Idolism (12 page)

“Having checks and balances is very nice and all,” he said. “But people have a right to know when the cheques bounce and the balances are mostly debt.”

Mr Lewis’s computer was a convoluted mess of junk, from useless programs that were once installed and have never been used to hundreds of PowerPoint presentations and Word documents containing half-baked draft bills and political strategies and, much to Tummy’s disappointment, not a single bit of porn. There was nothing that deserved the name file structure, no order, no proper system to anything. I was tempted to clean up Mr Lewis’s hard drive, do away with files and programs that hadn’t been accessed since the day he bought this computer, free gigabytes of disk space and establish a proper filing system that would make it possible to actually find something even if you didn’t immediately remember where you put it. It probably would have taken us months to find what we were looking for if we had gone through those thousands of files manually, but there was no time for that. Instead, I let the newly developed MINDY search module scan Mr Lewis’s hard drive. It found about a dozen files of interest, all in the same folder named ‘Education Reform’.

The two main documents were titled
Faith in Education and Academic Freedom – Strategies for teaching and learning in the new millennium – TOP SECRET
and the
School and Community Safety Act – TOP SECRET
. The titles alone made me cringe, because the so-called new millennium was almost halfway through its second decade, yet computer illiterate dumbass politicians like Tummy’s dad still thought that in order to keep something secret all you had to do was to put a TOP SECRET stamp on it. Very inconspicuous. Apparently he had never heard of encryption, not to mention simple password protection. If that was our government’s idea of data protection, then we were all doomed. But it turned out we were doomed anyway.

The government’s top secret
Faith in Education and Academic Freedom
reform plan was a bombshell. On 96 pages it listed in detail what they thought was wrong with the state of today’s schools, today’s youth, and, basically, today’s world, and how they were going to fix it.

“Bloody hell,” Ginger said, shaking her head. “They actually mean
Faith in Education and Academic Freedom
literally.”

I had printed copies of the
Faith in Education and Academic Freedom
plan for Julian and Ginger. Only Tummy didn’t want anything to do with it, and knowing his scattiness, I thought it was probably a good idea not to give him a copy that he could leave lying around on the dinner table at home.

“Do you have any idea what will happen if me dad finds this in me room?” he said. “He’s going to chop me hands off, that’s what. I can’t have me hands chopped off, I still need’em for wanking.”

Ginger scowled. “Now there’s an image that I can’t unsee. TMI, Tummy.”

“You’re welcome.” Tummy grinned.

“You’re welcome? What do you think TMI actually means?”

“Thanks much indeed?”

Ginger rolled her eyes. “It means
too much information
.”

“Wha’ever.”

“Listen to this,” Julian said. “’The disorientation and uprootedness of today’s youth can only be encountered by a return to utmost human qualities and virtues through stringent and intensive guidance along a well-defined path of righteousness and honesty, so that a child may find purpose and humanity in an increasingly inhumane world. Such guidance may only be derived from within the cornerstones of our civilization and from the time-tested rules and teachings set forth by the Almighty God of the three Abrahamic religions.’”

“Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” Tummy said.

Ginger nodded. “Good to see your job as an altar boy wasn’t a complete waste of time.”

“It wasn’t a job, it was an honorary post. Otherwise I would have gotten paid.”

“They’re making it compulsory,” Julian continued as he kept leafing through the document. “They’re making religious education classes compulsory for all pupils from nursery school through Year 12.”

“Great,” Tummy said. “At least one subject where I stand a chance of becoming an A-student. I bet there’s nothing they can teach me about God that me mum hasn’t taught me already.”

“Can they do that?” Ginger asked.

Julian shrugged. “They’re the Department of Education. They set the guidelines for school curricula. It says here that religious education classes will be cross-denominational. All will be taught at the same time in the same classroom by the same teacher.”

“A micro Middle East in every classroom, that’s going to be fun,” Ginger said. “But what about Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists? Are they to be guided along the cornerstones of the Abrahamic faiths as well?”

“Apparently.”

“What if I’m an atheist?” I asked. “Can I opt out?”

Julian shook his head. “No, sorry, compulsory for all. They say religious education classes are not designed to missionize, but to educate you and enable you to make informed decisions on matters of spirituality.”

“That sounds awfully like Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Ginger said. “They always say they just want to talk about Jesus, but in the end what they really want is for you to join their cult. Have you read the bit about evolution and creationism?”

“No,” Julian said. “Where’s that?”

“Page 44. It says evolution may be the truth, but it is not be the whole truth and not the only truth. Which is why they want creationism to be taught alongside evolution so that students may be enabled to make informed decisions, because there supposedly are so many questions that science alone cannot answer. That’s what they mean by academic freedom: the freedom to sell you myths as facts. If I didn’t know any better, I would be inclined to think that this whole thing is a satire.”

Tummy snorted. “Not a chance. Me dad doesn’t have any sense of humour at all.”

As the others kept quoting their favourite bits of the soon-to-be-introduced new school curriculum to each other, I took a closer look at the more technical aspects of this so-called education reform. It was based on a concept that MMC had already successfully tried in several third world countries. The plan was to turn every single classroom in the country into a 21st century state of the art multimedia experience, the most modern and advanced classrooms in the world. No more chalk and blackboards. In fact, no more paper either. The blackboards were going to be replaced by 92-inch touch screen monitors that the teacher could fill with multimedia content from the computer on his desk, or he could simply write on it with his finger. Students would no longer have to write down stuff in their notebooks. They could simply copy everything onto their own brand new tablet computers that were paid for by the taxpayer and provided by MMC Media Supplies. Students would also be able to do all of their homework on their tablets, and as soon as they were done, the teacher would be able to access it and grade it from his teacher tablet while sitting comfortably on his sofa in the living room. Students’ tablets were also equipped with a whole bunch of useful apps like a timetable app that would tell you exactly when and where your next class would take place, or a Wikipedia app, or an online dictionary app. There was a chemistry app, a physics app, a history app, a geography app. There were apps for everything and anything that would put the entire knowledge of the world at your fingertips. It almost sounded too good to be true.

And it was, because your teacher also had the ability to remotely activate or deactivate any of your apps or your Internet access, so that if you were sitting in a written exam they could make you sure you didn’t simply google your answers. There also was an app that let you call in sick, but if you did that, it would automatically send a text message to your parents’ mobile phones. The students’ tablets also had a built in RFID chip and a GPS tracker. The RFID chips were going to be used to check you in and out of school and, in fact, in and out of every single classroom every single day, and the GPS tracker let your teacher and your parents check your whereabouts, not only during school hours but 24 hours a day, even if your tablet was switched off. In the government’s revolutionary plans for a brave new world, every school kid in the country would be under around-the-clock surveillance, or as the
School and Community Safety Act
paper put it:
under control
. It was an Orwellian nightmare come to life.

“This is not a bombshell,” Julian said. “It’s a nuke.”

The way he said it had something alarming. Where there should have been unease in his voice, there seemed to be undue excitement. Even Tummy noticed it.

“I don’t like your tone, Jules,” he said.

Julian just smiled. He knew that we knew that he wouldn’t simply shrug this off, that there was no way he would wait for somebody else to light the fuse of that bomb. So I finally asked the question that Tummy and Ganger were too afraid to ask because deep down inside they already knew the answer, and they didn’t like it.

“So what are we going to do about it?”

“Oi!” Tummy protested. “Who’s we? I’m not going to do anything about it. And neither are you. This is at least two or three sizes too big for us. If anybody finds out that we hacked into me dad’s computer we’re all going to prison. Well, you guys will be going to prison and I’ll be dead because me mum and me dad will both kill me, one after the other. No one must ever know about this, you understand? Because if we...”

“Tummy?” Ginger interrupted him.

“What?”

“Shut up! We get your point.” She looked at Julian and me. “I hate to admit it, but Tummy does have a point. This could be very dangerous.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Tummy said triumphantly. “Listen to her, guys. Her dad is a lawyer. I rest me case.”

“However,” Ginger continued, “if the government is really going to go through with this plan, it will be the biggest social upheaval since the industrial revolution. Make no mistake, this is huge, and I’m not sure if knowing about this in advance and not trying to do anything about it is the right thing to do. We should at least discuss our options here.”

“What options?” Tummy asked visibly upset. His head was glowing bright red. “We can either shut the hell up about it, or we can get ourselves in shitloads of trouble. These are our options. What is there to discuss?”

“Tummy,” I said, “nobody is planning to go to the police and say, ‘Hey, we hacked into a government computer and we stole these top secret documents, please arrest us.’ There are a lot of ways we can handle this. I don’t know, maybe we can just leak these files to the press? Anonymously, I mean.”

Ginger shook her head. “They’d find it rather intriguing, no doubt, and maybe they’d even start their own investigation, but as long as they don’t have a verifiable source that they can quote, they’re not going to print anything. For purely legal reasons. I mean, anyone could type up a fake document and say they found it on a politician’s computer. Without hard evidence no editor is ever going to run this story.”

“See?” Tummy said. “This is pointless. Nobody is going to believe us that these reform plans are real unless we incrini... incremi...”

“Incriminate,” Julian assisted him.

“Yeah, that. Incriminate ourselves.”

I nodded. “Tummy has a point. We could get ourselves into shitloads of trouble.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Tummy said. “Besides, if they really go through with it, they will have to make their plans public sooner or later anyway. Let public outcry take care of it then. No need for us to get right in the middle of it.”

“It might be too late by then,” Julian said. “Sneaky lawmakers are sneaky. A little bill here, a small amendment there, and before you even know it, this thing is the law of the land. And then what?”

Tummy grunted. “Great. So what do you want to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Julian lied.

The Gospel According to Tummy – 5

We were sitting in social sciences class and discussing natural disasters and God’s role in it. Mrs Woollcott had shown us an interview with an earthquake survivor who had been pulled out of the rubble by rescuers after seven days. The survivor said that he had been praying to God to be rescued, and then he was rescued, and he said that God must exist because He had answered his prayers. Aaqib, one of our classmates, agreed that this was plausible evidence for the existence of God, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Some people ridiculed Aaqib, who was a Muslim, for acknowledging the Christian god, because that earthquake survivor was a Christian and therefore it must have been the Christian god who had saved him. Aaqib and the other Muslims in our class replied that the Jewish god Yahweh, the Christian god God and the Muslim god Allah were actually the same person only with different names. Somebody asked Ali if he truly believed that a Christian praying to the Christian god and having his prayer answered was evidence for the existence of Allah, and Ali said yes. That didn’t go down well with the Christians in our class and they asked, “Where was Allah for the thousands of others who were also under the rubble praying to be saved but didn’t get saved?” That prompted all sorts of funny answers from “Maybe they didn’t pray hard enough,” to “Maybe they were sinners, and God / Allah / Yahweh made the earthquake to punish them and he only saved those who hadn’t sinned.”