Woke, Rowdy Classrooms Pushing High School Students to Drop out and Seek Alternative Paths

Employees are seen at work during a workshop tour, in Melbourne, Australia, on April 20, 2023. (AAP Image/James Ross)

Highly politicised, “woke” curriculums and disruptive classrooms have led to less engaging lessons, pushing many young Australians to call it quits before graduating high school.

Australian education expert Kevin Donnelly said the decade-low high school retention rates are the result of students becoming disengaged throughout COVID as they lost face-to-face interaction with their peers and teachers.

“When you look at the high rates of students not wanting to go to school, or refusing to go to school ... one of the reasons is COVID,” he told The Epoch Times.

“Another reason is that when you look at the curriculum over the last 10 to 20 years—it’s not just Australia—the curriculums become very politically correct and woke.

“So I think a lot of students are reacting against that. They’re not enjoying or being engaged in what’s happening in the classroom because it’s become very politicised.”

It comes after the Australian Productivity Commission revealed that in 2022, the percentage of students who completed their high school education fell to 79 percent, the lowest level in a decade.

However, when the data is broken down, it reveals that Catholic or Independent schools consistently have the highest rate of students completing Year 12 and have remained virtually unchanged at 87 percent throughout the decade.

Meanwhile, in government schools, over one in four students ends up dropping out.

Australians Increasingly Favour Religious and Independent Schools

Donnelly said the reasons that Catholic and independent schools have fewer dropouts come down to a number of points, including better classroom discipline.

“Australian classrooms are among the most disruptive, with badly behaved students, across the OECD,” Donnelly said. “Classroom discipline is better in Catholic and independent schools.”

These comments follow the report by the Organisation for Economy Co-operation and Development (OECD) released in April revealed that the disciplinary climate in Australian schools was “among the least favourable in the OECD.”

When grading the disciplinary climate by index value, Australian classrooms were rated at -0.2 compared to the average rate of 0.04.

Donnelly added that Catholic and independent schools have less politically correct curriculums, and the students have a financial incentive to finish school.

“The children appreciate the fact that their parents are making the financial sacrifice, so they’re more willing to go to school,” he said.

School students arrive for the first day of face-to-face schooling in Brisbane, Australia, May 11, 2020. (AAP Image/Dan Peled)

As a reflection of this, in 2022, enrolments in independent and catholic schools surged while enrolments in government schools fell for the second consecutive year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

“Over the past decade, enrolments in independent schools increased by over 25 percent,” ABS head of education statistics Ellouise Roberts said. “In comparison, government school enrolments rose 11 percent, followed by an eight percent rise in Catholic school enrolments over the same period.”

Further, Donelly has observed that “hundreds and hundreds” of parents and teachers around the country have also begun setting up their own classical education schools.

“[They] are committed to a liberal arts education, which is more about moral and spiritual and intellectual virtues and values,” he said.

“There are quite a lot of parents and teachers and students who are reacting against the idea that education is just about the job or being indoctrinated, that they want a more substantial and enriching education.”

Senator Sarah Henderson, the shadow education minister, said the continuing presence of religious schools was a reminder that the purpose of education was more than just a measure of employability and other metrics and standards.

“They are a reminder that education also has a higher purpose—the cultivation of wisdom and a love of knowledge for its own sake,” she told the Christian Schools National Policy Forum in May.

“They are a reminder that the purpose of education is, as Plato said, to teach us to love what is beautiful.”

Why Education Policy Is Critical for the Country

Along with deteriorating discipline issues and student engagement, Australia’s education outcomes have been falling for decades despite record levels of funding to the sector.

At an individual level, a person’s economic and social success is not always dependent on obtaining higher levels of education, but they do make it more likely.

Indeed, data from the Productivity Commission report shows that those who do not finish high school are more than twice as likely to leave the labour force entirely compared to graduates.

But on a nationwide level, long-term economic growth and prosperity are based on knowledge, according to American economist Eric Hanushek.

This means that a country’s current education outcomes can be a significant indicator of its future economic development.

Education expert Glenn Fahey from the Centre of Independent Studies warns that Australia is likely seeing the preliminary signs of decades of declining education outcomes.

“Currently, productivity levels in Australia are slower than they’ve ever been,” he told The Epoch Times. “This points to early signs that the system is not seeing the educational returns that it was seeing in previous generations.”

People who experience difficulty in completing high school or obtaining higher levels of education also tend to suffer from long-term dependency on welfare programs.

“So for many people who fail to do well in school, they do face much greater challenges outside of school as well,” Fahey said.

Despite that, he warned that societies should not preference entirely based on credentials. However, to enable this, school systems need to be able to set up an individual with the necessary competencies to secure work, regardless of how early or late they leave school.

“Investment for any individual and for any economy or society is the investment made in educational success, and importantly, that’s all about the quality of education and not necessarily the quantity of it,” he said.

While investment into human capital is critical for a country, Donnelly said pursuing further education may not necessarily be suitable for everyone.

So it is important to have alternative paths available to develop skills instead of knowledge, such as apprenticeships, technical colleges, and TAFE.

“I don’t believe everybody should go on to do year 11 and 12,” he said. “You need a good reason to stay on for years 11 and 12. It shouldn’t be automatically assumed that everybody should stay on because students have different abilities, different interests, different motivations.”

“Especially for boys [who are disengaged], it’s a better option to actually start earning a bit of money.”