The war of words

Christopher Reynolds 21 February 2024 The Spectator Australia ?

I am very privileged to have been friends with Peter Drucker and Alvin Toffler. This morning I imagined sitting in Peter’s lounge room in Claremont, California, discussing the current socio-political climate of our Western Civilisation. We would begin with the agreement that we are experiencing a crisis of our time where the very fabric of Western Civilisation is under attack.

Peter would offer all the statistics and logistics of the crisis. Alvin would suggest that the disquiet we are witnessing on every front, a journey toward anarchy, is driven by fear and a desire for power by despots. This anti-civilisation movement, he would say, reminds him of the desperate struggle and turbulence of the French Revolution.

While the crisis of culture and national identity is raging on many fronts across Western countries, at its root, there is a struggle for the very soul of our society for a society’s strength emerges from the quality of its spiritual life more than its industrialisation. Our civilisation is not under threat from foreign enemies but threats from within. In the Australian context, Stuart McIntosh of Melbourne University has said, ‘If we deny our British heritage we will become a people without a soul.’ And this is what is happening as a young Australians struggle with depression, drug abuse, mental illness, and view themselves as alienated from the very values of our society. Their search for meaning is misled by people who use fear – fear of death and the end of the world – to create anxiety and discontent. The core values of our society are not only being questioned but are being eradicated.

While we see the Luddite-styled discontents in crusades, such as the Green movement, the First Nations Party, and the Woke movement on our television screens every night, it is not in the streets or the corridors of Parliament that the war is being waged but in the classroom. The quality of education across Australia has been eroded with a third of Australian students not meeting basic standards of literacy and numeracy in the latest NAPLAN assessments. In teacher training, only 10 weeks out of four years are dedicated to teaching literacy and numeracy. However, social justice, identity politics, and sustainability have become like a virus, a mind virus, or memes spreading through every course. There is no compulsory course anywhere on?How Children Learn?and the actual neurological process of the learning experience; how children learn should determine how teachers teach. Yet, such fundamentals have been abandoned for indoctrination and politics. The fight to save the nation will begin with saving education.

It will take moral conviction to speak in the Colosseum before the?polis?and promote the virtues of Western Civilisation with the message that truth matters hope matters, education matters, freedom matters, and our social fabric matters. It will take leadership to present a vision of a country worth belonging to for young Australians to stand proud.

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, through its education programs and scholarship funds, has taken up the task of promoting a better understanding and greater appreciation of Western Civilisation and its contribution to Australia. But why has a private foundation got to step in to do what education departments won’t? State governments have a constitutionally granted responsibility for education and it appears vital that the Australian curriculum is abandoned and state education is reclaimed and cleaned up.

Preserving the nation begins with reforming education and fighting this war of words in the classrooms of the universities and schools before it becomes a crisis in the streets.

AUTHOR Christopher Reynolds