Outthink the Mob

I have some good news for you. Back in 2017, Australia ranked 39 in the Unicef quality education rankings.

The bad news is we were 39 out of 41, with only Romania and Turkey below us.

To put this in perspective, Australian governments spent over $100 billion in 2018/19 on education – around  five per cent of Gross Domestic Product and our children seemingly get dumber every year.

Literacy and numeracy standards are falling while education funding keeps going up.

One possible reason is because the basis are being overlooked in favour of weird social engineering programs.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that rainbow transition theory was a more important lesson in schools than actually teaching kids to spell.

The creepy indoctrination of wokeness begins at an early age and, like completing the courses of scientology,  the cost goes up as you move through the levels.

It peaks in the increasingly useless realm of university education.

Gone are the days when university was the ticket to a rewarding career.
In too many cases they have simply become money generating diploma mills sustaining overpaid vice chancellors and cocooned academics.

Rather than prepare students for the rigours of the real world or equipping them with valuable skills, universities have become ground zero for the tyranny of wokeness.

Cancel culture is rife with those not conforming to the zeitgeist being slapped down. Free speech is no longer cherished.

The battle of ideas is now more akin to the battle of basket weaving.

We see academics cancelled for challenging other academics work. History is being rewritten thanks to the influence of Chinese communist party money, while the $3 billion Ramsey legacy promoting Western values struggled to find a home in our higher education sector.

It’s worse for the students of course. Some are precluded for daring to have independent thoughts or for questioning race based ‘safe spaces’ ….or worse still, just for not being an out and proud shill for socialism.

These are no longer places of higher learning but indoctrination institutes, not teaching students how to think but what they are allowed to think.

In other countries we’d call them madrasas or re-education camps.

Little wonder a number of companies now prefer to employ non-university graduates. They figure it’s much better to make them learn on the job rather than have some entitled bookish brat, straight out of the propaganda shop telling you how to run your business and demanding a corner office on day one.

All this comes at a hefty price to the taxpayers too.

It’s forecast there will be over $80 billion in outstanding student loans in the next few years and an estimated $20 billion of that will never be paid back.

That’s not to say all universities are the same.

Bond University on the Gold Coast seems to have the balance right and fosters a realistic, practical and competitive syllabus. It’s a credit to the board and vice chancellor Professor Tim Brailsford.

Thank goodness there are still some brave souls willing to push back against the tyranny – in academia and in the student body.

Last week on the Bernardi show, I mentioned that two students at the university of Chicago were pushing back against cancel culture by launching a newspaper promoting conservative speech.

The Chicago Thinker has a mission that reads in part:

We demand not be coddled. Embracing the experience of unfettered inquiry and free expression is precisely the point of these years of intense study.

Some things are too sacred to surrender to the mob, and the free exchange of ideas is one of them. The Chicago Thinker challenges the mob’s crusade against free speech by publishing thoughtful conservative and libertarian commentary, in addition to fact-driven reporting.

Their motto: “Outthink the mob.”  We should all be doing that.