Federal, state and territory governments have announced an overhaul of the Australian Curriculum, part of which involves the requirement that schools emphasise the Holocaust to an even greater extent than they already do.
The curricular changes to be mandated by politicians include “explicit learning about contemporary anti-Semitism, including common tropes and stereotypes, and how historical prejudice manifests in modern contexts”, as well as teaching about Jewish “lived experiences” and “strengthened Holocaust content in Year 10 History”. Given how little explicit instruction occurs in classrooms these days, this should be a welcome development.
The moves by politicians, under instruction from the Jewish lobby and in response to findings by the Royal Commission, will not achieve what they intend to, however. Imposing these curricular changes upon schools will instead spread the anti-Semitic attitudes that the powerful interests mandating them are seeking to stamp out.
I can say this with authority because my PhD is in how teachers implement history curriculum. I am, quite specifically, an expert on this. I spent seven years researching, writing, and thinking about how history teachers implemented the Australian Curriculum, and I can see that this will not work the way the powerful think it will.
Pretty much every secondary school in Australia that teaches History teaches a term on World War II and the Holocaust in Year 10. Over time, the Holocaust has colonised the teaching of the Second World War anyway, and the scant teaching time available for the many subjects we have in schools today means that history is rarely taught substantively. By the time the students have understood what a trench was in 1914, they’re being hustled on to the Treaty of Versailles, reparations, and maybe something about the Kokoda Track and plucky diggers.
All the children are left with from this superficial glossing by teachers who often didn’t even study history themselves is a set of ideological attitudes. That’s how history education really works in schools. It doesn’t create budding scholars who understand change and continuity, cause and effect, and the importance of perspective. Instead, it brainwashes students into an ideological matrix by framing every single lesson, regardless of the topic, through a lens of victim and perpetrator, colonised and coloniser, oppressed and oppressor. By repeating this implicit framing week in, week out over 12 years you end up with the young adult wokeling horde we have in Australia today. Think of how the Uruk-hai were spawned in Isengard.
If you wish to understand how we arrived at this catastrophic situation, you need to look up the Frankfurt School, its role in developing cultural Marxism, and the strategies developed by Jewish Marxists such as Saul Alinsky in his book Rules for Radicals. The woke agenda has spread through the education system, and they haven’t been subtle about it. When I first set out to teach History in Queensland 20 years ago, there was no such thing as school History. Instead it was Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE); a pastiche abomination the curriculum for which was based on postmodern and neo-Marxist principles developed by Frankfurt School intellectual Jurgen Habermas.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. Our education system was progressively hijacked by cultural Marxists whose theoretical weapons were developed by intellectuals in and around the Frankfurt School.
Being required to brainwash children to hate themselves, their ancestry and each other instead of doing what I had so longed to do, teach proper history, caused me enormous professional frustration. When I finally left teaching after 10 years, I resolved to become an activist. And the rest, I’ve got to say it, is history.
Getting involved in the anti-woke movement 10 years ago was very costly. I will never work in education again because there are powerful groups who keep lists on who has stepped out of line, and whenever I’ve gotten a job teaching somewhere they come after me. They first harass the organisation, then if that fails, they get one of their commie journalists to write a hit piece. No school will stand that kind of heat, at least not yet.
When I wrote for the Daily Caller, I called out the Marxist origins of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. It clearly hit a nerve, because later the Soros-backed domestic terrorist organisation Antifa launched a harassment campaign at my university to get me cancelled from my PhD programme. Queensland University of Technology ended up awarding me the PhD, but they then impounded it immediately so you’ll never find it and I’ll never work in academia.
I’m not including this for pity. I got off lightly. There are many Australians who have been banned from having a bank account, publicly beaten with impunity, or gone to jail due to taking on this invisible power structure.
This is how cancel culture works. Marxist ideological brainwashing is used to create footsoldiers for villainous billionaires who hate Western civilisation and want to see it burned to the ground. The same shadowy figures who fund and direct Antifa then have the power to summon Royal Commissions and instruct politicians to change school curriculums nationally.
It has taken decades to cultivate this cult of repetitive neo-Marxist brainwashing in Australian classrooms. This is not a battleship you turn quickly. The screenified brains of Australian teenagers are so accustomed to every lesson being the game of “find the victim to get an A” that they will apply that reflex when explicit instruction about the Holocaust and Jewishness is forced upon their teachers.
The theory I developed during my PhD study was grounded in the observation that teachers do not directly transmit what syllabus documents say to their students. Instead, teachers deliver curriculum through their own personal curricular ideology. When a curriculum confirms the ideological perspective they have on the subject, they will faithfully teach what the curriculum requires. Given the stranglehold Marxists have had on teacher training and curriculum development, this has been the stable situation for many decades.
When a teacher disagrees ideologically with what a curriculum requires, however, they find a million and one ways to appear to be compliant to the curriculum while subverting it with their students.
This is why I think the default reflex of the Jewish lobby to pressure politicians to change school curricula will backfire. Gaza has changed the calculus on where Jews sit in the oppressor-oppressed victim hierarchy. It was easy to show Gen X and Millennial kids pictures of the Warsaw ghetto and Buchenwald to get them to see Jews as emblematic of oppressed peoples everywhere. This is why the Holocaust has been so central to intersectional theorisation in education for decades, and it’s why those Frankfurt School intellectuals created cultural Marxism in the first place. If power must go most fully to the group most victimised, and Jews are emblematic of the victimisation of minorities everywhere by evil Whites, then cultural Marxism is the perfect control mechanism.
But Gen Alpha is different. For them, the grainy black-and-white photos of Dachau are as unrelateable as an Egyptian obelisk or a Cambodian stupa. There’s no emotional resonance.
Gaza though was recorded in 4K, and it was only two years ago.
Year 10 History isn’t taught the way Year 8 Civics is. You can get students to copy out a diagram of the various branches of government and they will (sometimes) do it at 14. That’s not how these new mandated topics will be delivered. Teachers instructed by the curriculum authorities to devote even more time in Year 10 to the Holocaust will deliver those types of lessons dialectically. I’ve never seen a decent Year 10 History class where some form of Socratic questioning and reasoned debate wasn’t going on. 16-year-olds don’t just sit and listen. They debate.
You can bet at least one of those 16-year-olds in every classroom has been exposed to revisionist perspectives by now. Whether they’ll be the “Free Palestine”, earnest type of leftist girl or the jaded “manosphere” rightist boy, there will be at least one student who will take the opposing view to what the teacher is supposed to teach. And, after Gaza, there will be more than one or two teachers who will be quite happy to let them influence the others. After all, that’s how subversion works, right?
The SOSE syllabus was imposed upon Queensland children in the year 2000. No one back then knew about cultural Marxism, Zionism, or the Jewish lobby. They do now, and the tired old control tactics that created the power structure still in place today are not going to work anymore. These kids are not the same. The world is different now.
Dr David Hilton is a former teacher and academic with interests in ancient cosmology, the origins of Christianity and the role of belief systems in society. He is the author of Civilizationism: Why The West Is Collapsing & How We Can Save It under a pseudonym. He writes at Metaphysical History.
Header image: Auschwitz (xiquinhosilva, CC BY 2.0)
