(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, January 23.)
There was a striking synchronicity in the timing of two of
the New Year’s first political pronouncements.
On January 13, Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced
that parents would in future be required to give written consent for their
children to attend religious instruction classes.
This effectively signalled the end of religious teaching in
state schools, since parents are far less likely to opt in than to opt out, as
they are permitted to do now. RI classes will likely wither on the vine through
lack of interest, which is Hipkins’ avowed intention.
The public response was so muted as to be unnoticeable. This
may have been because most of the population was still on holiday and focused
on other things – a factor the minister very likely took into account in the timing
of his announcement.
But the public’s apparent indifference may also be explained
by the fact that New Zealand is now an essentially secular society that quite
reasonably sees no place in the education system for religious instruction. Only
a small minority will lament its abandonment as a lapse into paganism.
But nature abhors a vacuum, and the government had a quasi-religious
substitute locked, loaded and ready to fill the gap. January 13 was also the
date on which the far more significant news broke that climate change is to
become part of the school syllabus for Years 7-10 pupils, which means those
aged between 11 and 14.
This was no sudden political impulse. The climate change
curriculum (you can read it online) emerged fully formed, with the Greens’ fingerprints all over it. It
was trialled at Christchurch’s South New Brighton School – an ideal test bed,
since the school’s pupils have been primed with fears that their neighbourhood
is at risk from rising sea levels.
Join the dots. Out goes religious instruction and in comes its
secular substitute in the form of politically charged dogma surrounding climate
change. The two announcements neatly complemented each other, serving as a kind
of metaphor for wider political and social changes driven by the “progressive”
Left.
And make no mistake: While purporting to be based on solid science,
the climate change curriculum is heavily freighted with ideology and represents
a world view that’s capable of being every bit as dogmatic and authoritarian as
religious indoctrination.
It is quite explicit about its goal, which is to groom a
generation of climate change activists. Apparently drawing inspiration from
Greta Thunberg, the teaching resource is threaded with statements such as:
“Climate change poses a severe threat to children’s most basic rights”.
It’s a piece of work the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels would have been proud to call his own – one that targets malleable
young minds in much the same way as the Hitler Youth did in the 1930s.
Guilt is an unstated sub-text throughout. The message is
that earth has been put at risk through greed and complacency and we must act
fast before the process becomes irreversible. Parents and grandparents can expect to be held to account for allowing this to happen.
In effect, schoolkids will be captive zealots in training. Indoctrination
isn’t too strong a word for this, and it raises questions about the morality of
using the public education system to impose adult anxieties and political convictions
on the young.
Again, the public response to the announcement was low-key,
but that may change when children start coming home from school and badgering
their parents to stop using the car and cut back on meat and dairy products, as
the curriculum urges them to do; or when they start exhibiting symptoms of
anxiety and depression, which the teaching resource acknowledges are possible
consequences of heightened climate-change awareness.
Indeed, the curriculum seems almost to relish the prospect
of impressionable pupils panicking over the prospect of an overheated, perhaps
uninhabitable, world. The teaching resource is tinged with New Age gibberish
about the need for children to explore their feelings – anger, frustration,
sadness, fear – relating to climate change. Teachers in turn will be encouraged
to listen, empathise and “reinforce the key message”. If that’s not
indoctrination, I don’t know what is.
Valid scientific scepticism is caricatured as Donald
Trump-style craziness. Nowhere in the teaching resource is there any
acknowledgement that many of the statements it makes are scientifically
contestable.
But this is where we have ended up. If climate change alarmism
is the new religion, then scepticism – or denialism, to use the more damning
term favoured by climate-change activists – is the new heresy.
There’s a disturbing whiff of totalitarianism in the way
this secular religion permits no dissent. If you believe that it’s dangerous in
a democracy to allow one view to hold complete and unchallenged sway, denialism
starts to look like an honourable stance, purely on principle.
