Scene: A VCE French class, mere months from their finals. They are reading a French article on surveillance technology. A reference to Big Brother. The first comment after the text is read:

‘Oh, what … like the TV show?’

These 36 words capture, with disturbing accuracy, the state of the Australian education system.

I am a private school, Year 12 graduate of 2025 and in my latter years of high school, I had a secret identity. By day, I was an exemplary automaton, in a constant ‘hypnopaedic’ state. By night, I was someone completely different: a Triggernometry podcast-listening, Jordan Peterson-reading, Donald Trump-following, rebel.

It was a risky, tiring game to play and – as bizarre as it sounds – I always felt like a ticking time bomb.

Pressurised and faced with unprecedented levels of cognitive dissonance, I lived in constant fear that I would detonate, the extensive criticism I had for my indoctrinating education and educators springing forth from my lips in an uncontrollable rage.

In the evenings, I felt anger at the rubbish I was forced to learn, manifesting itself sometimes in tears, given my frustration, lack of control and lost opportunities.

Yet every day I toed the party line, regurgitated the rhetoric, and smiled through the continuous conditioning.

I wrote, said, and did things that, reflecting on them now, make me feel sick to my stomach. Like a dissenter in a hostile political system, I knew that compliance was necessary. My marks depended on it.

For years, I betrayed my intellectual integrity, sacrificed my dignity, and tore myself apart fantasising about the reality of speaking out. It’s time to shed my intellectual burqa.

My English education at school:

Shakespeare? Rarely. Dickens? Never. Orwell? Well, evidently not. ‘Flames’ with themes of ‘eco-feminism’? Certainly! ‘Contemporary Indigenous Plays’? Twice!

The latter included analysis discussing the Encyclopedia Britannica as ‘a symbol of old, white authority’ and ‘colour-blindness [as] a microaggression’.

My classes were monopolised by the perpetual prevalence of phrases such as ‘inter-generational racism’ and ‘white supremacy’.

In simple terms: use these best buzzwords for a guaranteed A+.

For the persuasive speech assignment, credible sources were listed as (per my PhD English teacher): The Guardian, The Age, The New York Times, The Atlantic … Al-Jazeera.

Not only were articles from such publications promulgated as fact and presented in such a manner to ensure the ‘correct’ ‘take-home-message’ was branded into our consciousness, but only left-leaning sources were presented. Thus, students rarely (if ever) became aware of other arguments or publications citing differing perspectives.

I dissented, tackling the topic of the degradation of traditional feminism given the rise of transgenderism, culture-selective feminist criticism, and OnlyFans.

I was advised to not impose ‘white Anglo-colonial feminism ideals on other cultures or minorities’, ensuring to consider the ‘intersection of feminism and race … and feminism and gender’.

Safe to say, the speech was poorly received.

Was it the quotations of Louise Perry, Riley Gaines, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali that brought me unstuck? Maybe. Could it have something to do with the fact that there was, and still is, a boy in my ‘all-girls’ school? Perhaps. But one can never be sure.

Shall I continue?

Required reading: ‘To resist the climate crisis, we must resist the billionaire class’. This is a climate cultist call-to-arms masquerading as a fight against the ‘extractive colonial [capitalists]’ comparable (in my humble opinion) to a Kamala Harris emotive ‘word-salad’.

As with the Big Brother remark, I was struck by the hilarity of the situation, watching my teacher floundering in an attempt to rebuke my questioning and critique of this writer’s (as Ben Shapiro puts it) ‘non-argument’.

I professed my ‘confusion’ as to why the writer cited ‘the healthcare crisis, the housing crisis, genocide, hierarchies like racism and patriarchy, and a great deal of suffering’ or that ‘big pharma knew and lied’, in his climate-alarmist article. I was instructed to focus on analysis of the mechanism of persuasion rather than ‘critiquing the arguments’.

What about, ‘Trump’s War on Nature Is Up Against a Powerful New Resistance Movement’, which contemplates having ‘river guardians’ to ‘speak for the [rivers]’? I’ll admit when I am wrong. A movement to ‘[recognise] rivers as life-giving forces and as rights-bearing presences’ was not on my 2025 Woke bingo-card.

Music Repertoire Performance… I had hoped this would be an uninfected subject where I could play my violin, finding peace in the wondrous music of Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Handel who had populated my Suzuki pedagogy for a decade. Told to ‘diversify’ my program for the final VCE performance exam, I was given ‘Guluu’ for ‘violin and magpie’ where ‘the violin represents a lizard coming from under a rock and watching the magpie’. Its connection to Indigenous culture and the fact that it was ‘written by women for women’, seemed to elevate it to be the ‘jewel in the crown’ of my program given most of the other pieces were written by, and I quote, ‘dead, white men’. Atonal, non-traditionally notated, and improvisatory in nature, ‘Guluu’ seemed a musical rendition of my generation: infallible, lawless and entirely postmodern.

Much to my chagrin, it was to be played between my Bach Partita and Haydn concerto, as if to signify that it was of the same standard of intellectual and musical brilliance as these virtuosic works.

Yet, one must not only critique the substance of the Australian education curriculum but the intensely bureaucratic nature of the system.

Vivid recollections from Year 11 and Year 12 include the requirement to consult and dissect the ‘VCAA Study Design’, (the ‘Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority’ curriculum guide). In literary terms – bureaucratic bilge. Hours in class were spent understanding the ‘dot points’ of ‘learning outcomes’, translating the incoherent syntax of the education bureaucrats, and reading through ‘correct’ VCAA essays and practice answers.

Propagated as something akin to a sacred text that one should pore over to ‘understand’ the nature of the coursework. The Australian education system is breeding leftist puppets, test takers, ‘groupthinkers’, and ‘Study Design’ specialists, instead of intellectuals, dreamers, and daring innovators. It is astonishing how much time is spent learning how to play the game, and even discovering avenues for special considerations, rather than engaging with factual content.

My Christmas present from my father last year? A Peterson Academy subscription. Offering that it was the education that I deserved, yet never received, I was enamoured with my gift. Suffice it to say, I learnt more about European history and the foundations of the West from one eight-hour lecture series with Professor Robert Tombs than from my entire Australian education.

As a society already plagued by boundless bureaucratic bibles mandated by our bloated government, it is imperative that future generations are willing and capable of unsolicited innovation, intelligent, and practical policy (both locally and globally) and even, simply, an ability to engage with and understand reality. Yet, with a student body blinded to their indoctrination, unable to scrutinise the narratives being presented as fact and given that their most interesting daily discussions centred around the newest drama on Married at First Sight (or MAFS, as so affectionately known in my class), I will be the first to fear we are doomed.

Speaking to Canadian friends, their experiences uncannily mirror my own. Having listened and read broadly on the education crisis that is blitzing the Anglosphere, radical rehabilitation of these systems is critical to the survival of the Western world. As it stands, my generation is, at best, wholeheartedly ill-equipped to tackle the rise of AI, the multi-polar world, radical Islam, and the like.

If Western education is not reformed so that it ceases being politically left-hooked, bureaucratically bloated and reminiscent of a Soviet re-education camp, make no mistake, the Western world will have no future. The West is poised to implode not only because no youth will be proud to fight for their country and its genuine heritage but because they will not even be able to tell you what the Western world is.

If this system continues, no child of mine will ever set foot in an Australian school.