Multiculturalism as propaganda

It is not the purpose of this article to set out the details of an English curriculum for students from upper primary and high school except to say it should not include propaganda.

The single purpose of a school English curriculum is to teach children to be literate, which means to be able to read and write and understand what others have written. Teaching literacy to children is a gradual process that takes all of a child’s school years. It involves an instruction in all the formalities of the English language while simultaneously introducing the children to increasingly more complicated literature. But it does not stop there.

Its culmination, for the brightest minds, is in the dialogue that it permits between the student and the greatest authors, those men who are the real teachers for they are the teachers of the teachers of the teachers. That dialogue is what is known as a liberal education.

What might such a student find, by reading the works of men like Rousseau Kant and Hegal?

In his book, Giants and Dwarfs, the late Professor Allan Bloom states: “The notion of ‘culture’ was formed in response to the rise of commercial society. So far as I know, Kant was the first to use the word in its modern sense.”

He develops this further in his best seller, The Closing of the American Mind. Kant used the word, culture to describe the dignity of man in the context of modern natural science, a science which reduced everything to matter or atoms in motion. Bloom argues that what now passes for culture is merely differences in food and clothing: this attempt to preserve old cultures in the New World is superficial because it ignores the fact that real differences among men are based on real differences in fundamental beliefs about good and evil, about what is highest, about God.

Even so, the one thing missing from multicultural discussion is multicultural politics, the very thing which for Aristotle and the ancients is the determinative of people’s understanding of right and wrong.

Professor Harry Jaffa in his book on Abraham Lincoln, A New Birth of Freedom, states that it is the Aristotelian view of man that guided the founding of the American Republic. The great principle of republican government is set down in The Declaration of Independence. “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” This principle was, according to Lincoln, applicable to all human beings, everywhere and at all times.

This principle (which was accepted unquestioningly by the Australian founders) makes it clear that a democratic regime can only exist among those who recognise the unalienable rights of their equal, fellow citizens.

Multiculturalism which, at its most practical and basic level, promotes the cultures of all peoples including those who do not embrace the equality of their fellow citizens, is not only fundamentally inconsistent with, but is destructive of, republican, that is, democratic, government.

We suspect that the copyright owner of Multicultural Australia agrees since the website states that co-existence (tolerance) between cultures is only possible provided there is respect for others’ rights and an agreement about ends. In saying this he is, without knowing it, conceding that Aristotle not Kant was correct.

At its highest, participation in a democratic republic requires an abandonment of every political opinion inconsistent with liberal democracy and it is in the family where those opinions linger on whatever the law might say.