In Loco Parentis?

The indoctrination of young Australians by political activists begs the question: Who has the right to form the child, the family or the state?

Thank you all for coming this evening. It is an absolute pleasure to see you here, and I want to thank you again for your continued support of the IPA. Without that support, there would simply be no voice for freedom in this country.

The IPA has been in this particular fight—often as a lone voice in the wilderness—for many years, calling out the ideological capture of our education system while others stayed silent. That long-term courage and consistency is why we are still here, and why tonight matters so much.

I know many of you have joined us this evening for the sparkling company, the drinks and the canapés—welcome though they are—but I also know you are here because you understand that something has gone very badly wrong in our education system. And I do mean very badly wrong.

We are not dealing with a few eccentric teachers, or a handful of unfortunate lesson plans, or the occasional activist who has wandered into the classroom and mistaken it for a political rally.

In Australia, children are taught to understand our history as one giant crime scene.

We are dealing with something much deeper. I believe that the ideas now permeating our kindergartens, primary schools, secondary schools and universities constitute one of the great travesties of the twenty-first century.

Some of you will have come face to face with this through your own children or grandchildren. Some of you may have seen it through your work. Or perhaps you are still at school yourself. Or, heaven forbid, you are in the middle of a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney University and wondering whether you will make it to the other end with your sanity intact.

But wherever we encounter it, we have no choice but to confront this system head on and ask the difficult questions.

What are we really doing to our children? What kind of madness are we inflicting on the youngest and most vulnerable members of society? And what kind of adults are we producing?

Because this is not ultimately a battle over lesson plans. It is not just an argument about the National Curriculum, or cross-curriculum priorities, or social justice in teacher training, or gender theory disguised as respectful relationships. Important though they are as individual issues.

But in the end those are the symptoms. The deeper question is this: what vision of the human person now sits behind our education system?

Are we forming children to become free, responsible, literate, numerate, morally serious adults—capable of gratitude, judgement, self-command, love of family, love of country, and service to others?

Or are we training them to see themselves as victims and oppressors, to distrust their inheritance, to fear the future, to politicise every human relationship, and to regard Western Civilisation itself as something from which they must be liberated?

Unfortunately, it is the latter. And that is why this matters so much. Because this is not just a battle over what children are taught. It is a battle over the formation of the child.

Most parents want their children to grow into well-adjusted, sane, literate and numerate human beings, with their innocence protected and their humanity intact.

But the state, judging by the priorities now embedded in policy and curriculum, is producing something very different: politicised, anxious young people, severed from their past, alienated from reality, and primed to regard the institutions of Western Civilisation not as an inheritance to be understood and improved, but as structures to be dismantled.

That is the real argument. It’s about the kind of adult we are forming, and therefore the kind of society we are creating.

In Mindless, I look at what is happening across Australia, Britain and the United States. And what I found was not just a decline in standards, though there is certainly plenty of that. I found the same system being rolled out in every country, with slight tweaks. In Australia, children are taught to understand our history as one giant crime scene. In Britain, children are taught to hate the Empire. And in the United States, they are meant to believe that America was founded on slavery in 1619.

But all have the same thing in common: education has been repurposed. It is no longer primarily about knowledge. It is about politics. Children are not being taught first to read, write, reason, understand history, or inherit Western Civilisation. They are being taught to adopt political positions before they are old enough to understand them. They are being turned into political activists.

In Australia, this politicisation starts in kindergarten. Through the government-mandated early learning framework, Belonging, Being & Becoming, well-meaning teachers, full of social justice fervour, are told to turn their small charges into “active citizens” in the journey of reconciliation.

Very young children are being drawn into rituals of permanent national guilt: National Sorry Day, National Reconciliation Week, NAIDOC Week, acknowledgements of country, classroom activities, apology cards, and carefully choreographed exercises in remorse.

Small children are becoming environmental activists, found obsessing over recycling or telling their parents not to let their engines idle, as if their lives depended on it. As IPA Adjunct Fellow Clare Rowe has shown in her excellent reports, they truly do believe that their lives will depend on it, and many are now suffering from crippling anxiety.

That same politicisation, that same activism, has infected every single subject, because it has infected teacher training in this country. As IPA research revealed, trainee teachers at university are forced to spend more time on social justice than on teaching literacy and numeracy. One and a half years, compared to three months.

The leap between university lecture theatre and classroom is not a big one. Children are now being told, directly and indirectly, that mathematics, science, English literature, geography and the traditional curriculum are not neutral or objective bodies of knowledge, but manifestations of “whiteness”—morally tainted, politically dangerous, and in need of challenge.

The act of knowing becomes an act of oppression.

In other words, knowledge is something children are told they do not need to know, because in knowing it, they are complicit in a system of oppression. The act of knowing becomes an act of oppression.

But children are not simply left with no knowledge. They are offered another kind of knowledge—or “knowledges” and “other ways of knowing”—which are treated as equally valid.

In the National Curriculum, The Dreaming is presented not simply as mythology, tradition or cultural inheritance, but as a living framework for understanding the natural world. Progressive educators have taken great pains to integrate Indigenous knowledge across all subjects. In biology classes, students are told that for millennia Aboriginal Australians practised perfect environmental stewardship. Fish traps are presented as proof of mastery of modern multidisciplinary science. Aboriginal Australians are declared the world’s first astronomers, their star maps predating Copernicus by millennia.

This is not balanced education. It is the deliberate blurring of the lines between mythology and scientific fact—treating them as equally valid ways of understanding the material world.

I don’t think this does children any favours, because when we pretend that ancient mythology and empirical science are interchangeable, we are impoverishing them intellectually.

And this brings me to one of the most important ideas in the book: cultural literacy. We talk a lot about the declining standards of literacy and numeracy, but we do a disservice to future generations by not talking about another kind of literacy which is fast disappearing: cultural literacy.

In the 1980s, the American educator E.D. Hirsch realised something profoundly important. He saw that children could be technically literate—they could sound out the words on a page—but still have no idea what they were reading.

Why? Because they had not been taught history, literature, religion, geography, civic culture, stories, symbols and shared references. They did not know enough about the world they lived in to make sense of the words in front of them.

Without a framework, reading becomes mechanical. The words are there, but the meaning is lost. And this matters far beyond the classroom, because a society needs shared knowledge. Cultural literacy is the glue that binds us together.

That is why the assault on the traditional curriculum is so serious. When children are severed from the historical inheritance of their own civilisation—its religion, literature, institutions, art, music, laws and political traditions—they become far easier to manipulate. Something else will always rush in to fill the void.

And what has rushed in is identity politics. Children are being taught to think not in terms of reality, but in abstractions: oppression, power, identity, privilege, resistance. They are being trained to interpret the world through ideological categories rather than through experience, evidence, common sense and moral judgement.

The danger is that when everything is presented as oppressive, children lose the ability to distinguish between the ordinary difficulties of life and genuine danger. When all knowledge is dismissed as white supremacist or colonial, young minds are not being expanded; they are being closed. When children are taught that nothing is objectively true, that every relationship is a power struggle—between men and women, parent and child, teacher and pupil—they begin to lose their grip on reality itself.

Children do not belong to the state; they belong to their parents.

This is why we must spare a thought for the young people themselves. Many of them are anxious, confused and increasingly aware, sometimes too late, that they have not been properly equipped for life. They have been told endlessly about power, but they have been left powerless, because they have not been given knowledge.

In Mindless, I quote lecturers who describe students arriving at university unable to cope with the intellectual demands being placed upon them. English literature students have to Google basic words, while students without basic numeracy are undertaking maths degrees.

I call this the tyranny of ignorance, and the system is doing unimaginable damage to so many young people.

And yet—and this is important—this is not a time for despair, because to despair is to admit defeat. This is a time to fight. And, as they say, to box clever.

Because we are beginning to see signs of that fight everywhere. As IPA Director of Education Programs Colleen Harkin will testify, teachers are beginning to speak, sometimes quietly and cautiously, but they are speaking. Parents and grandparents are waking up. People everywhere are rejecting the system and looking for alternatives.

In Australia, we have Campion College in Sydney, soon to be under the custodianship of former IPA Executive Director, John Roskam. We have the newly founded St John Henry Newman College in Brisbane. In Perth, organisations such as Families for Australia are drawing inspiration from the American parental-rights movement, including Moms for Liberty. Across the country, microschools are emerging. In Adelaide, there is an especially strong community of parents who have decided to take back control. And homeschooling, always the most difficult option, is becoming more popular as numbers continue to rise.

And the young people themselves are beginning to resist the absurdity of what they are being taught, and they are rebelling against it. We see it in the next generation at the IPA Academy: young Australians who are hungry for knowledge, truth, seriousness and civilisation. They are the future.

But importantly, across Australia, Britain and America, sensible people are starting to understand what all this is really about: the state making a claim over the child.

That, I hope, is where this book finds its purpose. I wrote Mindless not simply to catalogue the madness, though there is plenty of madness to catalogue, but to show the deeper pattern: the steady transfer of authority from parents to the state, from knowledge to ideology, from civilisation to activism.

During the last decade with the IPA, I have been exposing and opposing the changes that have been made to curricula at Australian universities, schools and kindergartens, and indeed what we used to call Teachers’ Colleges, which are now riddled with activist agendas. Compiling this book was a rare opportunity to bring all the evidence together in one place and put all my research into a global context.

The book is for parents, grandparents, teachers, aspiring teachers and anyone who wants to understand what is happening inside our schools. The aim is to help people spot the signs, learn the language and understand the code.

This is a grave moment, but it’s not a hopeless one.

When schools obsess about “identity” in primary school, it is not harmless. It is often the gateway to radical gender theory. Talking about recycling swiftly transforms into teaching children that the end of the world is nigh. Telling children ad nauseam that they are “global citizens,” comes at the expense of Australian citizenship, national loyalty and inherited civilisation.

This is exactly why the IPA’s Schools Program, led by Colleen Harkin, is so important. It is actively providing teachers, parents and schools with positive, knowledge-rich resources that counter the ideology—resources built on scientific truth, Western Civilisation, shared Australian identity and real belonging. If you have not yet explored what they offer, I strongly encourage you to do so.

And now we have Ben Crocker joining the IPA in a senior role, as Deputy Executive Director in charge of our programs in society, culture and education. Ben is a very accomplished Australian who went to the USA on a prestigious post-graduate scholarship, and by sheer talent and enterprise found himself thereafter appointed University Dean at the University of Austin, Texas (UATX), which as a start-up university, resolutely non-woke and pro-freedom, has been the best thing to happen to higher education in that country for decades.

Ben will now bring that energy and those smarts to the IPA. It is nearly two decades since we established the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program, and more recently we launched the Centre for the Australian Way of Life, and have put serious resources into our Schools Program and Generation Liberty. We have the team and the capability to take these to the next level, and directly impact the culture and the new leaders that will shape Australia’s future.

You may be interested to know that his undergraduate degree was in Music. Classical music is one of the last bastions of the good the and the beautiful, because it speaks directly to all of us, and can’t be mediated by Marxist gatekeepers. Ben has kept the faith.

Above all, Mindless documents what is being done to children in the name of social justice. It records it, so that no one can say they didn’t know. So that no one can claim ignorance. So that when the reckoning finally comes, and future generations look back and realise what they were deprived of, those responsible cannot say they were never warned.

But more than that, I wanted to remind people of something simple and profound. Children do not belong to the state; they belong to their parents.

This is something we seem to have forgotten as a society, and we need to be reminded of it again. Just as we need to be reminded that what parents want for their children, and what the state increasingly wants, are two very different things.

That is where the hope lies. For all the damage that has been done, children still respond to truth, beauty, stories, courage, music, history, nature, faith, family and the great works of civilisation. The curriculum may have gone mad, but the human soul has not changed. Children are still capable of wonder. They still want to make sense of the world. And when they are given real knowledge instead of slogans, they flourish. They do not want to be politicised.

So yes, this is a grave moment, but it’s not a hopeless one. It will require courage from parents, honesty from teachers, seriousness from politicians, and institutions like the IPA willing to say what others will not. But it can be done.

We can restore education to its proper purpose. We can defend childhood from the ideologues who would conscript it. We can reform schools and universities, and if they won’t be reformed we can build new ones that instruct rather than indoctrinate, that teach rather than turn out activists.

We can say, without apology, that our children deserve civilisation, not ideology.

Thank you.

This is a version of the address given by Dr Bella d’Abrera at the launch of her book.

This article from the Winter 2026 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA’s Bella d’Abrera.