Teacher training is where the culture war begins. Those who train our teachers have a decisive influence on those who teach our children. To control and change society, there is nothing more strategically important than teacher training – and the radical-left has controlled it for decades.

Universities’ extreme left bias has become obvious in recent years. There is an almost total lack of diversity of ideas and opinion; deliberate brainwashing of students; anti-male sexism; racism; antisemitism; and complicity in gaming the immigration system. Add to that list low academic standards, and why would we entrust universities with such an important job as teacher training?

It would be easy to remove teacher training from the universities altogether, as was the case half a century ago, and set up alternative pathways to become a teacher – perhaps through newly formed institutions, or even TAFEs.

At present, to become a teacher requires a four-year Bachelor of Education, or a two-year Masters of Teaching after completing another degree. And be in no doubt as to what those education qualifications involve. Think Woke, Indigenous, environmental sustainability, gender equity, radical-left ideology…

DEI for up to four miserable years.

For example, the two-year University of Queensland course to indoctrinate prospective teachers, who already have another degree, starts with the subject ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Education’. Such a topic should take 20 minutes to complete – but it lasts a full semester. Then they move on to ‘Global Issues and Social Justice’, and ‘Teachers as education innovators and agents of social change’.

The Melbourne University Master of Teaching core subject ‘First Nations in Education’ proudly proclaims that ‘teacher candidates will engage in critical discussions and activities that enable them to reflect on the impacts of settler colonialism, racism, and unexamined bias on First Nations educational sovereignties as well as build their understanding and awareness of Indigenous knowledges and strategies for working towards decolonisation’.

The University of Sydney’s slogan for its Masters of Teaching is ‘empowering future educators for social justice and innovation’.

It is not as though they are hiding what they are doing. They are quite openly in the business of destroying our country.

And now ask who are the only people who could possibly survive these courses of non-stop nonsense and indoctrination? There are two types of people – those with an incredibly high tolerance to extended periods of pain, and those who are fully signed up to the nonsense in the first place, probably as a result of indoctrination at school.

The upshot is that teacher training courses select those people who are most likely to hate Western Civilisation, believe Australia is illegitimate, think Hamas are the good guys, and consider Mao to have been a nice old fellow who couldn’t possibly have killed more people than Hitler.

And then we hand over our children to these people for 12 years.

Incredibly, many teachers turn out very well despite this process. Perhaps there is a third group – those who have become totally accustomed to saying what is politically correct while hiding their true thoughts. I can only admire their forbearance.

We must move back to a system of teaching apprenticeships where trainee teachers are attached to a succession of master teachers to learn directly on the job. We all remember these master teachers from our school days. Supremely competent and highly respected. Work with people like that for a year or two and one would learn far more than at a university. There is a small amount of useful education theory that could be taught in a couple of months – mostly online.

Of course, trainee teachers would need to have the requisite background knowledge for the subjects they teach, but that is easy to gauge with an entrance exam. And any deficiencies can be rectified with online courses, especially in Maths or English. After all, present education degrees do not devote much time to training in these areas.

Teaching is one of the hardest jobs and it is made more difficult by the fact that new teachers, straight from university, are very young, often without enough gravitas or world experience. There is no reason why older people should not go into teaching. Grey hair, and having worked in a ‘real job’, are a great asset for a new teacher.

But consider a tradesman whose physical health is failing him, or soldiers who have finished serving their country and who might be considering starting a new career as primary or junior high school teachers. These would only need limited training in subject knowledge; but under existing arrangements they would have to endure four years of torture, without pay, to become a teacher. So, it rarely happens.

An alternative pathway for mature people to enter teaching has thus become very difficult, and it probably affects men more than women. We urgently need more male teachers. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, fewer than 30 per cent of teachers are men.

Taking away the teacher training role from universities, and thus the number of education academics, would have another useful effect. It would greatly reduce education ‘research’ – where the seriously malignant ideology that has helped ruin our schools is invented.

But taking on the university system is dangerous. Australia’s universities are rich and powerful. All of the big ones have multibillion-dollar turnovers and have legions of media people pumping out stories about how wonderful they are. And because they hunt in packs, like the Group of Eight, they make the CFMEU look like amateurs when it comes to beating up those who cross them.

However, the universities’ record of failure has become so well known that community respect for them has diminished. Thus, while reform is going to be resisted, it is certainly possible. Taking away one of their present functions, or at least their monopoly on it, is a good place to start, and would be a decisive blow in the culture wars. But this should be only the beginning of a reform process that our universities need.

Peter Ridd. Adjunct Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs