LIBERAL ARTS AND AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS – THE WAY FORWARD – DALLAS MCINERNEY

Western society today is being challenged by an inability to accept genuine debate and discussion. An inability to accept that Western traditions have a legitimate place in public policy. The sort of tolerant debate that has existed over centuries of liberal and classical learning. Even a tolerance for Christian values. In August 2025, Catholic Schools NSW issued a discussion paper entitled Liberal Arts and Classical Education – A Return to Beauty. It explores Liberal Arts and Classical education’s antecedents and notes the phenomenal activity taking place abroad where greater numbers of educationists are re-embracing old style Liberal Arts values. To explore more in the development of schools directed at liberal arts education Dallas McInerney, the CEO of Catholic Schools NSW addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 1 October 2025

LIBERAL ARTS AND AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS – THE WAY FORWARD

DALLAS MCINERNEY

Gerard and Anne – congratulations on 36 years of wonderful leadership and curation of The Sydney Institute. It has been a true gift to the city and always positive influence on public debate. When thinking about the track record of Australia’s other organs of cultural influence, you stand tall. The Institute has lasted longer than Molly Meldrum’s Countdown (a mere 13 years), Whitlam’s Government (barley three years), the ABC’s Q&A program, 17 years, the insufferable Drum program (also 13 years). You predated Kevin07 and Kath & Kim, seen off David Marr it appears and, most impressively you platformed a range of voices from Chris Patten to Elizabeth Evatt; Dominic Perrottet to Eva Cox, George Pell to Jane Caro and our own Jacinta Collins. On behalf of a grateful city, thank you and congratulations.

My task tonight is a simple and but important one:

• to offer a course correcting alternative for NSW schooling, one where beauty, wander, awe and even the transcendent – enveloped in a rigorous school-based curricula, broadly described as the liberal arts – is the antidote for our times;

• While noting the impressive innovation and success of liberal arts schools across the USA and UK, it’s by recalling and then reclaiming the traditions of NSW school education, we can deliver on the promise of liberal arts for the children in schools today; and finally,

• In doing so, we need to choose a side in two competing visions and purposes of school education. My remarks should be received as companionable to the discussion paper published by Catholic Schools NSW – A Return to Beauty, distributed to all this evening.

First, to Luke’s Gospel: a sower went out to sow his seed. And, as he sowed, some fell by the wayside and it was trampled down, and the birds of the air devoured it. Some fell on rock and as soon as it sprang up, it withered away because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up with it and choked it. But others fell on good ground, sprang up and yielded a crop a hundredfold.

Catholic schoolteachers, of whom there are several past and present in the room, will recall this passage from Luke’s Gospel. It’s often shared with early career teachers to help them shape their craft, direct their efforts and support their personal formation. Where have we been sowing the seeds of school education in Australia? In 2023, the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment reported that in the 20 years that it had been monitoring Australian students, there had been a significant decline in their performance.

In maths and reading, Australian students were scoring more than 25 points below students of the same age in the early 2000s. In other words, a 15-year-old in 2022 had the level expected of a 14-year-old 20 years earlier. The seeds have not always been falling where they should.

There are many reasons that things have gone wrong. No small part of it has been the way educational (not political) progressives have tried to reform education in Australia. School education has an unceasing appetite for the novel and new, and much of it, isn’t good:

• From rushing laptops to primary school desks before penmanship has been mastered,

• choose your own adventure learning,

• schools designed around the student voice,

• educators who are more comfortable as mental health first responders,

• lax or permissive behaviour frameworks,

• pedagogy that privileges critique before comprehension,

• dismissing the power or automaticity,

• cavernous learning spaces foisted on schools by offbeat architects that present significant auditory challenges for students,

• a bizarre obsession with imprinting “soft skills” on kids that apparently only became relevant in the 21st century

• A tendency to therapeutic pandering in the classroom, sometimes advanced under the guise of all pervasive wellbeing programs, that in their extreme forms, risk being substitutive of the proper role of parents and carers.

Of course, we hope none of this features in Catholic schools. In the book, Australian Answers, Gerard Henderson dubbed Dame Leonie Kramer, the country’s leading conservative educationalist of the last century, the Great Dame. The Great Dame was no reactionary. She acknowledged the need for educational reform and she once conceded that the concept of essential knowledge, exemplified by the curriculum of the ancient universities, no longer represented the growth of knowledge, and it was futile to resist change, which need not mean abandoning historical discoveries. Yet, she was in no doubt as to the reformers’ mistake.

Progressive education advocates accuse their opponents of looking in the rearview mirror, but they themselves looked neither back at history for useful lessons, nor ahead to anticipate the consequences of their theories. Real reformers do both. If we want to better deliver on the promise of education in Australia, we need real change by reformers to hope to deliver an integrated education that students need if they are to live full life, come into their humanity and grow every day. As Kramer suggested, we should look back, to move forward.

It can be easy to give despair and not so easy to find reason to be excited about the future of education. And yet that is what educationalists in the United States are doing through the development of the classical school movement. There are now over 1,500 classical schools offering a liberal arts education in the United States, and the sector is estimated to be growing at a rate of 4.8 per cent per year. The growth of classical education and liberal arts school, is presently the most dynamic trend in school education in the developed world.

These are independent schools. Some are secular, others are affiliated with Christian denominations, such as the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education and the Chesterton Schools Network. All share an educational philosophy that students excel when they are exposed to the great texts, art and music of our cultural inheritance, and when they are taught a curriculum that is broad, yet integrated and importantly – when all of a child’s senses are engaged in the process of discovery.

As this is a new phenomenon in the US, empirical research is limited. What there is, however, is encouraging. One recent study has shown that students in classical Christian private schools have significantly higher literacy and numeracy results than students at other American schools. Another study has shown that after graduating from a classical school, students go on to have more positive life outlooks than Americans educated at other schools.

Is this an option for Australia’s schools? As I will explain, we have the historical scaffold of school education policy in New South Wales that can accommodate and support liberal arts schooling – today. What’s required is intent, not upheaval. We don’t have the same free hand in terms of regulation and curriculum that our counterparts in the United States and other countries enjoy. Australian schools can’t simply design their own curricula.

As with so much else in Australia, the education system is highly regulated – Australian schools must take a government mandated curriculum. They can opt for the technical incontinence and cultural morass that is the Australian curriculum (a product of a Coalition Government!) or adopt their own state curriculum, as we do in New South Wales. The opportunity before us is to identify the success that others have had overseas and create an Australian model for thriving.

What our paper Return to Beauty makes clear, is that the obligations of taking a mandated curriculum from the Government, need not be a barrier for liberal arts schools in NSW – in fact, it can be affirming. This was the blueprint for education in the state for 110 years until the passage of the Education Reform Act in 1990. Significantly, it was the educational philosophy expounded by Sir Henry Parkes – not always the greatest friend of Catholic education, that asserted education should “exercise and discipline both the moral and intellectual powers … and the maintenance of unflinching virtues.” New South Wales was unique among the Australian colonies in having a minimum curriculum across both primary and secondary schools under the Public Instruction Act regime. In addition to core curriculum requirements of reading, writing, and arithmetic, there were additional subjects that should be taught where practicable including, English grammar and composition, geography, history, drawing, physical education, and singing.

The idea that students in the colony of New South Wales needed a well-rounded education is a colonial legacy of which we can be rightly proud and recall for today’s purposes. Although the Public Instruction Act was repealed by the Education and Public Instruction Act of 1987, which was itself repealed by the Education Reform Act only three years later, the enduring legacy has been from colonial times onwards, of a commitment to a broad based, holistic curriculum and that has held to the present day. Parkes’ educational vision – which endures, is fully consonant with the imperatives of a liberal arts education.

The colonial vision of a well-rounded education is one legacy, but it is not the only one. Another is the tradition of a mandated curriculum. Although the Public Instruction Act endured for over a century, Sir Henry Parkes’s vision was carried on by Dr Terry Metherell’s. After Nick Greiner won the 1988 election in New South Wales, an election commitment to reform the education system was implemented by Metherell through the Education Reform Act. The Education Reform Act was significant for many reasons, but our focus today is on the curriculum. In a major reform, the Act established a curriculum framework that could only be altered as a result of parliamentary debate. Syllabuses were to be developed by the Board of Studies and approved by the Minister mandating outcomes that were required at each stage of a student’s education.

This speaks to the true rigour of the NSW approach. The government was now insisting on specific achievements that were definable, and teachers needed to be given clear and realistic goals. This was a necessary antidote to “the often vague and unattainable goals associated with curricula of the 1970s, especially those with process oriented curriculum aims and objectives”.

It was during the era of the Parkes mandated curriculum in NSW that Catholic educators mastered the alchemy to mould the statutory curriculum to Catholic purposes. Indeed, Mother Mary MacKillop was an early exponent of fusing the secular with the Catholic. She insisted that all Josephite schools followed her approved program of learning which was still reportable and oversighted by the Director-General of education.

We have a unique and positive educational inheritance in NSW – and it is time we drew down on it. The study of music, art, history and geography are still mandated subjects with designated hours for NSW secondary school students. This is not the case to the same extent everywhere in Australia or overseas. Additionally, in this state, we kept geography and history as distinct, contained subject and eschewed the approach taken by other jurisdictions to collapse them into amorphous “social studies” substitutes. It was Labor Premier Bob Carr who personally intervened to have the Education Act amended to protect the standing and content of geography and history in NSW secondary schools. We also, thankfully, resisted the calls of the “sandalistas” in the 1980s and 1990s who campaigned to have History renamed or erased from school curricula as it was deemed too militaristic and hegemonic in its outlook, and replace it with a new unit called Peace Studies.

Given this robust intellectual history and rigorous approach to curriculum, it is understandable why the Safe Schools program never found a permanent home in New South Wales. At Catholic Schools NSW, the Kathleen Burrow Research Institute has published a discussion paper called Liberal Arts and Classical Education: A Return to Beauty, which sets out the way forward. In short, a liberal arts school can align their preferred curriculum with the mandated NESA syllabuses. The creative arts syllabuses from K-10 which mandates dance, drama, music and visual arts provides a very supporting foundation for the liberal arts approach. As I mentioned, NSW has always mandated strong foundations in English, mathematics, science, geography and history – all core components of a liberal arts program.

Finally, the magic of interdisciplinary learning, the connective tissue between great subjects and a hallmark of liberal arts education (integrated content). Think of a Year 9 lesson that explores the history of Christianity via great works of art where the students have to give an oral account of their understanding. This can be realised by combining courses of study to integrate the different subjects, ensuring mandatory outcomes and indicative hours are met to the satisfaction of the school regulator, NESA. The mainstays of a liberal arts subject inventory are there in the NSW curriculum. The regulatory framework is permissive. The posture of the curriculum is supportive. And the historical traditions of NSW education are both affirming and uplifting.

These are all good things as the appetite for liberal arts schooling is undoubtedly growing. Schools just need to be committed and intentional if this is the path they chose to take; and examples of how it can be operationalised are detailed in our discussion paper. We have provided the road map with reference to case studies. However, a commitment to the liberal arts can’t be fully embraced without first mediating between two competing approaches to teaching and learning bearing down on school education and take a side. The first, articulated by Archbishop Anthony Fisher, focuses on the need to provide an education for the whole person. The second promoted many in the academy, but let me choose one. Professor Larissa McLean Davies, currently of Melbourne University, focuses on education for deconstructionism and decolonisation. I shall consider each of these in turn before presenting what I see as the way forward. Last year, Archbishop Anthony Fisher issued a challenge to Catholic schools in the Archdiocese, when he called on them to recommit to promoting a liberal arts education in their schools. In doing so, he was making the case for education of the whole person, which he argues is central to liberal education.

Unsurprisingly, Archbishop Fisher’s motivation is to help Catholic schools resist the effects of secularisation and reawaken their students to God. What matters for present purposes is the kind of education that he believes can achieve this end, and that is a liberal arts education. Although there is disagreement about exactly how to define liberal arts education, all its advocates would agree that a liberal arts education can be described as follows: The pursuit of wisdom, including the intellectual and moral education of the whole person, with an integrated curriculum of defined subjects gaining knowledge that cannot be accrued by just one life time, grounded in the classic texts of the Western tradition as a means of encountering truth, goodness and beauty via the abstract and theoretical. Or, as has been put more succinctly, “the best of what has been thought and said in the world”.

In calling for such an approach to education, Archbishop Fisher is clear about what he is not calling for. First, he is not calling for the humanities to be prioritised at the expense of STEM subjects. He is not calling for an education that is in any sense “anti-science”. Secondly, he cautions against identifying a liberal arts education with a narrow fixation with the Great Books of the Western canon. Archbishop Fisher notes that, historically, such an education involved the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then proceeded to the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The purpose of such an education was first to teach students to think critically and express themselves eloquently. Having done that, it then sought to expose them to subjects that would arouse their sense of wonder about the world. Archbishop Fisher is right to warn us that much of popular culture evades the big questions, and that there is a real risk that education is “dumbed down” by too much of a preoccupation with it. It is again a case for engaging all of the senses in the journey of discovery.

As an antidote, we can look to education as an opportunity to cultivate virtues in students. This means cultivating the intellectual and moral character traits of a well rounded person who will recognise the common threads that bind citizens and communities, able to disagree, without being disagreeable. Of course, we need to give students useful information and skills. But that is not enough. We also need to instil in them the virtues that are necessary to find meaning and purpose in life, and to make good choices.

It is here that Archbishop Fisher thinks a liberal arts education is vital. It is the means by which he believes students develop empathy, passion, and depth of understanding. In short, it is an education that makes a person more humane and he is surely right that this a prerequisite for any useful life. This is because his vision is for an education that prepares students not only for employment, but for family life, friendship, the life of the mind, civic engagement, and other leisure pursuits such as the arts and sports.

In Catholic schools, this education for the whole person should extend to preparing the student for eternal life and Archbishop Fisher envisages a whole-of-school approach that cultivates humanitas and religious sensibility in the teaching of all disciplines.

Now let us consider the alternative perspective, one favored by Professor Larissa McLean Davies. She acquired a specialisation in the curricula for English in Australian schools during her time at the University of Melbourne, which she is soon to leave for another academic posting. Her research has been directed towards supplanting the classics in favour of Australian texts focused on climate change and Aboriginal literatures. For example, in one of her most highly cited pieces of research, Professor Davies conducted a survey of the top fifteen books taught by English teachers. These are texts that have stood the test of time for generations of schoolchildren.

In a never-ending search for fault or offence, Professor McLean Davies offers the following assessment of the most popular booklist. Most works on this list are written in the past, by male British or American writers. Most of these have formed part of the school literary canon for generations. There are only two texts by women – The Outsiders by S E Hinton and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and no texts by Australian women, migrant Australians or Aboriginal writers.

Now, even the most unapologetic philistine might blush to dismiss Shakespeare and Orwell as merely “old white men”, but for an expert on shaping English curricula, the posture is especially brazen. This off the wall research puts her squarely in the tradition of what Amercian school teacher Daniel Buck describes as being a “conspirator in cultural upheaval, not a steward of shared knowledge or inheritance”.

The professor and others like her are intellectually magnetised to critique our inherited wisdom, plumbing the depths of conceited subjectivity to the point of the ridiculous. We should not be surprised that Professor Davies takes this approach, however, as she describes herself as being “invested in the project of unsettling English” from “its imperial foundations”. For Professor Davies, the role of the teacher is to “challenge the colonial roots and cultural hegemonic thinking that dominate curriculum design” and “to highlight Whiteness in our systems”. Education for decolonisation versus education for the whole person

I think we can make two observations about the approaches of Professor Davies and Archbishop Fisher. Although they are both interested in which books are being taught in English classes, they disagree about which should be prioritised. Where Professor Davies would choose books that unsettle imperial foundations, Archbishop Fisher would choose books that inspire wonder. This difference is underpinned by a deeper difference. It seems that Professor Davies’ approach prioritises education as a vehicle for social change, whereas Archbishop Fisher’s approach prioritises education as a vehicle for personal growth and enlightenment. Some will disagree with Professor Davies’ vision of social justice. Others will disagree with Archbishop Fisher’s vision of the whole person: You decide.

I turn now to Liberal Arts and Classical Education: A Return to Beauty, a proposal for Catholic schools in New South Wales, which advocates for the whole-person education advocated by Archbishop Fisher. I’ll say something briefly about why this is desirable and how it can be achieved. Our discussion paper identifies two significant opportunities to strengthen the capacity of Catholic schools in New South Wales to educate for the whole person within the existing curricula.

A liberal arts education is centred on the great literature of the Western tradition, and acquainting the students with the wisdom to be tapped by reflecting on it. In New South Wales, the curriculum provides options as to what texts are taught, and it is up to individual schools to decide which options they elect to teach. This flexibility provides the most important opportunity for liberal arts education. Teachers must be encouraged to choose set texts which are also part of the Western canon. This is a vital starting point for preparing to deliver a liberal arts education to HSC students. Consider the following literary options that are proscribed by NESA for Year 11 and 12 NSW school students:

• The works of Henry Lawson

• The Complete Poems of William Blake

• The Complete Poems of John Keats

• Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Othello

• Macheivelli’s The Prince

• WB Yeats, Virginia Wolff, Robert Frost, WH Auden, Anne Bronte, Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Colderidge

The other existing opportunity concerns the integration of core content. This ensures that the content learnt in one subject is related to and complements what is being studied in other subjects, so that students acquire a deeper understanding by making connections between different things that they are studying. This might, for example, see students learn about ancient Greek history at the same time that they are studying Greek literature and art in other subjects.

The New South Wales curriculum is not written in a way that specifically integrates core content across different subjects – nor does it preclude such an approach. Appendix B to A Return to Beauty provides a snapshot of how one school has integrated content across subjects and all within the constraints of the mandated curriculum for Years 5-7. It is significant to note that the current Education Reform Act (NSW) 1990 scheme for a mandated curriculum was informed by the 1998 White paper “Excellence and Equity” which stated that “all students (must) have access to literature of high quality … gives them a perspective on their cultural heritage… that maintains the cultural basis of our civilisation…”

We also see several important opportunities for ensuring teachers in our schools can pivot towards the educational approach advocated by Archbishop Fisher. First, we need to take a close look at teacher training degrees. We need to ensure that initial teacher training is combined with an understanding of the liberal arts education and how to practise it. One option is a double degree that combines a Bachelor of Education with a degree that provides content knowledge, such as a Bachelor of Liberal Arts, or combining Bachelor of Arts (Western Civilisation) and Master of Teaching degrees, as Australian Catholic University does in partnership with the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. These existing degrees demonstrate that new degree programs are not required.

It is important to stress that the study of texts in the Western canon and achieving an integrated curriculum does not hinge on teaching methods. The New South Wales curriculum does not mandate teaching methods. Liberal arts schools deploy a range of teaching methods. They are often associated with direct instruction, the Socratic method-style of questioning, and school discipline. Researchers have established a consistency between these and higher academic achievement. They are also features of some of New South Wales’s top performing schools.

The fact that teaching methods in classical schools are also typical of those in high-performing schools in New South Wales means that alternative teaching methods are necessary and existing methods can readily be adapted to deliver a liberal arts education. I’m pleased to say that Catholic schools are already well on the way to delivering a liberal arts education for the whole person. In some cases, we are seeing new schools being created. We have already seen the establishment of Hartford College in Sydney’s southeast in 2022, offering a classical education in the Catholic tradition. The approach is also being picked up in other States. St John Henry Newman Academy is due to open in Brisbane in 2026. In other cases, existing schools are already adapting. St Mary’s Cathedral College in Sydney has created an integrated approach based around its Paideia program. In Sydney Catholic schools, this whole-person approach to education is also reflected in the way religious music is being taught in schools

The approach we are taking to educating for the whole person is an approach that can be replicated in schools throughout New South Wales. It demonstrates that a radical overhaul is not required in order to achieve better outcomes for our students.

I’ll conclude with the sage advice from a great Irishman, whose own literary works make for compelling inclusion in the liberal arts canon – C S Lewis. In one of his several books defending Christianity, Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.