Education today is all about the promotion of agendas – and it is not just in the Safe Schools program. Our young teens’ recent school excursion to the University of Melbourne’s Science Gallery was more like a trip down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Disturbingly, like the gender confusion being promoted in schools, this was a promotion of scientific confusion.
Everything associated with science was thrown out the window – scientific questioning, rational thought, and indeed scientific proofs. The most dangerous lesson being taught was to uncritically accept what they heard and to suspend disbelief (a practice of cult groups the world over). We need to arm our children against these things.
Below are some of the lessons we learned and discussed together with our teens.
Lesson 1: Buyer beware – trusted institutions such as schools and universities apparently engage in deliberately false advertising.
The advertising sounded exciting: flying and programming drones with a lengthy paragraph on all that would involve. Just prior, there was this single sentence:
SWARM reflects on the pros and cons of collective behaviour, social movements, artificial intelligence and bio-communities.
It turned out that most of the day was spent on this sentence and the drone’s sweetener came only for a short time at the end.
The actual excursion was a pastiche of ideologies. Much of it was pseudoscience at best. Trees were said to be sentient beings, which is more pantheistic religion than science, and children had 3D body scans taken which apparently could be sent in future into a gravity hole in outer space as ‘cosmic fossils’ which would somehow coalesce to form a new planet.
It seems they could do this after taking the euthanasia roller coaster (more on that below). Social media was somehow linked to a capitalist hell. An indigenous AFL player’s ‘phenomenal spatial awareness and ability to predict patterns’ was said to come ‘from his deep connection to Country’ which is Aboriginal religion, not science. It was all sheer nonsense but protected nonsense because it came under the banner of the ‘University of Melbourne’ and ‘Science’.
We have been far too complacent. Parents tell me that ‘such and such’ would never happen at their school or with their principal. Never forget these same schools abrogate fundamental parental rights with Doctors in School, Safe Schools and Respectful Relationships programs – all of which advocate keeping parents in ignorance of what is happening with their child at school including the school secretly transitioning children. Nor can you rely on your children to inform you of ‘issues’ as they do not have adult discernment or experience. Indeed, another young Christian teen from this excursion simply told his parents he’d had a great day and saw nothing amiss.
Lesson 2: How to spot the difference between propaganda and education.
The first is an enthusiastic promotion of one side, the second considers multiple perspectives and encourages you to come to your own conclusions. So we deconstructed the propaganda beginning with: The Euthanasia Roller Coaster which normalised, indeed promoted, euthanasia to young teenagers as a carnival ride!
“Step right up for an end-of-life journey that can only be described as breath-taking. Literally. Featuring a 500 metre drop and 7 loop-de-loops, participants experience thrill, euphoria, loss of consciousness and eventually death. Engineered to humanely take the life of a person due to lack of oxygen to the brain – widely considered the most pleasant way to die.”
Simply questioning the mindless embracing of this latest technology is all that is necessary.
- How would the parents and friends of that young person feel about this?
- Would you want your friend who had perhaps contemplated suicide to be exposed to a presentation like this?
- Who would be the audience for this kind of death – your terminally ill 80-year-old or teens?
- What are the ethics of promoting euthanasia to teens without parental consent?
- Was there any consideration of moral or religious objections to euthanasia – anything from those opposed to euthanasia?
We asked similar questions for the enthusiastically-promoted, Sentiment Honk, in which Artificial Intelligence was used to identify every time someone had a negative thought.
- The first question would be according to who?
- Would you be happy for the CCP to have this technology?
- Then what could be the potential uses or abuses of such technology?
- And perhaps the deepest question, why is none of this being discussed in exhibits such as these?
- My next question would then be if one perspective is being pushed, can you find out who is funding this? The closest we got was that universities have spent over 180 million Euros (277 million dollars) worldwide since 2008 on just 8 of these science galleries so that’s some serious money and influence.
Lesson 3: Knowledge is power and you CAN question the experts. And that special Mum moment: ‘Look – what you learned in science is useful.’
One exhibit and discussion promoted the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) ‘insect eating as the way of the future’ sales pitch. The presentation included the written statement that:
“Traditional protein sources [cows etc] produce methane gas that negatively affects the Earth’s ozone layer, speeding up the process of global warming.”
I had to laugh when I read this. I asked the girls, “How many glaring science errors can you spot in that one sentence?” Apparently, the University of Melbourne gurus did not realise that the ozone hole does not cause global warming, that CFCs, not methane, cause the ozone hole and that ‘global warming’ has been superseded by the term ‘Climate Change’ due to the spectacularly failed predictions on warming over the last few decades. And the very important question, why would you believe anything else these people say?
Then we applied Lesson 2 on considering multiple perspectives. For instance, how does Australia’s cattle industry feel about their industry being curtailed? What about the 3000 Dutch farmers whose Government is forcing them to sell up to reach emission targets or the NZ farmers who are being taxed for the methane their cows produce? And always what does history teach us?
Some have paralleled what is happening in the name of Climate Change to Mao’s Great Leap Forward in which ‘The regime considered no cost or coercion too great in making the realisation of Communist ideals the supreme goal …’. and that ‘a system of absolute power micromanaging agriculture … has the potential to inflict the worst suffering imaginable on society – even in nations blessed by natural resources.’ Yang Jisheng.
The whole segment ended with teens sitting around a massive egg that vibrated each time a baby was born worldwide – presented as a frightening scenario that would necessitate insect eating and the other technologies presented. I asked the kids what emotion this experience was intended to create. Did this foster or denigrate human worth and dignity?
Lesson 4: Fear gets in the way of rational and objective thought needed for wise decision-making.
- How well do you think when you are panicking?
- Historically, fear has been used as a tool of manipulation. It has been said that that which you fear the most controls you. Can you think of examples from history?
- If you think it fostering fear is justified for a good cause, is it ethical? What happens to children who have a steady diet of fear-based teaching as this approach to education is normalised, seen in everything from COVID responses to Climate Change? Speculatively, could it be a factor in the escalating levels of anxiety in younger and younger age groups?
We then stepped back to examine the impact of the population explosion more carefully – having found an article that contained another perspective.
Modern-day anti-humanism emerged in the 1970s, [when] Ehrlich published his widely read polemic The Population Bomb in 1968, which originally opened with the lines, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Thanks to human ingenuity in the form of the Green Revolution, that didn’t happen. …
… [The article goes on to cover the fact that not all experts agree with this position] ‘Julian Simon rejected the idea of overpopulation as a problem. He believed that, on the contrary, more people in the world means more people to solve problems, and less resource scarcity. “There is no physical or economic reason,” he wrote, “why human resourcefulness and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedients that, after an adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose.”
New research, inspired by the Ehrlich-Simon wager, has further confirmed that, contrary to the anti-humanists’ claims, population growth goes hand-in-hand with more abundant resources.
Lesson 5: Recognise that science and indeed everything is not value-neutral and evaluate the presenter’s worldview in relation to yours.
In contrast to the anti-humanist view of people as a cancer on the planet, we believe that humanity has a unique and special place in creation and has a Holy Book that demonstrates how individuals have the potential to make a positive difference with the pinnacle of this being Jesus.
We then discussed the consequences of ideas. Out of the anti-humanist worldview has come decades of education focussing on animals and the environment to the virtual exclusion of biographies of those who have made a difference (other than a few sporting or indigenous heroes) that has in turn led to a further loss of faith in humanity and a growing despair and hopelessness.
There are very few adults in our society, let alone young people, who know anything about significant heroes of history who shaped our society with implications into the present day including Wilberforce, who oversaw an end to slavery in the British Empire; Lord Shaftesbury, who dedicated his whole life as an MP to fight for the needs of the poor and down-trodden; and Australian humanitarian heroes such as Caroline Chisholm. As Karl Marx famously said, “A people denied their history are easy to control.”
It IS possible to stop the system from controlling the minds and hearts of your children. Parents, you are not powerless. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind – be students of the world as well as the Word as Calvin called for.
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