Kevin Donnelly: why schools don't teach Western Civilisation

Thank you very much for that very wholesome introduction. I should thank the IPA for today and for the invitation, and to acknowledge that over the last 20, 30 years the IPA has been very much involved in a number of areas, but education in particular. Some of you I'll recognize, and the audience might remember I think it was called Asus when Leone Ker and others many years ago started a unit within the IPA that looks specifically at education, and the arguments we had back then we're still having today. So thank you to the organizers for the invitation. I'd also like to thank Andrew Bolt. I'm not sure whether he's still here, but I do write for the print media, and in many ways Andrew is the reason for that. Many years ago he was an editor at the Herald Sun, and I started writing about 20, 30 years ago about many of the issues that we still face as well. So thank you for being here, and thank you to all of you for coming along. I don't have a lot of time, so what I'll do is give you a bit of an overview of what I consider to be many of the recent, when I say recent the last 30, 40 years, in education. A lot of the movements or theories that have had an adverse impact on what I consider to be education, and I'll talk about my definition which I've borrowed from others later on. But if you look at what's been happening in school education, mainly also universities, but school education, we've moved a long way from what I remember as a kid. I was talking to somebody outside before, and I grew up in Broad Meadows Housing Commission. Dad was actually a communist, and that was an interesting family because Mom was a good Catholic, so it was Mass on Sunday and the Eureka Youth Movement on Tuesday. I was about 14 or 15, and I remember it well, all the glossy magazines from Mao and Stalin. But it was a great house to grow up in because we always argued politics and religion. So I remember as a kid we used to start school with Monday assembly, and I might get it wrong, but I love God in my country. Does anybody remember? Honestly, I faithfully served my parents, teachers, and the laws. And we were in school, a photo of the queen above the office. I've been doing a lot of work around Australia in education the last few months related to the National Curriculum Review, which I'm not going to talk about. It's a bit like Fawlty Towers: don't talk about the war, don't talk about the National Curriculum. I made the mistake of talking about it when I was appointed, and I made what I thought was not a very dramatic statement: that young people after 12 years of schooling should know something about religions and belief systems of the world, whether it's Christianity, but also Islam, Buddhism, Judaism. And I was, is there a verb for tweeted? I was sort of destroyed in the Twitter sphere for about a week for mentioning religion, so I have to be careful. But to get back to education, one of the interesting things that I've found over the years is that education as I knew it growing up has changed dramatically. One thing now is that we have to teach competencies and generic skills. Some of you might remember the Carmichael report, the Mayer report. There was a big push from business: collecting, analyzing information, communicating ideas and information, planning and organizing activities, working with others, using mathematical ideas, solving problems, using technology. This has been a significant push in education, and it's been going on for 20, 30 years at least. The issue I have is that a lot of the research shows that in fact these so-called generic skills or competencies don't exist in a vacuum. They don't just pull them out of the air. They're often domain specific, so they have to be taught within the context of what Jerome Bruner called the structure of the discipline. I was an English teacher, I love poetry. An example would be that if in a class we were talking about a Wordsworth or a Yeats poem, we have to know something about alliteration, about assonance, about the musical quality of language. We need to know something about metaphor, about imagery. That is very different to reading an IKEA manual where you're simply putting together a cabinet or a desk. One is aesthetic, one moral, the other is utilitarian, practical. And when you look at the different subjects, whether it's mathematics or music or dance, if you consider that a subject, Hirst and Peters would, I'm going to say Hirst and Peters, I don't think, but I could be corrected, the generic skills generally only arise within the structure of a discipline, and that has to be the primary purpose. What also happened was we had to prepare students for the 21st century, and again if I had a dollar for every time I've heard the expression 21st century learning or lifelong learning or multi-adaptable learning, I never quite work out what it means. But there was an interesting secondary school Australian principals organization that defined it: we have to teach 21st century learning, lifelong, learner-driven, just in time, customized, transformative, collaborative, contextual, and most importantly learning how to learn. So the question then becomes, well what's actually going on in the classroom? The third influence, and this is one which a number of speakers have touched on today, and if I'll give it a plug, Dumbing Down, the book where I deal with this in a great deal of depth, the cultural left as I called them took the Long March some years ago. Some people talk about Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who used that expression. Other people talk about the Paris riots in the late 60s and the fact that the left decided that they would never win at the barricades, so what they would have to do would be to take the Long March. Now whether it's church, family, education, universities, the idea is to overthrow the status quo and to radically change society. In the past and even still, I'm often attacked for being a conservative, and it's interesting some of the discussion this morning after the National Curriculum Review was announced. I was attacked by academics for being misogynist, Eurocentric, homophobic. The worst of all actually was being attacked for being Christian, which apparently is the greatest sin of all. But anyway, when I told them that I'd been in the Eureka Youth Movement, they kind of changed their mind. But the left, the cultural left, has started this Long March and it's had a profound effect not just on universities but also the school curriculum, which has nothing to do with the review of the National Curriculum. But the argument is that the established forms of knowledge are simply a social cultural construct employed to marginalize and disempower the less powerful. So if you read Foucault, if you read Baudrillard, if you go back to Gramsci, the argument is that there are no disciplines that have any inherent value in terms of objectivity or truth. Really what you have are sociocultural constructs that are used by those more powerful to oppress so-called victim groups. And you might remember Mother Russia or Joan Kirner as I call her from Victoria, who was Education Minister and then became Premier. But Joan actually had the conviction of her beliefs and gave a very good talk at a Fabian Society many years ago where she talked about getting rid of our High School Certificate. We've had this debate in England and Australia about senior school certificates and whether they are elitist, competitive, whether they favor particular socioeconomic groups. If you've read the Gonski report, a lot of that is based on the premise that socioeconomic status is the main cause of educational disadvantage, which is a whole other argument I won't get into. But what the left argued is that competition, examinations reinforce inequality and disadvantage. There was a good book, I think All Shall Have Prizes, was it Melanie Phillips? I think she wrote a book in England, All Shall Have Prizes, which talks about this movement in education where we got rid of 1 to 10 when four meant fail, or A to E where E meant fail, so you had continuous diagnostic formative assessment, whatever that is, instead of summative assessment. So the argument is everyone's a winner. I taught English. The funny thing in Australia is we love sport, we love to win against the Poms in cricket, we love to win in Rugby Union against the New Zealanders. But when it comes to education, we have this strange cultural idea that we have to celebrate everyone because we don't want to hurt their self-esteem, it'll somehow cause them to doubt themselves. Of course when they go into university not being able to write a properly structured essay, or they become an apprentice carpenter and can't measure anything because they can't do any mental arithmetic, that's when they really get into trouble. But we kind of disguise that. In English we have social critical literacy. So there was a debate in New South Wales some years ago about the impact of theory on Year 12 literature, where something like 1984 has to be deconstructed in terms of gender or race. My favorite examples include even in primary school, where something like Cinderella can't be read or in the library because it privileges a particular view of males and females. And certainly if you look at even Thomas the Tank Engine, where you've got the controller, you've got categories of trains, you've got the buses that aren't as high in terms of the structure, it's obviously reinforcing capitalist hierarchies. So you can't do Thomas the Tank Engine, we all know that. And theory also had a significant influence on objectivity and truth, because apparently how each individual relates to and understands the world is subjective. I have been at lectures where people say to me, you can't teach a David Malouf novel or a Henry Lawson poem. Not only is the author dead, there is no author, but words don't have any referential meaning anyway. And in fact if it's somebody's belief that they have responded in a subjective way, then you have to value their opinion. And you wonder why when I talk to people even in the law who employ graduates, they find it very hard to tell the graduates that actually you're wrong, you've not understood the brief, because not only often can't they punctuate or know anything about grammar, not that I'm a hero on grammar, but they believe that they have the right to somehow give their opinion. So language is a play of signifiers, everything's a text to be deconstructed. We have exams around Australia now where movie posters could be a good thing, but when they start saying graffiti or SMS messages should be given time in the classroom, then I have to worry. Terry Eagleton, even though he's changed his mind recently, some years ago wrote a book on theory where he argued that Shakespeare's works had no inherent meaning and that there could be a time when Shakespeare was off the curriculum because again he's only a dead white European male and his work is a social cultural construct with no inherent value. So everything's a text, all cultures are of equal worth. And it's interesting, they don't talk about multiculturalism anymore, they talk about diversity and difference. So the new sort of catchcry is diversity and difference, all cultures are equal and there's nothing unique or significant about Western civilization, which begs the question as Andrew Bolt said, why are so many people so desperate to come and live in Australia? I just came back from Cambodia, I travel a bit in Indochina. If you go to Burma or Myanmar or even Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, they're totalitarian regimes where people can be picked off the street, there's no freedom of press. If you want to invest money, you find that you're suddenly talking to people who want your money without any guarantee that you'll get any results. We actually are incredibly lucky to live in a Western liberal democracy. But according to a lot of the people who have been writing the books on education, we shouldn't privilege Western civilization, and that has had a profound impact. And Christianity is simply one belief system among many. In Dumbing Down I give examples of that, where religion if it is mentioned is simply Christianity along with Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc. So there's no recognition that we are a Christian nation. So the alternative, Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, the best that's been thought and said, is an expression many of you would know. I've argued for many years that we really should get back to a sense of education dealing with that. And Michael Oakeshott, who I only started to read a couple of years ago, has a lovely essay, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. In that he talks about education as a conversation, a conversation beginning thousands of years ago involving a myriad of voices and evolving over time. If you think about Western civilization, whether we go back through Europe or England or ancient Greece or Rome, many of you know even the Scandinavian countries, even the impact of Spain, some of the European countries, it's involved a range of voices. So it's actually wrong just to say it's dead white European males. In fact our Western civilization is very rich and multifaceted. But what Oakeshott talks about, and I'll quote him: education properly speaking is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions for utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to the conversation. Now each of the disciplines has its own unique flavor to that, but I think as a fundamental point it's important. And I'll just finish off with what I think that means in terms of education, school education. When you look at a curriculum, it should draw on the established bodies of knowledge, understanding, and skills to get back to the structure of the disciplines. Now that doesn't mean that other areas, co-curricular music, sport, drama, aren't important. They are important. But if we're talking about the formal curriculum, then the established bodies of knowledge, we need to stress and respect the past as well as the importance of the future. And T.S. Eliot wrote a very small book on education that's very useful here, because he talks about that accumulated wisdom over hundreds if not thousands of years that we simply can't ignore. Education should be committed to rationality and truth, unlike theory where there is no truth, or unlike neo-Marxism where truth is simply related to who you are in terms of the pecking order. It deals with the whole person and should not be narrow or utilitarian. I get into arguments here because I actually argue education is not utilitarian. It's more about cultivating a certain sense of the conversation as Oakeshott would call it. And the disciplines evolve over time. To pick up on some of the discussions this morning, it does deal with particular morals or values like reciprocity, mutual obligation, a commitment to the common good. In education for a long time we only talked about our rights, and there was very little discussion about our responsibilities. I think it's very important that we get back to a sense of mutual obligation, reciprocity, and those other factors. I was going to finish with Plato's parable of the cave, which many of you would know. But just very quickly, the idea is you've got slaves chained in an underground cave, a chamber. There's lighting, there's movement, there are shadows. For them that is reality. They can't move their heads. And what happens in education, I'd argue, is that you unshackle these people, you allow them out of the cave, you allow them up the roadway past the fire, past the various moving shadows, until they go outside and they might be blinded by the sun. But education really gets you to look at what is a more transcendent sense of truth and reality. I mean it has its practical obligations, obviously practical things are important. But to me education isn't simply about making a living. It's also about that transcendent sense of having a higher moral and spiritual purpose, which actually is mentioned in the Melbourne Declaration, which is our road map for curriculum in Australia, where it does talk about moral and spiritual. But then the question becomes, well how is that enacted in the classroom and who should have responsibility for doing it? So thank you.