Yet another battlefront in the totalitarian assault against home education and parental rights appears to be opening, this time in Australia. While parents across the nation and worldwide flee government schools by the millions, bureaucrats are working overtime to slam the door shut on one of the last bastions of educational liberty: homeschooling. The latest attack came just last week, when a high-ranking official in far-left Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government openly attacked homeschooling and religious schools as potential threats to “deeper social cohesion.” The remarks appear to be a trial balloon for future policies undermining home education and faith-based schools.
In a controversial speech to a leftwing “think tank,” Australia’s Assistant Minister for “International Education” Julian Hill highlighted the rapid growth of religious education and home education. But rather than celebrating the trend, he argued that it was preventing Australian children from mixing with peers from different backgrounds.
“Education could be among the institutions that militate against intercultural connections and deeper social cohesion,” Hill declared, questioning whether the children are being properly exposed to “broader society” and what exactly is being taught in their homes and religious academies.
In particular, Hill, who also serves as assistant minister for citizenship, customs and multicultural affairs, warned about supposedly “quite extreme or conservative curricula being used.” If the trends continue, this “gives cause for pause and reflection,” he said, without specifying what curricula he objected to or why he did not approve.
“What is being taught to these kids?” Hill continued. “Are they mixing with broader society?”
Hill’s rhetorical attacks on home education, parental rights, religious liberty, and other fundamental freedoms are not happening in isolation. Instead, they are just the latest salvo in what is quickly becoming a global war against those who seek alternatives to government education.
Indeed, last year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) openly called on governments to urgently crack down on home education. To comply with supposed “international human rights law,” all governments have an obligation to bring homeschooling and religious options under state control, the UN said.
Hill, a top Labor politician down under, pointed to numbers that he considers alarming in Australia. Statistics show parents across the former prison colony are increasingly seeking to reclaim their God-given authority from the state over their children’s education and upbringing.
Since 2015, Australia has seen 320 new Catholic and independent (mostly religious) schools open, compared to just 279 new government schools. Last year, fully 33.9 percent of Australian students — 1.4 million children — attended religiously affiliated schools. Of course, in Australia, government largely funds (and controls) “religious” schools, too.
Meanwhile, homeschooling registrations have skyrocketed over the last five years. Data cited by Hill show an increase of 232 percent in Queensland, 116 percent in New South Wales, and 85 percent in Victoria. That massive surge coincides with COVID tyranny — especially draconian in Australia — exposing the reality of the government school system.
Hill, a graduate of a religious school himself, insists he’s not necessarily opposed to faith-based education. Rather, he just wants to make sure there is more government-orchestrated “mixing” through sports, extracurricular activities, and social events — modeled on Singapore’s top-down social engineering.
In other words, parents cannot be trusted to raise their own children and associate with whom they want. This is especially in the new and improved “multicultural” Australia, engineered in recent years through borders opened wide by political elites. In Hill’s view, the state must step in to ensure proper “bridging capital,” reduced “prejudice,” and resilience against “hate-based violence and misinformation.”