Jim Hopkins: Time parents fought flawed system

Parents have every right to take their school to task over how their children are taught. Photo / Thinkstock

We're a clever bunch of primates, that's for sure. Not the strongest species under the sun but certainly the smartest, at least in this neck of the voids. Having sensibly avoided extinction, we've evolved to the point where we're giving the Gods a run for their money. Indeed, in terms of bending the world to our will, you may say we've already trumped the Olympians and most of the rest of the heavenly panoply to boot. There's not a lot we can't do.

Though there are a few things that elude our omnipotence. No one knows how to stop asteroids before they hit us, or how make Julia Gillard popular. Nobody's got the foggiest idea who'll pay for Auckland's Noddy trains and there isn't an astronomer alive who could tell you what planet Len 'The Line King' is on.

And there is one other matter which remains intractably beyond our control. As any parent will tell you, there's absolutely no way on God's good earth you'll ever get educators to take a blind bit of notice when you raise concerns about curriculum content or classroom conduct.

If you really want to know how it feels to be a pauper in the palace, insignificant and unwelcome, try telling a school principal you're not happy that your child can't read, or spell, for taht mettar, or is being taught that it's fine to play with a clitoris provided the owner says "Yes".

Years ago, the legendary retailer, Allan Martin, had a slogan; "It's the putting right that counts." But in schools, "it's the putting off that counts". Parents are expected to meekly accept whatever poppycock passes for modern educational dogma. Our job is to drop the classroom conscripts off and leave the rest to the experts, who will brush aside any protests from gormless mums and dads with a te-e-e-erribly sympathetic "there, there, you're upset, but the research clearly shows ..." response, this being the new-age way of saying, "Sod off, you meddlesome twit, and let us get on with the business of shaping your child as we see fit."

So, without remit or sanction, they introduce 12-year-olds to oral sex, anal sex, the joys of imagining they're gay and, lest that weren't enough, a bit of clitoral advice as well. Meanwhile, in the junior school, 6-year-olds are being told about "sexual touch" and the possibility that a babysitter may try to put a hand down their pants.

This is well-intentioned wickedness and should be named as such. It is child abuse, as the responses of 6-year-olds reported in the Herald this week make clear. Moreover, maintaining a system in which such 'lessons' cannot be effectively challenged is an abuse of the adults who fund it as well.

Be assured, there are agendas at work here, although there's nothing new in that. Education has always been for adults. Kids may cop it but grown-ups inflict it, and always for their own ends. It's grown-ups who make the rules, create the curriculum and set the exams. However we pretend otherwise, children have no choice in the matter. School is compulsory. They have to go. If education was truly "child-centred," we'd need their consent to inflict it.

But we don't. Ready or not, 6-year-olds are given instruction which is an institutional expression of that glib and spurious old feminist slogan, "All men are rapists". While 12-year-olds get what appears to be a Beginners Guide to the Joy of Sex, with content predicated on the simplistic post-Freudian proposition that "Repression is bad".

Maybe, when the class has finished listening, rapt, to their teacher replicating the noises of orgasm they could be encouraged to do some practical work together, in pairs or groups, so they can hear the sort of sounds they would make. Perhaps we should insist on this, confident that the perversity of adolescence will mean that whatever their elders tell them to do, they won't, and whatever the old plonkers tell them they mustn't do, they will! Maybe, just maybe, all this sly classroom indoctrination on matters social and sexual, historic and environmental, will simply make today's children even more conservative than they are already.

"Mum, I'm going to fight the establishment! I'm going to be an accountant and stay a virgin till I'm married!"

"Oh, dear! What does your girlfriend say?"

Or maybe it won't. Maybe the abuses of position and power revealed this week make it imperative that the people who fund the system had some real control over the thoughts it fosters. Which won't be easy.

Never underestimate the ideologues in education. They're not Gramsci's "useful idiots". They know exactly what they're doing, and what they're doing is treating the curriculum as their inviolate preserve.

Because we've let them. But no longer. It's time to remind those suddenly receptive politicians who'll soon be chasing our votes that those who pay the pedagogues expect the pedagogues to start paying attention.

READ MORE OPINION ONLINE

* Bob McCroskie of Family First says parents have every right to be upset.

* Diane Taylor says full disclosure is long overdue.

Go to nzherald.co.nz or http://bit.ly/kzWAO