INFILTRATION OF COMMUNISM

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27442, 31 August 1954, Page 11

INFILTRATION OF COMMUNISM

Teachers Warned By

Minister Olec. 11.30 p.m.) SYDNEY, Aug. 30. Communists would try to “infiltrate their filthy ideologies into schools,” the Acting-Education Minister (Mr J. F. McGrath), warned teachers today. “If some teachers want to graft alien doctrines in the minds of our precious children they are traitors,” he told the annual conference of the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation.

Teachers later bitterly criticised Mr McGrath’s speech as “insulting” and * ‘McCarthyism.” Communist forces operating from abroad would try to steal our heritage by deceiving our school children with their “filthy so-called ideologies,” Mr McGrath said.

If any teachers assisted this Communist aim, they “should be sought out and driven into disgrace and oblivion,” Mr McGrath said. He added: “Education is our insurance for the future of our nation.

“On our children rest all our personal hopes. They are really the precious treasure of Australia. Teachers, to a great degree, have this national treasure in their keeping. They must guard it with unremitting vigilance,” he said.

“Make no mistake about what I am saying to you today. I am not mincing words,” said Mr McGrath. “A menacing danger from overseas would desire to spread its foul doctrines among our children. By poisoning the minds of our children—by warping and twisting their outlook—these foreign parasites would desire to steal our inheritance. Our inheritance is freedom. We Australians trust you as teachers and you must protect our children as well as instruct them,” he said.

“From time to time it is suggested that some schoolteachers are too ‘advanced’,” Mr McGrath said. He added that the delegates knew what he meant. “If ‘advanced’ means that some teachers have deluded themselves into an evil form of insanity in which they consider they are entitled to# ‘advance’ cancerous foreign ideas, they are due for bitter regrets.” Violent Reaction Teachers reacted vehemently and bitterly In the afternoon session of the conference. The conference chairman (Mr H. F. Heath) repeatedly had to call for order as speakers referred to the speech as “McCarthyism,” "unwarranted,” and “insulting.” A former president, Mr S. P. Lewis, said: -“Attacks on the teachers for alleged indoctrination in schools is a beginning of McCarthyism.” Another teacher, Miss Kent Hughes, said the speech was a definite attack on the civil and political rights of the teachers. “Mr McGrath has given no indication that he had any basis of truth for his statement,” she said.