Now, let me be quite clear here: I’m not being overly sensitive to Peter Dutton’s recent comments because I’ve spent a large part of my professional life in schools. Ok, I’m a teacher and, according to our new leader, I’m an extremist…
Wait, that’s right. Peter Dutton isn’t our new leader. The Liberals didn’t win the election. Sorry, it’s easy to forget that when the media have spent more time talking about the Coalition and how poorly Labor went than talking about Labor. Well, I’m sure with the crisis in the cost of energy, we’ll be hearing all about Labor’s poor planning and their lack of any solution to this problem which they should have fixed when they were last in office…
Anyway, I was talking about Mr Dutton’s latest attempt to demonstrate his softer side by telling all the viewers on Sky that teachers were extremists and that this would be a focus for the next election. It’s entirely possible that this was a throwaway line, like his joke about water lapping at the door. After all, he was on the Andrew Bolt show and there were likely to be less people listening live than when he shared the joke with Tony and Scott.
Just in case you’re one of the millions who don’t listen to “The Bolt Report”, the substance of He Who Must Not Be Blamed, Shamed or Named’s comments was that he was going to talk to parents about what teachers were doing and get them all onside and put a stop to this lefty bias that teachers seem to have.
As Pleasant Pete said: “…If it was limited to just environmental issues or just to climate change, it would be bad enough… extremism is some of the teachers and the language they use, the approach that they take, it’s across a broad range of public policy areas and I think the national curriculum, the values argument is going to be one of the big debates over this parliament and I think you will see a big difference between the policies we take to the next election compared to what Labor will. Labor is completely and utterly dominated by the union movement as you know and the teachers’ union is one of the strongest voices in the ALP and not in a good way!”
That’s the actual quote so if it seems to be a little disjointed that may be because he had to stop and remember that he’s a nice man now that he doesn’t have any of those nasty portfolios that demand you drag families out of their beds in the middle of the night or tell rape victims that they can’t have an abortion because we will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances, etc.
But it was his comments on history that demonstrated exactly how much he’s changed. He said that he didn’t want teachers “teaching a different view of history”. Teachers should stick to the actual facts of what happened.
Now, this is a perfectly reasonable demand for a leader to make. After all, that’s the idea that Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin and various other strong leaders had. There are certain facts and you stick to them and if you seem to think that there aren’t we can educate you at the re-education camp.
Yes, not teaching a different view of history begs the question: “Different view from who or what?”
Now, I realise a question like “Was Australia settled or invaded?” does raise the temperature at some family get-togethers, but the idea that history is all neatly settled some time ago and all that teachers do is present a series of orderly facts isn’t teaching history any more than saying that science has discovered everything that we need to know and there’s no room for an alternative hypothesis about the nature of the universe or a fresh look at the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum physics and let’s just ignore Einstein’s objections…
Sorry, I got distracted there. There’s probably several physicists upset by me suggesting that there’s something wrong with the Copenhagen interpretation, and Dutton would be on their side for sure. Or mine, on the grounds that they know too much about the subject and we’re better off sticking with someone like me who’s done his own research.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea that teachers “should stick to the actual facts of what happened”, except for the fact that – as a discipline – history is about using various sources to try to determine what DID actually happen. If the government version of history, for example, says that asylum seekers threw their children overboard and there’s video evidence, a historian also needs to investigate the eye-witness accounts that say it never happened, as well as trying to view the video evidence which seems to have be unavailable owing to the fact that it got wet, when the government ordered that it be thrown in the water in order to save their credibility.
Yes, it seems that Mr Dutton has a very settled view of the world. This must be what that columnist who said that Pete had the worldview of a Queensland cop meant when she said that we should give him a go. Once you decide who’s guilty, you don’t have to think about it anymore.
Actually, I’m not even sure that Queensland police think that way…
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