In which Charles Dickens tackles the Caterists ...

Is it possible for a twittering twit to hold two contradictory thoughts in the head at the same time? Tyranny and a second print run?

But enough of exhibitionists and their supporters. Sheehan can continue on happily knowing he's at one with Bernardi and the Fairfaxians can continue to wonder why their subscription base flounders ...

Enough already.

Today there is a fresh outbreak of Caterism, which it turns out is way more difficult to contain than the contagion Dustin Hoffman confronted in the 1995 clunker Outbreak. (Poor old Wolfgang Petersen, if he'd only kept to submarines).

The digital splash's line is a particularly unfortunate - some might say stupid - way of starting a debate, since on all the evidence, the Abbott government wants evangelists, what with the evangelical ways of Kevin Donnelly long on view, while Ken Wiltshire has also been well down the evangelical path for a long time, as he showed in an opinion piece for the reptiles, On all counts, Coalition deserves independents.

Wiltshire blathered on about Edmund Burke and called on the independents to support the coalition, while flapping his moosh about the dangers of the "radical social and economic objectives of the Greens" via private member's bills and conscience votes. 

Oh the shock and the shame of a politician voting according to conscience:

Through this back door Labor would be able to introduce the Greens' priorities on gay marriage, softer border protection, and heftier mining taxes and so on. It is a safe bet that the voters of Lyne, New England and Kennedy are opposed to these and many other Greens' demands to which Labor and Wilkie will almost certainly succumb, especially after July 1 next year. 

Wiltshire wrapped up his evangelical plea for conservatism and for the independents  thusly:

... as Burke's number one Australian fan, former federal Liberal minister Jim Killen, would have recommended, the independents might do well to be guided by another saying attributed to Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Since we're now back in the evangelical history wars, it's an unfortunate attribution, but typical of the mangling of the past. 

Why try to give a quotation the gravitas of Burke when it's long been known that the odds are that he was unlikely to have made the observation? (And for more on that, head off to this investigation of the quote) 

Was Wiltshire attempting to prove that the intertubes is more informative than the evangelicals?

As you'd expect of an evangelical, Wiltshire is already on record as saying that the national curriculum is a failure.

The funniest thing?

The reptiles themselves were naked about the evangelical intent of the appointments:

The Abbott government will move today to reshape school education by appointing strong critics of the national curriculum to review what children are taught, amid fears a "cultural Left" agenda is failing students. 
The Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, is seeking a blueprint by mid-year to overhaul the curriculum, warning that the rise of "remedial" classes at universities proves the depths of the problem in Australian classrooms. Vowing to restore an "orthodox" curriculum, Mr Pyne will today name author and former teacher Kevin Donnelly and business professor Ken Wiltshire to lead the review. The appointments clear the way for reforms that could expunge parts of the history syllabus that Tony Abbott has blasted for favouring Labor and the unions but glossing over the work of Coalition prime ministers. 
Mr Donnelly is a fierce critic of the "relativism" in the teaching program, while Professor Wiltshire has rejected the emphasis on "competencies" and urged a sharper focus on knowledge and assessment. 
The looming changes could spark another "culture war", given past brawls, including John Howard's criticism in 2007 of the "shameful" neglect of Australian history and the disputes over Julia Gillard's introduction of the national curriculum in 2010.

They even headed it Christopher Pyne tackles leftist 'bias' in classrooms (behind the paywall because information should never be free), without a shred or hint of irony, so firmly are the reptiles at the Oz in crusader mode.

Expunge? Such a quaint, but nobly Stalinist word:

1. to strike or blot out; obliterate; erase. 
2. to eliminate completely; efface; destroy.

Yep, that's the way to deal with history. Expunge the bits you don't like, maintain the ideological and theological rage.

The reptiles even provided a handy guide to the way the evangelicals were already deeply committed to their theology:

It took Orwellian cheek, mixed with typical poodle Pyne hubris, to dress up this pair of crusaders as being free of partisan bias and blessed with open minds capable of devising a curriculum for parents that deals with "real-world issues", whatever they might be, though they clearly exclude all greenie policies, gay marriage, climate science, taxes on the rich, you know all the nasty bits that need to be expunged ...

Like his mate, Wiltshire is a values man:

"A school curriculum should be based on a set of values, yet it is almost impossible to determine what values have been explicitly used to design the proposed model," he wrote of the changes under the Gillard government. 
 "Curriculum should also be knowledge-based, yet we are faced with an experiment that focuses on process or competencies." 

He's also deeply old-fashioned, though perhaps that will be useful in the era of the Abbott/Turnbull days of the NBN:

Professor Wiltshire also attacked the "astounding devaluation of the book" in modern teaching.

What's really astounding is that Wiltshire should be blathering on about "books", when the notion of a book in these iPad, Kindle days is extremely nebulous.

Of course Donnelly is more rabid, and the lizards were happy to trot out some of the farthest reaches of his paranoia:

Mr Donnelly, a regular contributor to The Australian, has warned against a "subjective" view of culture that neglects the Judeo-Christian values at the core of Australian institutions. 
He has also savaged a civics curriculum that teaches that "citizenship means different things to different people at different times", rather than preparing students for an understanding of their responsibilities. "The civics curriculum argues in favour of a post-modern, deconstructed definition of citizenship," he wrote last year. 
"The flaws are manifest. What right do Australians have to expect migrants to accept our laws, institutions and way of life? "Such a subjective view of citizenship allows Islamic fundamentalists to justify mistreating women and carrying out jihad against non-believers." 
Mandating a "cultural left national curriculum" would fail students, he wrote.

Amazing stuff - as if your average secular atheist is on side with Islamic fundamentalists, when in reality it's the Christian fundamentalists who take their side on subjects such as gay marriage. And if that puts Donnelly and Wiltshire on the side of Islamic fundamentalists, so be it.

But while exploring this valley of the quaint, we've completely ignored the Caterists, scribbling furiously in Australian curriculum beyond saving, behind the paywall because of the speed with which the contagion spreads.

This is hardly surprising if you think about it for a nano-second, because the head Caterist is a dingbat, a supremely blinkered and stupid man who affects the guise of a practical man tilting at the windmill of academic verbiage, a bit like the twit Alderman Cute, as portrayed by Dickens:

"I am a plain man, and a practical man; and I go to work in a plain and practical way ... There's a great deal of nonsense talked about Want - "hard up, you know: that's the phrase, isn't it? ha! ha! ha! and I intend to Put It Down. There's a certain amount of cant in vogue about Starvation, and I mean to Put It Down! That's all! Lord bless you ... you may Put Down anything among this sort of people, if you only know the way to set about it."

Of course Dickens was only warming up and would hit his stride with the likes of Gradgrind and Bounderby, and Nick Cater is a tragedy on two levels - that Dickens should have mocked his kind, yet they keep bobbing up like mushrooms, and now, having bobbed up again, Dickens isn't around to mock and make fun of this sort of nonsense:

At every turn, the curriculum appears intent on taking the most dismal brutal view of every episode in human history. The industrial revolution's contribution to the world is restricted to "the transatlantic slave trade and convict transportation". It led, we are told, to "longer working hours for low pay and the use of children as a cheap source of labour" and is best interpreted through reading the works of Charles Dickens. 
The reforming instincts of 19th-century liberals that led to the end of transportation, slavery and child labour are whitewashed from history.

Just the juxtaposition of those two thoughts is such an astonishing piece of stupidity, it made the pond's day, since it doesn't seem to have occurred to Cater that Dickens might have been one of those very same nineteenth-century liberals with a keen reforming instinct...

It's so astonishingly dumb that the pond feared that Cater might use himself as a compelling example of the complete failure of education systems throughout the world.

If you read just one work of Dickens. you'll cop all the reforming instincts you'll need, and if you happen to luck into Hard Times, you'll have the wondrous Bounderby and the ever so practical Gradgrind for company:

Mr Gradgrind walked homeward from the school, in a state of considerable satisfaction. It was his school, and he intended it to be a model. He intended every child in it to be a model — just as the young Gradgrinds were all models. 
There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one. They had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little hares. Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run to the lecture-room. The first object with which they had an association, or of which they had a remembrance, was a large black board with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it. 
Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre. Fact forbid! I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle, with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair. 
No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a Professor Owen, and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive engine-driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.

Apologies. Up against Cater, Dickens is such fun, and you can get the rest of Hard Times here.

There's plenty from Cater which would have been like fresh meat to Dickens. Where one might suggest that the curriculum is inclined to state the obvious, Cater sees some kind of conspiracy:

They will be asked to "interrogate" Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring and 1970 editions of Mother Earth News magazine, before considering the "rights of nature recognition - that humans and their natural environment are closely interrelated".

Yep, we should stand by for Caterist course 101, of the Gradgrindian kind, explaining how humans and their natural environment aren't closely interrelated.

Sustainability is a particular bugbear of the Caterists:

Sustainability in science develops "an appreciation for the interconnectedness of Earth's biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere".

Because they're not interconnected at all!

Sheesh, you just sat Non-relational non-related Caterism 101, and already you've failed the next stage by proposing interconnectedness ... What next? The sensible, sustainable use of resources, when really we should be tearing them all up and shipping them to China ...

The pond could have spent all day wading through the implications of Cater's profound stupidity, but in the end, it was too much and instead there came a profound welling of sadness for the hapless designers of the curriculum, who had laboured long and hard on developing ways to interest and engage students, only to be confronted by the superficial stupidities of a cherry picking twit, who it has to be said, excels himself with his closer:

Christopher Pyne has been condemned as a culture warrior for having the audacity to question this tosh. The opposition has accused him of attempting to politicise the curriculum, and has labelled his chosen reviewers, Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire, as ideologues. 
 If the Education Minister is to be criticised, it is for imagining this irredeemable document can be tidied up and put back on the shelf when the only realistic course of action is to tear the damn thing up.

Oh he's the very model of a modern revolutionary. Tear the whole thing up! You might now head off to read Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, but we'll settle for more of Gradgrind:

Don't bother telling us that the English language "provides rich and engaging contexts for developing students' abilities," or that "texts provide the means for communication". 
In our own inexpert way, we had sort of gathered that. 
Just tell us how you plan to teach literacy and numeracy, and what else you are planning to put into the kiddies' heads.

Oh sorry, that was Cater. Here's Gradgrind:

“Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” ...
Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir - peremptorily Thomas - Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!

And so on, and the real tragedy?

Published in 1854, and yet here and now, a goose too dumb to realise he'd been sent up rotten by Dickens. If only Cater had an education, if only he'd done some reading ...

If only Dickens were around in 2014. He - and so we - would have such fun with the reptiles and the Caterists ...

(Below: a portrait of a nineteenth century forebear of Nick Cater. Oh how happy the children look. Poor Louisa. Poor Tom. They only wanted to go to the circus.)