Deceptive Left-dominated education in an Australian High School

I have received the following email from a reader who is an inmate of a government High School:

As a year 11 student in **** with more than a passing fancy for history, I took Modern History as one of my choices in the second semester of school. I wouldn't know anything about Australian history from that class, there was not a single mention of it apart from a very brief look at Australia's role in the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War is a case in point about why History in schools is failing miserably, or at the most generous, being changed into -- as you so eloquently put it -- a "politically correct, ideological prism." The Vietnam War was portrayed in a rather interesting fashion, as a Communist North reaction against American imperialistic ambitions on the region. No mention was made of the North's continued covert support of terrorists or its intentions to invade and then annex the South.

The class even from the very first was told to look critically at the American conduct of the war. We looked at the Mai Lai massacre, which was a horrible abomination, but instead of treating it as an isolated case (which it was probably not). It was used to illustrate an imaginary trend and we then proceeded to spend the six weeks examining American conduct in great deal.

A personal favourite was the curriculum's view of the Tet offensive; it was not treated as a communist attack on cities full of non combatants on a national holiday. Instead we looked at the conduct of the Americans in dealing with it, every report of heavy handedness, every possible picture that could possibly be used to attack America was brought up. No mention was made of the massacres which the communists perpetrated in which thousands were killed.

Even more entertaining was the constant left wing rants from many of my co-students. I have heard communism called many things in front of me, but a good system which helped all the people, that was a first. So I guess that Marx must have been rolling in his grave when the Soviet Union was formed, with Gulags (people need to go somewhere), with the God-Comrade Stalin (better a man who tries to be god than god), with the KGB (someone needs to keep the Proletariat and reactionaries in order) and with the mass starvation of the Poles and Ukrainians (they tried to be different) and all the other trappings of the Russian version of communism. He must have died again when China fell to God-Comrade Mao better than God-Comrade Stalin (he was a peasant), then died again when God Comrade Mao used peasants instead of Marx's beloved industrial workers (is that communism?), then once more when Mao then proceeded to starve millions, and Marx's beloved industrial workers and less than loved peasants (Stalin at least cared, he hoped). Which sadly the class did little to damp or in anyway impede in fact it encouraged it.

A measure of respect can be aimed at people who have read Marx and understand the finer principles of Communes and the like, even if they like a grievously flawed philosophy. There were too many flaws in the way the class was presented to list but that is one example. The teacher was exemplary. The scorn in this letter is directed solely at a curriculum that is so utterly biased it destroys the notion of history: A curriculum in which questions for essays in which the only answers could be biased (however hard I attempted to do otherwise), where evidence for the exam could have come from a whose who of left wing images and views of the Vietnam War, where choices were coaxed to fit a narrow biased view that a bunch of left wing ideologues intent on ruining the world under the weight of their "good" intentions want the entire world to meet.

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