‘The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ wrote L P Hartley. What schools and universities teach and don’t teach about Western civilisation and Australia’s development as a nation illustrates the truth of Hartley’s observation.

Remember when government schools had a picture of the Queen in the foyer outside the principal’s office, and Monday morning assembly began with raising the flag and taking the oath of allegiance: ‘I love God and my country, I will honour the flag, I will serve the Queen and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers, and the law.’

The history curriculum adopted a grand narrative centred on Western civilisation, starting in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and moving on to Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia from the time of the First Fleet. Students were taught to acknowledge the debt owed to a Westminster government and a common law system inherited from the United Kingdom.

Fast forward, and it’s obvious how much has changed. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ has replaced ‘God Save the Queen’, and ‘Welcome to Country’ has replaced the ‘Oath of Allegiance’. The national curriculum has jettisoned a balanced approach to history, civics, and citizenship. It embraces the ‘black armband’ view of history. The arrival of the First Fleet is described as an invasion leading to genocide. It ignores the arrival of the King James Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that arrived with Captain Phillip and underpins our freedoms and liberty.

The way civics and citizenship is taught highlights the success of the cultural left in its long march through the institutions. Students learn that: ‘Citizenship means different things to people at different times depending on personal perspectives, their social situation, and where they live’. Based on postmodern relativism, they are taught citizenship involves multiple perspectives that ‘reflect personal, social, spatial and temporal dimensions of citizenship’.

Instead of acknowledging our British heritage, Australia is described as a ‘secular democracy and pluralist, multi-faith society (that) draws upon diverse cultural origins’. Forget about nation-building. The focus is on diversity and difference instead of promoting social cohesion and stability.

Under both Labor and Coalition governments in Canberra, the curriculum undermines a sense of pride in Australia. So, it’s hardly surprising that when millennials were asked in a poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs whether they would defend Australia if it was invaded, 38 per cent answered ‘No’.

Although the most recent iteration of the curriculum mentions Magna Carta, Westminster government, common law, and our constitutional monarchy, it is not compulsory to teach students about them. Indeed, it is more than likely that schools will continue to teach the ’Black armband’ view of the nation’s political and legal systems because the cultural left dominates tertiary education and teacher training.

In her chapter on universities in Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March, Jennifer Oriel writes that universities have long since forsaken the concept of a liberal education defined by Matthew Arnold as the ‘best that has been thought and said’. Instead of the pursuit of what T S Eliot called wisdom and truth, universities are dominated by a rainbow alliance of nihilistic theories, including radical feminism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, and LGBTQI+ gender and sexuality. In line with the Black Lives Matter movement and post-colonial theory, students are taught that Western societies are structurally racist, Eurocentric, and riven with white supremacism.

And it’s not just happening in Australian universities, across the Anglosphere, academics are purging curricula of ‘whiteness’, and even science and mathematics are not immune. In the UK, students and academics associate Enlightenment thinking with capitalism and imperialism. Such oppressive thinking is condemned as ‘the knowledge and standpoint of wealthy white, cis-gendered, able-bodied men occupying positions of objective superiority. Dismantling the white curriculum thus requires the dismantling of the multiple spheres of power that reproduce the dominant system of thought.’

The origins of Woke ideology and cancel culture can be traced back to the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s. In Celsius 7/7, British conservative Michael Gove argues this was a time when the Left concluded that the most effective way to overthrow capitalism was to take a long march through the institutions. Instead of inciting a revolution as occurred in Russia and China, leftists infiltrated and took control of schools, universities, and churches, and undermined the family. The cultural revolution of the 60s, epitomised by the student riots at the Sorbonne and the rise of postmodernism and deconstructionism, has also had a profound effect on education.

As a result of the dominance of cultural Marxism, we live in a world where identity politics prevails, and disadvantaged individuals and groups are presented as powerless victims of an oppressive, Eurocentric, capitalist system while Eurocentric, heteronormative men are guilty of being male, pale and stale. Rather than relying on reason and rationality, arguments are subjective and emotional, leading, in the end, to either epistemological suicide or violence. Instead of the Enlightenment’s focus on rationality and reason, generations of young people espouse the belief ‘I feel therefore I’m right’. Free and open discussion and debate are replaced by what Camille Paglia calls, ‘An ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance, and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.’

What is to be done?

Conservatives and those committed to rationality and reason must be willing to call out the true nature of cultural left ideology and have the courage to be true to their beliefs and convictions. Cultural warriors must reassert the importance of the Anglosphere and the debt we owe to the UK and Western civilisation that can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. As Augusto Zimmermann argues, ‘Our political and legal systems are underpinned by the New Testament and the admonition to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, and the importance of Christianity must be asserted. Like the cultural left, we must call on like-minded individuals and associations to be active in the public sphere and take a medium to long-term view of the struggle against nihilism and neo-Marxist ideology.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is the editor of Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March.