George Orwell passed away in 1950 in his forty sixth year. His major works were written before, during, and immediately after, the Second World War. His comments on the battle for ideas and democracy, history and the truth, are of particular interest for Australian fighters for public education.

DOGS have chosen various statements from his writings in the period 1937 to 1948 as a measure of:

i.     the failure ( with a few notable exceptions) of persons in leadership positions in public education together with

ii.    the failure ( with a few notable exceptions) of organisations and groups associated with public education

to fight for the historic concept of public education together with the public education systems in this country.

 Causes are Neither Won nor Defended without a Fight, and surely Not by Capitulation or Sell-out

In relation to the above statement, consider the following propositions of George Orwell:

i.     Wars are not won without fighting.

ii.     The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

iii.    The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact.

iv.    We have become too civilised to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive, you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil and it is often the lesser evil.

v.    We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Problems with Ruling Class Minders and Those in Leadership Positions.

In relation to the above statement, consider the following propositions by George Orwell:

i.     England is a family with the wrong members in control...as a class they are quite incapable of leading us to victory.

ii.    We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

iii.    The lie will have become the truth: freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength; war is peace.

iv.    The history of the War will consist largely of facts which millions of people now living know to be lies.

v.     History is written by the winners.

vi.    Far subtler methods of distortion that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle...there has been a quite deliberate conspiracy to prevent that Spanish (civil war of the 1930's) situation from being understood.

vii.   Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable: and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

viii.   Double-think means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.

ix.   To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

General Advice from George Orwell:

In relation to the above consider the following propositions from George Orwell:

i.     Do you want to see England conquered or don't you?...In practice one must help one side or the other.

ii.    It is time to stiffen morale, not to weaken it.

Relevance of George Orwell for Supporters of Public Education:

  Public education in Australia is in dire straits, grievously underfunded, undermined by billions of State Aid to the denominational system and cast into the oblivion of the COAG quagmire. With talk about accountability and transparency, the AL)P Government is following England in setting our schools up for "failure" and  privatisation. The central public school bureaucracies have been either taken over by private school operators or decentralised into irrelevance. With a few notable exceptions, those holding leadership positions  who should be fighting for our public school inheritance are like Chamberlain desiring 'peace in our time' when confronted with Nazi Germany. Since the introduction of State Aid to church schools, like the intelligentsia of Paris when the Germans marched in, too many in leadership positions have sued for peace with sectarian interests. As D Pryce Jones wrote in his Paris in the Third Reich:

People did not think of themselves as having moral choices to make - they had careers and ambitions and so on.

What Public Education in Australia now needs is what Leo Amery, while staring at Chamberlain in 1940 said:

We are fighting today for our life, for our liberty, for our all. We cannot go on being led as we are. Somehow or other, we must get into the Government men who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory.

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