A Man Who Has Class
Miranda Devine
The Daily Telegraph
February 05, 2014
THE vicious attacks on the expert chosen by Christopher Pyne to review the national education curriculum show just how much is at stake for the cultural revolutionaries dumbing down our schools.
Dr Kevin Donnelly is their worst nightmare, appointed to snatch the curriculum back from the brink of disaster. For his trouble he has been falsely branded a paedophile, Islamophobe, homophobe, misogynist and Christian. In the sewers of Twitter, people have wished him dead and asked him for his opinion on vibrators. "Go f... yourself Kevin Donnelly."
Among his and Queensland academic Ken Wiltshire's tasks is to decide whether the three priorities of the new curriculum - sustainability, indigenous history and culture and Asian engagement - make any sense. Absurdly, even in maths the curriculum claims "sustainability provides rich, engaging and authentic contexts for developing students' abilities in number and algebra". Good grief. Pyne has rightly queried this politically correct attempt at brainwashing. He ought to rip the curriculum to shreds, but he is taking the gentle approach.
Clear-thinking Donnelly is the perfect choice.
An unabashed critic of moral relativism, he wants education to be about "objectivity and truth". He believes students should understand the foundations of Western civilisation and Australia's Judeo-Christian heritage. He thinks academic rigour and phonics and even - shock, horror - rote learning might be a good thing.
He is against the fashion of students "constructing" their own knowledge. When university students need remedial reading classes, he knows something is wrong. "The penny has dropped that what we are doing isn't working well enough," Donnelly told me. "In terms of falling standards something has to be done."
Most parents would agree but the Marxist teacher unions are beside themselves, trawling around for something, anything, to discredit him.
The latest ploy was a story this week claiming Donnelly is homophobic because he once wrote, in his 2004 book Why Our Schools Are Failing, that teachers should not push leftist propaganda on gender and sexuality. Donnelly criticised Australian Education Union policy that "homosexuality and bisexuality need to be normalised" in the classroom and "heterosexism" (the idea that heterosexuality is the norm) must be stamped out. He cited the example that Cinderella and Romeo And Juliet are "condemned as heterosexist because they privilege traditional views about heterosexual love".
Essentially, Donnelly's view was that sex education is a sensitive and controversial topic and that parents have the right to know what is happening in the classroom. The AEU seized the bogus story as "yet another reason why Kevin Donnelly shouldn't be anywhere near a curriculum review".
Kevin Donnelly / Artwork: John Tiedemann
Source: DailyTelegraph
Others on Twitter claimed he would "rather have our youth committing suicide than be educated … If Kevin Donnelly comes anywhere near my children I can't be held fully accountable for my actions. What a creep." The denizens of Twitter take their lead from the bile emanating from the education establishment, unions and academics who have presided over falling standards.
Worst was former NSW education director-general Ken Boston, who took to ABC radio last month with an extraordinarily unhinged tirade: "Kevin Donnelly is a polemicist. He's not taken seriously. He doesn't engage with reasoned argument or evidence. His views, or rantings frankly, are well-known and have been disregarded for many years. His publications are regarded as specious nonsense." And on and on he went for five minutes. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Donnelly could hardly be better qualified. He holds a master's of education and a PhD on school curriculum, was on the panel of examiners for Year 12 English in Victoria and the Board of Studies. He also was a secondary school teacher for 18 years. He is a thoughtful man who has devoted his life to education.
Boston, on the other hand, has a doctorate in "coastal morphology". The 70-year-old devoted himself to the study of saltmarsh grasses into his 30s when he changed careers to become an education bureaucrat in Ballarat. Remarkably, he rose to the top of the NSW Education Department and landed a plum job in London as chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority but left in 2008 in a national fiasco over school tests. London's conservative Daily Telegraph said that during Boston's six years at the authority it "presided over the dumbing down of the curriculum, a decline in the rigour of tests and hyper-inflation in the results".
He is hardly in a position to criticise Donnelly. But all the vitriol is like water off a duck's back to Pyne. The more the Left criticises Donnelly, the more he knows he's on to a good thing. For our children's sake, let's hope its not too late.
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