circumstances, in all places, inherently conservative. Go read John Dewey…or Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society or Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-education…..or just go sit in a classroom and watch kids’ brains leak out their ears.
And let’s be honest, have you ever heard anyone on the left describe themselves as woke? Woke is a term that the right uses to vilify anything it doesn’t agree with. It’s a straw man that right wing echo chambers like Sky News (sic) set up so they can knock it down because straw men are the only men they can best in any intellectual contest. So maybe just stop letting those idiots define how you will frame your ideas. Remember, the way you can guarantee that you will always win the argument is by you deciding what the argument is. She who frames the debate wins by default….so stop having their argument. It’s old and tired and never meant anything anyway.
If you want to have a discussion about the perils of the modern education system then start with its abject failure. According to the ABS 47% of adult Australians can’t read and write. They are functionally illiterate. Sure, they can tell the difference between an A and a B and sometimes even distinguish a C, but they can’t read well enough to understand a recipe, a bus timetable or the inscription on a pill bottle, “Take one tablet, twice daily, with food.” Now ask who benefits from that.
Who benefits from having an entire nation of people soooooo fundamentally uneducated that you can spoon feed them utter pap and they will swallow it whole? Who benefits from reducing the Australian public to such a level of ignorance that they cannot fathom how the world works and so are reliant for their understanding of the world on lying politicians, the Murdochs, the Nine Entertainment Group, right wing shock jocks, or God help them, the ABC?
Sure, the LNP benefits. So too does the Labor Party. Gone are the days of Hawke and Keating, where the ALP believed in treating Australians, the working class included, like they were intelligent and capable of understanding politics and economics and social policy. Gone are the days of my youth when the whole nation, the working class included, ground to a halt on a Tuesday night and sat glued to their televisions watching Keating deliver the budget.
Gone too are the days when leadership was about lifting your people up, encouraging them to be their better selves, to rise above the baggage of their colonial history, to respect- really respect- Aboriginal Peoples, to transcend Australians’ innate racism, to become decent human beings and take their place as equals in the community of nations, as residents of Asia, to engage honestly in international fora, to promote the rule of law in international affairs ( the real rule of law, not Schlomo’s ‘rules based order’, code for preying on the weak and getting away with as much as you can) to shoulder the burden that the wealth and privilege of the Lucky Country had bestowed upon them and to treat their neighbours- foreign and domestic- with respect and dignity. Nope, all gone now.
Now, we are a nation that celebrates stupidity and racism and cowardice. Now, we are a nation of bogans, ruled by bogans, or at the very least those who strive to look and act as bogan as possible. Bogans and faux bogans. Pauline et al. Jacqui. George Christensen, the member for Manila. Craig Kelly. Schlomo the Pedo. Rule by trailer trash. Kakistocracy meets kleptocracy.
That idea from time immemorial, that leadership is the reward for the best and brightest, the bravest and wisest, cut down under the withering sickle of the tall poppy syndrome. Being able to toss a footy or don a hard hat and high vis -despite never having calloused a hand in your entire life- is more electorally weighted than being able to prevent the corporate sector from stealing $35 billion of taxpayers money under the fraudulent Job Keeper Scheme or managing an economy so that having a full time job lifts people out of poverty, not grinds them down into it.
Now, the qualifier for electoral success is how willing you are to rape and torture innocent children in concentration camps….oh, I’m sorry, “detention centres”. If you won’t wipe your arse on the Refugee Convention then you’re unelectable.
Now, we are a nation that would invade other countries in violation of international law, wage War of Aggression, commit a Crime Against Peace or good old fashioned terrorism, call it what you may, and butcher a million Iraqis and still think ourselves decent human beings. We are a nation that promised the Afghani people that we were on the side of the angels, that they too could have democracy and human rights and development….and then threw them to medieval wolves when the going got tough.
Now, we are a nation who would take the Major General responsible for laying waste to an entire city, of burning babies alive with napalm and white phosphorous (a war crime) and appoint that individual, Jimmy Molan, aka the Butcher of Fallujah, to disgrace our national parliament.
Now, we are a people who would allow our soldiers to commit war crime after war crime and take the mountain of evidence collected by the Brereton Inquiry and shove it in Marise-big-fat-Payne-in the-arse’s bottom drawer (Marlsies drawer now) and refuse to prosecute a single one of our war criminals, while bleating about Putin’s alleged crimes in Ukraine. Crimes that currently we are unable to actually do anything about.
Now, we are a people who would steal the loose change from a blind beggars bowl….or bug the cabinet room of the newest and poorest nation on Earth so we might better be able to steal the only resource they have to feed and clothe and educated their children.
Now, we are a nation that would secretly imprison any citizen who dares to expose our greed and duplicity. (Hey, have any of you ever wondered? If there was a secret trial of the mysterious “Witness J”, and another secret trial of the equally anonymous “Witness K”, does that mean there have also been nine other secret trials: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I? Or do we imagine that bureaucrats began sequentially labelling secret trials in the middle of the alphabet? My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a journalist who can ask the simplest of questions. How many other secret trials have there been? None? Nine? More than nine? The alphabet allows for at least 26. Someone could at least ask the question.)
Now, we are a nation where one in three giant multinationals never, ever pays a single cent of tax. Where a sociopathic, tax evading, American billionaire who gave away his Australian citizenship in the 1980’s, and hence his right to interfere in our elections, sets himself up as kingmaker in every election, federal, state and local government, and demands that our politicians, who are meant to represent the interests of the people, bow and scrape and kiss his ring.
A nation where rich filth earning millions of dollars in income pay no tax and at the end of the financial year put their hand out for tax return on tax they didn’t pay….and the government gives it too them.
A nation where the banking oligarchs commit 30 million criminal offences with government guaranteed impunity. The million offences uncovered by the Hayne Royal Commission, the 23 million Westpac later copped to and the other 6 million that they admitted but reckoned didn’t fall within the remit of the regulator. Charging dead people for life insurance. Knowingly laundering money for organised crime and terrorists. Knowingly financing the online, real time rape of children. And not a single banker went to prison. And what did Catherine Livingstone testify under oath when asked why Matt Comyn, the bloke who laundered money 60,000 times was then promoted to be CEO? Livingston said that if the CBA had scoured the world for a banker of Comyn’s seniority and experience they would not have found a single banker who wasn’t guilty of similarly serious criminal offences “…and I don’t mean that as a joke.” she testified. Didn’t think you did, Darlin’. Taken at her word Livingstone would have us know that the bankers aren’t in bed with organised crime, they are organised crime.
A nation where mining oligarchs blow up 40,000 year old sacred sites and nobody goes to prison, drain river systems, systematically destroy endangered ecosystems and poison our farmlands.
A nation where energy companies systematically manipulate markets to drive up spot prices so as to reap piratical profits.
So much for liberal democracy and its integral component…the rule of law.
Does anyone really think that a nation of intellectually pussy whipped Australians, worshipers to the bogus cult of the Anzac legend, rum and coke soddened bogans enthralled by the bread and circuses of Maccas, the NRL and a handful of Olympic gold medals, whose media, banking sector, energy supply and food are all controlled by tiny anti-competitive oligopolies, has any chance of rising up and overthrowing the power structures that make all the aforementioned possible, when they can’t read well enough to understand a recipe or a bus timetable and have never even heard of critical analysis? Woke??? More like Australian ‘education’ as Rip van Winkle ‘slept’ or Marx and Engels’s “opiate of the people”.