The military is indoctrinating schoolchildren
Why teach kids how to save the planet, when we can encourage them to design killer submarines instead? High school students can now join the Defence Department’s Nuclear-Powered Submarine Propulsion Challenge. Defence will provide the resources for teachers to enable the project and student winners will get an all-expenses-paid trip to HMAS Sterling in Perth.
It will, according to the Defence web page, “inspire students to discover how [nuclear propulsion] works and ... makes submarines more capable”. Rear Admiral Jonathon Earley says that this will encourage students to see how science and maths subjects “are practically applied in the real world”. Students are, he adds, “our future submariners, engineers and technicians”—in other words, students fit for Australia’s multibillion-dollar war drive.
It’s not just at school that this pro-war, pro-nuclear message is being spread. Catriona Jackson, CEO of Universities Australia, toured the US looking for military partnerships after the government announced its $368 billion nuclear submarine deal. “The foundation has been laid so Australia’s universities can play their fullest role in supporting AUKUS”, she said. And Adelaide University dares prospective students to “make history” with its revamped courses to construct and maintain the newest weapons of mass destruction.
This is what Earley means when he talks about applying knowledge in the “real world”: a world being prepared by our politicians for more imperialist war and the militarisation of society. Nowhere will there be discussion of the potential of nuclear war to destroy our world, let alone the elephant in the room—the real-world lack of any capacity to dispose of nuclear waste safely.
Of course, it’s not just the nuclear and war industries that attempt such right-wing ideological programs to persuade young people of the benefits of destructive technology. In 2018, fossil fuel companies provided teacher training and free curriculum material, which contained not a word about climate change. The miners’ fear, said Rio Tinto’s CEO in the Sydney Morning Herald, is that “coal will become the next tobacco”—that is, recognised for the toxic substance that it is when burned. In 2017, more than 3,000 students were involved in this continuing project, run by the Queensland Minerals and Energy Academy.
Without a second thought, millions of dollars are being spent promoting dangerous, climate-destroying and warfare technologies. They’re indoctrinating the kids.
Compare the political right’s championing of these threats with their rants and vile campaigns over the supposed left-wing “indoctrination” of kids. Or their whipped-up panic about climate activists’ city stunts, leading to draconian anti-protest laws in several states.
From 2010, Safe Schools, a government-backed support program for LGBTI school students, was a lifesaver for many. But its very popularity and effectiveness drew the anger of the conservative political right—which wants non-heterosexual children to grow up hating themselves.
Right-wing groups such as the fringe Australian Christian Lobby and some Liberal MPs attacked Safe Schools. In a matter of weeks, the Victorian program was gutted through a vicious campaign and the leaders of the program were publicly vilified. Federal funding was cut at the end of 2017—just when the mining companies were getting their hands on the kids in Queensland.
For the political right, it’s okay to indoctrinate kids into accepting and even participating in human and planetary destruction. But they pour poison on programs that encourage people to embrace human decency.
