Posted on 01/15/2007 1:45:53 PM PST by naturalman1975
'What?' My student exclaimed in a manner that demanded immediate clarification. While tutoring him in the Year 12 English course (VCE), I had made a comment that inferred the existence of poets who were not of the Left, that is poets who expressed, for example, liberal, conservative, or patriotic views. My student, stunned with surprise, did not believe that such creatures existed. He neither believed that there could be such a thing as a non-Left poet nor that poetry could be used to express non-Left ideas. This was not the student's fault. My student was very clever, hardworking, and he had writing ability, which I was very keen to develop.
However, like most students, he did not read poetry of his own volition, so all of his encounters with it had been imposed only ever been presented with left-wing poets, such as the Australian Bruce Dawe, and he therefore reached the (understandable but mistaken) conclusion that all poets were left-wing, for example, pacifists rather than patriots. This misunderstanding is just one of the consequences of the overwhelming ideological bias favouring the politically correct Left in the English curriculum in Victorian high schools.
This bias is not confined to poetry. It permeates the entire English course, and it has done so for decades. The subtle un-stated implication of an English curriculum that consists almost exclusively of the study of books, films, plays and poems that espouse left-wing sentiments is that the only ideas worthy of display in serious art are left-wing ideas. This ideological bias also carries the subtle un-stated implication that to be intelligent and creative, in a manner that may one day produce works worthy of scholastic study, is to be left-wing.
The criteria for the selection of texts for study are published with the course text list, and presented on the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority 'have literary merit and be worthy of close study'. This criterion appears innocently unbiased. Taken at face value, it could even potentially accommodate the study of an ideologically wide spectrum of texts.
However, not all the selection criteria appear ideologically neutral. The criterion that stipulates that the list of the 30 texts (from which school English departments select three or four texts for their students to study) should 'include texts that display affirming perspectives' is indisputably ideological. This is because what is considered to be 'affirming' by the members of the predominantly leftwing educational establishment is what is perceived by them to be affirming for ideologically designated groups, such as Aborigines, migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, asylum seekers, Irish-catholic republicans, etc. What they deem to be affirming for these groups, in practice, often becomes disconfirming for free-market liberals, conservatives, traditional Australian nationalists, Irish-protestant loyalists, etc. The implication from the Victorian English curriculum is that these are the bad guys, those who are unworthy of the affirmation of their values.
In addition, many of the selected texts may not be all that affirming in practice for some of the students who are members of the groups nominated by the Left as in need of affirmation. Unfortunately, the heavy handed anti-racist messages in many texts, such as Garry Disher's The Divine Wind, can backfire, making some Asian students suddenly feel uncomfortably self-conscious, as they are transformed (by an English lesson they will probably never forget) from being just one of the gang to being an 'Asian' who is designated as worthy of pity for apparently being a member of a persecuted minority. Many young migrants, or the children of migrants, are understandably proud of their ethnicity. Nevertheless, they often see themselves, and like to be seen, as individuals, so it can feel patronisingly disconcerting to unexpectedly find themselves ideologically categorised as belonging to groups designated as people with problems. As a private tutor, I am privileged to hear the sincerely expressed concerns of students in this regard, concerns that most students would be wary of sharing with an English teacher who is unequivocally enthusiastic about a text that reflects their ideological preferences.
It should be noted that a couple of poets who were not of the Left did temporarily sneak into the Year 12 English curriculum, like stowaways in a cargo hold. They were to be found in a collection of poetry from the First World War that had been edited by a pacifist writer, Jon Silkin, who confessed in his introduction that he felt reluctantly obliged to include in his anthology several famous movingly patriotic laments for the war dead, such as Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier' and John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields'. These poems appeared along with works such as the bitingly anti-patriotic, angry and stirring pacifist poems of Wilfred Owen, like his 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' or 'Dulce Et Decorum Est', poems much preferred by the editor. Both patriotic and anti-patriotic sentiments were eloquently expressed in the range of works in the anthology, and both patriotic and anti-patriotic sentiments are very worthy of study and appreciation.
Regrettably, the study of poetry from the First World War (a worthy choice) was rotated off the curriculum prematurely, well before it had finished the standard four-year stint. It was replaced by a collection of lyrics by the Australian singer-songwriter and left-wing political activist Paul Kelly, Don't Start Me Talking: Lyrics 1984-2004, which featured protest songs about Aboriginal reconciliation and other politically correct subjects. No conservative sentiments are to be found here. Kelly is a competent lyricist, but the inclusion of his works raises another issue emanating from the ideological bias in the curriculum - opportunity cost.
Year 12 English students only get to study four texts, or three, or sometimes even only two if their teacher does not cover the designated material in the designated time. Time spent studying the lyrics of Paul Kelly is time lost that could have been spent studying Rupert Brooke or Wilfred Owen or William Shakespeare. Even Paul Kelly, who would be understandably flattered by his selection, would probably admit this. But one wonders, would a lyricist of equivalent talent to Paul Kelly, but expressing the opposite views, ever be selected for Year 12 study? Is the decisive factor for being selected literary talent? (Kelly has some.) Or is it ideological conformity? (Kelly has this in abundance.)
The preference for political correctness seems to particularly stand out in the selection of contemporary Australian literature for study. The pattern could not be an accident. Although the defenders of the current education system could argue that the decisive selection criterion is quality, it has to be recognised that ideology often profoundly shapes perceptions of quality, and the fact that left-wing texts are routinely selected according to criteria claimed to highlight quality appears to be testimony to this very human tendency.
At the beginning of the school year when I analyse the recently added contemporary Australian literature in preparation to tutor my students, the ideological themes become monotonously repetitive. They are the ideological canons of political correctness: environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, Marxism, and pacifism. In addition, the specific issues covered in the texts are equally repetitious, being those of most interest to the politically correct Left, such as Aboriginal land rights and reconciliation, migrant settlement and multiculturalism, immigration and asylum seekers, and so on.
Along with Paul Kelly's lyrics, one can currently observe these ideological themes and issues repeated in various combinations in Tim Winton's Minimum of Two, Wayne Macauley's Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, Amy Witting's I for Isobel, Hannie Rayson's Inheritance and Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father. Before 2006, these views were found in Bruce Dawe's Sometimes Gladness, Philip Hodgins' Dispossessed, Jane Harrison's Stolen, Julia Leigh's The Hunter, Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon's Jackson's Track, David Malouf's Dream Stuff, Christopher Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously, Brian Caswell and David Phu An Chiem's Only the Heart, and Garry Disher's The Divine Wind, among others.
The themes and topics examined in these texts are important and interesting. However, what is concerning is that the effect of this ideological uniformity emanating from the texts is the unstated but evident message that what is politically and socially important is what the Left perceives to be important. In addition, this ideological conformity also implies that when one displays interest in these issues, one is expected to broadly conform to a particular pattern defined by the politically correct Left regarding the designation of victimhood and villainy to various historical actors.
This raises several questions. Is this ideological uniformity and conformity educationally advantageous in a pluralist society? Moreover, is it democratically fair to those many students and their taxpaying and/or school-fee-paying families who have different views from those of the politically correct Left? If it is educationally beneficial to have one's views challenged, as many educationalists on the Left could claim as a defence, then why should it consistently be the case that it is always the young Australians with, for example, liberal, or conservative or traditional nationalist views who are given the educational 'benefit' of having their views challenged in the classroom? Meanwhile, those families who support, for example, the left faction of the Australian Labor Party, Greenpeace or the International Socialists consistently have their views confirmed and validated.
The school English departments choose three or four texts from a list of 30 options. Although William Shakespeare's Hamlet is on the list, which would be reassuring to those parents who desire a less politicised and more traditional English course, chances are that it may not be chosen by the English Department at their child's school. For example, those students whose school English departments in 2006 chose to teach Shakespeare's psychologically insightful Hamlet, Henry Lawson's cynically ambivalent Short Stories, Martin Scorsese's masterfully directed cinematic adaptation of Edith Wharton's exquisitely well-observed novel The Age of Innocence, and Sophocles' famous classical tragedy King Oedipus, did very well. These students were fortunate.
Meanwhile, students at schools that chose Paul Kelly's Don't Start Me Talking, Hannie Rayson's Inheritance, and Wayne Macauley's Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, drew the cultural short straw. These students were less fortunate.
In addition, the choices of texts annually rotated onto the curriculum seems to reflect trends in the contemporary political concerns of the politically correct Left, which provides circumstantial evidence suggesting that the educational establishment may be interested in using English to affect the political process regarding issues closest to their heart. For example, following the refusal of the Howard Government to accept the findings of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report on the stolen generations, Bringing Them Home, a flood of texts coincidently entered the English curriculum advocating politically correct positions contrary to that taken by the Howard Government. These included Jane Harrison's Stolen, and Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon's Jackson's Track. This is a thematic trend that continues unabated with the recent addition of Hannie Rayson's Inheritance to the list, among others.
Following the defeat of the referendum on whether Australia should become a republic in 1999, by coincidence, texts were subsequently added to the English study list that espoused republican views, such as Brian Friel's anti-British pro-Irish republican Marxist play Freedom of the City and the film Breaker Morant, which argued that Australia's membership of the British Empire was against Australia's national interest.
The Howard Government's stand on illegal immigrants preceded the addition of texts to the curriculum that argued for the acceptance of illegal immigrants, such as Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.
The Howard Government's decision to join the US-led Coalition of the Willing and contribute troops to the war in Iraq was soon followed (coincidently) by the addition of anti-war texts - Graham Greene's anti-American Cold War tract The Quiet American, and Salem Pax's The Baghdad Blog.
Coincidently, the texts added to the curriculum are never remotely supportive of Coalition Government policy. Coincidently, they consistently seem to support the politically correct Left's position recently thwarted by government policy. Interestingly, on occasions when texts in the curriculum are critical of Labor Party policy, it is because Labor Governments adopted policies that departed from the politically correct Left's agenda. For example, the deregulation of the financial sector by the Hawke Government, a policy influenced by economic rationalism, found criticism in English texts such as Philip Hodgins' Dispossessed and Hannie Rayson's Inheritance.
The criterion for text selection recommends that the works will be 'raising interesting issues and providing challenging ideas'. However, the choice of literature that is relevant to current issues can easily become political proselytising by literary proxy if there is no mechanism for accountability. What is suggested by this evident trend is that, currently, there appears to be nothing or no-one in the education bureaucracy to establish or ensure a degree of pluralism.
With the origins of what is now understood as political correctness stemming from the New Left and the (hippy) counter-culture of the 1960s, it is not surprising that, with the strong presence on the English curriculum of texts by authors who espouse politically correct views, that dimensions of the hippy lifestyle would be presented in accepting or favourable terms. This can even include the recreational use of illicit drugs. This complex, difficult and divisive social issue is of particular relevance to young people in their teens because these are the years when the temptations are more frequently presented to them and the peer pressure to take drugs is strongest. The Howard Government has expressed support for 'zero tolerance' rather than the harm-minimisation approach to illicit drugs, and it has funded public awareness campaigns to encourage young people to say no to drugs. However, a number of texts on the curriculum appear to present more counter-cultural attitudes.
In Hannie Rayson's Inheritance, a mother in the play, in jest, mildly criticizes her son's generation for seeking 'ersatz adventure' in computer games or drugs. Her comment could represent disapproval or a kind of acceptance. It is not clear. What is clear is that her son, who smokes marijuana during the play, is admirably presented as one of the main positive politically correct characters who stands up to the racists. He is depicted as insightful and as a character with whom the audience is invited to identify.
Andrew Bovell, who once co-wrote a play with Rayson, wrote the screenplay for a film text set for study, Lantana, an otherwise intelligent drama that mostly examines human relationships involving love.
Like Rayson, he could not resist an appropriately counter-cultural drug reference, with the character of a mother, whom the audience is positioned to see as a strong sympathetic character, advocating parentally supervised marijuanasmoking for her son in the family home. By contrast, the audience is positioned to see the father who rejects this policy as unreasonable. Presumably, this represents the screenwriter's support for the harm minimisation approach to illicit drugs.
In some passages or references in Graham Greene's overtly existentialist novel The Quiet American, readers could legitimately interpret opium-smoking as described as sensuously alluring. Drugs are regularly used by the hero of the story, a character who is presented as a flawed but admirable individual with whom the audience is positioned to identify and regard as politically insightful, culturally sensitive, and possessing a moral conscience.
On the other hand, there are drug references in several of Paul Kelly's lyrics, some of which appear negative while others are explicitly matter-of-fact about drug use, particularly those songs that seem to have been influenced by the observations of urban decadence expressed in the music of Lou Reed, whom Kelly admired. There is also a brief critical reference to illicit drug users in Mark Haddon's plea for tolerance regarding the sufferers of autism, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. When reflecting on the presence in the curriculum of these counter-cultural attitudes to the use of illicit drugs, or to support for the harm minimisation approach, it is worth being reminded of another of the official text selection criteria. It recommends that the texts 'be appropriate for the age and development of students and, in that context, reflect current community standards and expectations'.
Despite its flaws, there is merit in the Victorian Year 12 English course. Many of the texts currently on the curriculum are worthy of study, and some are profound and enlightening. However, there is room for improvement. Unfortunately, some texts currently on the curriculum are of questionable value. Meanwhile, there are other texts that espouse different views to those traditionally listed that are also worthy of study and could be included.
There is a need for far greater pluralism. Perhaps the current list of 30 texts could be reduced to 20, with ten selected by the Left and ten selected by the non-Left, with the stipulation that school English departments must choose from both sides of the list. The ideal situation would be an English curriculum that is both philosophically broad and richly educational, where students are presented with a range of interesting ideas from which they can freely select or reject according to their capacities for reason and the dictates of their consciences.
Dr Mark Lopez is an educational consultant and the author of The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics. (MUP, 2000) He also participated in the Commonwealth Government's History Summit in August 2006.
Leftist notions have gradually filtered down from the universities to secondary education. This is exactly what the leftists have intended. Those who disagree with the Left will have to engineer their own "long march through the institutions".
By Kipling
Gods of the Copybook Headings
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.
Agree. Conservatives should insist on more pluralism in the selected readings. It would also help reach and engage those particular students who are inclined to prefer more positive reading materials. Not everyone is interested in reading cynical novels about how society is bad.
(another good conservative read.... )
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1807–1882
The Village Blacksmith
UNDER a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And watch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.
He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter's voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!
I remember what a shock it was to read Ayn Rand. I was 33 and had never been exposed to any such thing. Once I'd read her, I realized how shocking it was to have obtained a B.A. in English without ever having read a single modern conservative writer.
The surrender of the Academy to the Marxist New Left in the 1960s has done everlasting damage to America. As one who vividly remembers the terrible ideological damage wrought by Hitler Youth and Stalin's Pioneers, it's hard to endure the similar brainwashing and political indoctrination of American kids. Make no mistake: those who engineered the coup and implement it now are every bit as totalitarian as the pair I mentioned.
Naturally Kipling and Service are looked down upon by departments of English -- but I've no doubt that if Homer or Shakespeare returned, they would prefer the manly storytellers with a sense of humor to all the navel-gazing twits spawned by the English departments.
Attention, kid studying poetry: Before you fall in love with a poet or with his/her views on life, take a careful look at a photo or a portrait of that poet. Sometimes, appearances do reveal a truth, and a picture is, sometimes, worth more than a thousand words. LOL
I think he meant "I had made a comment that IMPLIED...".
"Those who disagree with the Left will have to engineer their own "long march through the institutions"."
That's why I suggest more retirees with notable careers take classes at universities. Face it, we are life-long learners anyway so class work is more play than anything else. It's awfully nice to investigate those subjects one has not had time for in the past.
I had great fun in a political science class taught by a lefty made very nervous by my presence.
Astronomy was just straight science and math. ~No problems with the hard sciences...just the ones that masquerade as "science."
One of the great tragedies of literature is poetry became the official haunt of disgruntled lesbians, angry feminists, self loathing homosexuals, and angry race hustlers. As a result poetry died and is unlikely to be reborn. I think the illness began after WW2 and the emergence of the beat poets who trivialized the discipline of poetry. By the 70's any moron with a grudge called himself a poet.
Today poetry had fallen to such low state inner city drug dealers and gangbangers find as many rythmically acceptable ways to to say Moth#$%^@(*&! is considered poetry. Poetry is not only dead the carcass is rotting and smells to high heaven.
Shakespeare had a tremendous sense of humor!!
;-)
Just keep asking the professors the Right questions.
:-)
Oh, I agree with you that they are totalitarian. They're my contemporaries. I've seen them in action.
They are, after all, openly attempting to reshape society according to precepts that are not only unexamined but unexaminable. According to multiculturalists there is no point of view within a specific culture - especially Western - that is capable of examining a metaculture. It works the other way around and the other way around only.
I think that in the case of poetry especially this is a disastrously limited point of view. For one thing it cuts out a majority of the corpus of Western poetry from Homer through Pope, Marlowe, Arnold, Blake, Donne, Shakespeare, Byron, Burns, Browning, all of whom have been derided as both unpleasantly jingoistic and unpleasantly masculine, to Nesbitt and Kipling, who have been officially been declared non-persons. What is left isn't up to what is gone. When Walt Whitman is celebrated more for his reputed homosexuality than his subject material you know something is terribly wrong.
I had occasion to post a verse from Drake's Drum yesterday in another context and it occured to me that this is a poem that once every British schoolboy could recite and now that none has heard of. That is a sad comment on the new education.
And yet, real education consists not in teaching things, but in teaching how to learn and inculcating in the student a love of it. That may give the author of this piece some hope. One cannot expect ideologically-driven Education graduates to understand, much less communicate, a culture they have been conditioned to despise. But the most subversive thing all of us can do to overturn this stacked deck is to whisper to the kiddies that there's something a lot richer and more important out there only a library card away. Should the libraries fail, and they too are under assault, then Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 may have been prophetic.
You never read T.S. Eliot?
Plus he littered bodies across many a stage. Can there be any doubt that he would prefer The Cremation of Sam McGee to anything produced by the critically acclaimed nonentities of the last half-century?
He had something for everyone...and often in the same play.
:-)
Nope. Well, I read Eliot on my own but he certainly wasn't part of the canon they aimed at me.
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