How public education failed me with no mention of Mao
THE WRY SIDE Emma Tom October 11, 2006
I'M one of those Australian students who has slipped through the net. It's not English, maths or Shakespeare I've missed out on while studying at assorted Australian primary schools, high schools and universities.
It's the Mao propaganda.
Not once have I had a teacher or lecturer who has advocated the autonomy of the Hunan Province, the expunging of non-Marxists from the military or the execution of the intelligentsia.
Yet, according to federal Education Minister Julie Bishop, perniciously pinko pedagogues have been busily ramming Maoist dogma down the unquestioning gullet of every other pupil across the nation.
I feel so left out.
Embarrassingly enough, my public high school education means I can still spell diarrhoea sans dictionary, perform long division sans calculator and recite - trippingly on the tongue - Shakespeare sans script. Sceptics may doubt the usefulness of such skills given the wide availability of spellcheckers, calculating devices and people who think Hamlet quoters are complete and utter wankers, but on the whole I've always felt relatively well-rounded.
Now, however, I realise I'm a freak: possibly the only Australian to escape school without having to spend my uniform allowance on a Mao cap, Mao suit and Red Army shoulder bag for carrying my textbooks, all of which would have been copies of Mao's Little Blue Book.
Or was it puce?
Once again I must confess my shocking ignorance and critical need for a crash course in chairmanisms.
University has been no better. I'm about to finish a masters degree and it is my grave responsibility to report that Mao has been mentioned only twice.
The first time was in a lecture about the implications of the rise of China on competing Asia-Pacific and East Asia regional organisations, and was part of a brief overview of Chinese economic history.
During this class, there was a lot of chitchat about China's global economic ranking based on GDP (gross domestic product) as opposed to PPP (purchasing power parity) measures. But I certainly don't remember my lecturer - a high-profile member of the Lowy Institute for International Policy - ever saying anything along the lines of "yay Mao" or "Marxism rocks".
He was far more animated about the fact that, thanks to China's international economic integration, communism was increasingly being seen as a politically correct fig leaf, even within China itself.
Probably not a concept Mao would have been comfortable with in a little book of any hue.
Marxism also made a brief appearance in one of those notorious gender studies classes, but even here, an area where radical indoctrination is supposed to reign supreme, it was only a brief mention in an incredibly dense reading comparing different economic views on the idiosyncratic circulation of commodities. Maybe this particular piece had a left-wing bias. Maybe it didn't. Unfortunately, it was the first industrial-strength academic text I ever encountered at university and I had absolutely no freaking idea what its author was on about.
Perhaps ignorance was my ideological salvation. All I know is that, once again,
the academics who taught this course didn't ever turn up wearing Che Guevara singlets or suggest that the great proletarian class violently overthrow the foul running dogs of capitalism.
Apart from anything else, these lecturers didn't have time for a class struggle. They were too busy wrestling with the massive class sizes and massive enrolments of under-Englished foreign students, both of which are commonplace now that Australian universities have been starved of public funds and are obliged to run themselves as enterprises. Not that Bishop or the rest of the Coalition would see these developments as the result of enforcing ideology on education.
As Australian educationalists Jane Caro and Lyndsay Connors pointed out this week, it's depressingly common for people to brand others' opinions as insidious ideologies while insisting their own views are values. Actual evidence to back up such positions is usually seen as an optional extra.
Well, far be it for a lowly, brainwashed student to suggest that Australian politicians lack intellectual rigour, but I reckon a little more research is required before the cold warriors of education do any more screaming about all these alleged reds under the texts.
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