Calls to mandate what is described as ‘consent education’ in the national school curriculum represents the most recent example of cultural-left activists and sympathetic bureaucrats further dumbing down the school curriculum when responding to mob hysteria and short-term opportunism. 

As a result of the baying media reporting a handful of cases involving alleged rape and sexual harassment a renewed fatwa is underway condemning all men as misogynist and all women as victims of a society riven with structural sexism and violence. 

And the solution?  Further weaken academic rigour and the ability to teach essential knowledge, understanding and skills by further cluttering the school curriculum and turning teachers into social welfare workers because parents no longer act as their children’s primary educators. 

As well as stranger danger, wellness and resilience, healthy eating, road and water safety, cyberbullying, respectful relationships and radical, politically correct gender and sexuality programs teachers are now expected to also teach students the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ when involved in sexual liaisons. 

Ignored, as proven by the 2014 review of the Australian national curriculum I co-chaired, is that the school curriculum is already overloaded and teachers are increasingly angry and exhausted as a result of not being able to do fulfil their primary task – teaching a balanced and enriching curriculum based on key subjects and areas of learning. 

Also ignored is the fact that subjects across the curriculum from preparatory to year 10 already have to be taught through a cultural-left prism involving Indigenous, Asian and sustainability perspectives.  Even science and mathematics are not immune with schools now being told such subjects must be taught from an Aboriginal perspective. 

No wonder Australian students consistently underperform in international mathematics, science and literacy tests.  And no wonder so many students, even after 12 years, leave school culturally illiterate, morally adrift and with a patchy and superficial knowledge of Western civilisation and Australia’s evolution as a nation. 

Based on already existing programs like Safe Schools and Respectful Relationships it’s also obvious that any program designed to teach students about sexual violence and rape will adopt a politically correct, cultural-left mentality.  While Safe Schools is promoted as an anti-bullying program one of its designers Roz Ward admits it’s really about promoting a neo-Marxist inspired view of gender and sexuality. 

One where boys can be girls and girls can be boys, or anything in between, and where society is condemned as heteronormative, binary and transphobic.  Respectful Relationships programs, while not  as egregious, also adopt a politically correct stance where the implication is domestic violence only relates to women and that all men and boys are potentially misogynist and violent. 

Drawing on the prevailing left-of-centre orthodoxy any school program dealing with consent will most likely tell students that girls and women have the right to go anywhere, at any time even if alone and in a dangerous environment and no matter how intoxicated.  Such a program will also suggest women are always passive victims and sexual violence is an inherent part of masculinity. 

One only needs to look at a recent incident involving Victoria’s Brauer College to get some idea of how boys and men are being unfairly characterised as violent and misogynist.  Last week at the school assembly boys were made to stand up and apologise to the female students for being male.  As one mother is quoted as saying when her 12-year-old son returned home confused and upset “They watched a video to do with sexual consent and at the end of it they were made to stand up and apologise to the opposite gender on behalf of their own gender… He’s upset by it – he now has this misconception that everybody looks at him and males as predators or somebody wishing to do harm to someone in a sexualised manner – seriously, he’s 12”.   

Dr Kevin Donnelly has just released Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March detailing the origins and dangers of cancel culture and political correctness (available at kevindonnelly.com.au).