As to why so many students wagged school last week protesting about the supposed man-made climate catastrophe and why so many will protest this week against Israel’s right to defend itself against the evil and barbaric invasion by Hamas … there are numerous reasons.

In 2006, Al Gore’s misleading video (in that it contains known errors) An Inconvenient Truth became routine viewing in schools across Australia spreading climate alarmism. One of the three cross-curricula priorities in the national curriculum is sustainability, mandating a deep green environmental perspective on all subjects.

Based on a revisionist view of history involving feminist, Marxist, and post-colonial theories students are taught, Western Civilisation is guilty of imperialism and white supremacy and that there is nothing unique or worth defending about liberal democracies like Australia or Israel.

Israel is seen as an artificial state created by white imperialists that has no right to exist. Hamas terrorists, instead of being evil and inhumane, are lauded as freedom fighters dedicated to liberating Palestinians from years of subjugation.

Students chanting from ‘the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ have no idea of where the Jordan River is or appreciate the land of Israel is the ancestral home of the Jews. It’s no wonder they are so easily duped.

Schools have long since stopped teaching students to think rationally and logically. Clear thinking has been replaced by emotion and cant. Emotion is the deciding factor determining how young people respond to argument and debate about contemporary issues.

‘I think, therefore I am’ has been replaced by ‘I feel, therefore I am right’ and any who believe otherwise are condemned as politically incorrect and cancelled for committing thought crime. The prevalence of cognitive dissonance adds to the heady mix of irrationality and ignorance.

To be human is to search for meaning and a sense of belonging as well as a commitment to something that gives purpose and direction. While the search for wisdom and truth as well as religious belief once provided that need, we now live in a world where subjectivism, ennui, and uncertainty prevail.

For many students climate alarmism is a religious faith where Greta Thunberg is the messiah and whatever the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dictates reads as holy script. That the world is about to end is taken as beyond doubt leading to young girls terrified they can never be mothers.

Students marching in solidarity with banners declaring ‘free Palestine’, ‘Israel is a terrorist state’, and ‘the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ find purpose and meaning that gives their vacuous lives direction.

As argued by GK Chesterton, ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’

It is also vital to realise climate change alarmism and antisemitism are just two examples highlighting how schools have been turned into re-education camps where students are indoctrinated with mind control and group think.

Kindergarten children are taught gender and sexuality are fluid and dynamic and not God-given and biologically determined. Boys are taught men are inherently violent and misogynist and the curriculum, instead of patriotism and nation-building, teaches guilt, and self-loathing.

Why this has happened is clear. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, over the last 40 years the cultural-left has taken control of the school curriculum and infected vulnerable students with neo-Marxist critical theory and Woke ideology.

After the second world war, Marxist academics argued to win the West, the focus had to be on infiltrating and capturing capitalist society’s ideological state apparatus (ISA). As argued by Louis Althusser:

‘But now for what is essential. What distinguishes the ISAs from the (Repressive) State Apparatus is the following basic difference: the Repressive State Apparatus functions by violence, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses function by ideology.’

Althusser argues cultural-Marxists must take control of key institutions, including family, church, political and trade union organisations, the media, schools and universities. Turbocharged by the late 1960s Cultural Revolution, the left’s long march has succeeded beyond expectations.

Given schools have become neo-Marxist-inspired indoctrination camps, it’s understandable why thousands of parents across Australia are either home-schooling their children or establishing their own community schools.

Such an education is often religious in character where students are taught to be culturally literate, intellectually robust and morally and spiritually grounded. Instead of vague and ephemeral values, schools are committed to teaching virtues including love, courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice.

Instead of promoting language control, group think and mob hysteria, such an education is also based on rationality, reason and common sense. Much-needed attributes in this time of intellectual dishonesty and conformity and where intolerance is re-badged as tolerance.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a senior fellow at the ACU’s PM Glynn Institute and editor of Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March.

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