A book in a Catholic school library which labels Robert Menzies a tyrant in the company of Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein ought to be withdrawn – see report of incident here.
I’m no friend of George Brandis’s (although I have been), but my old school debating colleague is right on the money when he wants “100 Greatest Tyrants” taken from the library. Rubbish like that has no place in any school.
What is most striking about this is not that State Premier Beattie labelled Brandis a “drama queen” for his stand – the decay of state education systems and a lack of dedication to academic rigour under largely Labor governments is the major reason why private school enrolments are booming, so what else would you expect him to say?
Nor is it the reflex action of the teachers union to defend the book – the defence of teachers by teachers unions against any type of oversight is the greatest bar to teaching being regarded as a real profession.
No, it is the fact that the principal of a private school – one of the supposed refuges from debased public school teaching – should defend the book. Principal Bernard Durie says the school isn’t “into censorship in a big way yet”, but the basis of education is selection. Presumably this is a school which also files the Bible under Science alongside creationist text books. And if it doesn’t then Bernard Durie has some serious self-examination to do.
But not everything goes the government’s way on this issue – Brandis’s discovery was probably a by-product of him searching for the Maoist tomes that Julie Bishop asserts exist in the bowels of school curricula. They are as yet as elusive as WMD in a Babylonian desert.