ROBERT MENZIES’ PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

David Furse-Roberts, Research fellow at the Menzies Research Centre and editor of Menzies – The Forgotten Speeches joined forces with Dr Catherine Runcie, contributing editor of Reclaiming Education: Renewing Schools and Universities in Contemporary Western Culture, at The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 22 May 2019 to discuss the concern many feel over scholastic standards and the decline of the liberal arts in educational institutions in Australia. The issues of concern cover whether educational curricula has degenerated into postmodernist brainwashing with the new “Identity” culture drowning out the best of Western civilisation’s history and tradition. Has discourse at our universities become more rant than discussion with left-wing ideologues able to deny their opponents a hearing?

ROBERT MENZIES’ PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

DAVID FURSE-ROBERTS

Taking Menzies’ philosophy of education as the main theme, this paper will outline the formation of his worldview, his vision for Australian higher education, his contribution to the growth of universities during his time in office, and some of the lessons that can be drawn for today.

Robert Gordon Menzies was born in 1894 in the Victorian town of Jeparit to his parents, Kate and James Menzies, who each instilled in him a love of learning. Now the Scottish background of Menzies was very important to the formation of his philosophy of education.

 Much like the Jewish and Confucian traditions, the Scots have tended to highly prize the value of learning and scholarship, which Menzies’ own background typified. From this background, the two most important influences on Menzies’ worldview and educational outlook were Scottish Presbyterianism and the liberal Enlightenment.

From his Presbyterian upbringing, Menzies believed that human beings derived their identity not from some tribal group of class, race or sex, but from their creation as men and women in the “image of God”. As such, Menzies affirmed the belief in a common humanity derived from “one blood”. In a radio broadcast from the early 1950s, Menzies said that the primary objective of education was to teach people about their relationship to each other and their relationship to their creator.

From the liberal Enlightenment, meanwhile, through figures such as John Locke, David Hume and Robert Burns, Menzies imbibed his belief that education was one of the great driving forces for human progress and enlightenment. As such, schools and universities represented the great engine rooms of human civilisation.

Brining this outlook on education to his long public life, Menzies proved to be both a traditionalist and a moderniser. On the one hand, he desired educational institutions to hold fast to their original purpose of moulding moral character and teaching people how to think, yet on the other, he wanted to broaden the reach of these institutions, particularly Australia’s universities, to a broader cross-section of the population including women.

Turning to university education, Menzies enunciated his educational philosophy when he spoke of what he saw as the sevenfold purpose of the university

in a 1939 address. These seven purposes are worth enumerating just in brief:

• First, the university would be the home of pure culture and learning.
• Second, it would be a training school for the professions.
• Third, a link between academics and workers. This is particularly important to remember given the divide and common antipathy that exists between intellectuals and working people in our society today.
• Fourth, a home of research.
• Fifth, a trainer of personal character.
• Sixth, the training ground for leaders in politics and all fields of endeavour.
• Finally, the custodian of mental liberty and search for the truth.

As a moderniser, Menzies envisioned a role for universities to serve the Asia Pacific and to attract greater numbers of women through their doors.

Although he was an Anglophile, Menzies believed it was no longer acceptable, or indeed, viable, for modern Australian universities to look to either “Oxbridge” or the American Ivy League institutions for the recruitment of their experts. As part of an advanced and forward-looking nation, it was high time for Australia’s universities to invest in cultivating their own crop of home-grown researchers and experts.

Conscious of Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific, Menzies also maintained that strong Australian universities with Australian-trained academics would enable the nation to be a major hub and provider of higher education in its own region. With the Colombo Plan having brought many promising students from South East Asia, India and other places to study at Australian universities since the early 1950s, it was critical that these universities play a leading role in the region. In turn, Menzies envisioned that these Australian-trained students from the Asia-Pacific would be equipped to develop higher education opportunities and universities in their home countries.

Menzies also desired Australian universities to become open to more women.

 In a radio broadcast as early as 1942, he remarked that “Higher education for women must come to be regarded as normal, and not as the eccentricity of a potential blue stocking”. During Menzies’ prime ministership, the number of female students enrolled at Australian universities rose from 19.7 per cent in 1952 to 25.9 per cent by 1964.

As Prime Minister, Menzies presided over the expansion of the university sector with the commissioning of the 1957 Murray Report

that paved the way for opening new campuses. Like Menzies, the Commissioner of the Report, Sir Keith Murray, had a traditional, non-utilitarian philosophy of higher education, yet a far-sighted vision to bring this within the reach of more Australians. Accordingly, the number of students at Australian universities rose markedly during the post-war years with new universities established including the University of New England (1954), Monash University (1958), Macquarie University (1964), La Trobe University (1964), the University of Newcastle (1965) and Flinders University (1966).

With Menzies’ philosophy and approach to education, there are lessons for us today.

The first is that universities must recover their original purpose. Instead of being mere commercial enterprises or utilitarian degree factories fixated on churning out the greatest number of graduates, they need to return to their founding purpose as being cultivators of character and culture.

Critical to this, is the importance of investing in liberal arts faculties that offer studies in disciplines such as history, philosophy, literature, languages and theology. Menzies understood such disciplines as critical to advancing human understanding and nurturing civilisation, so modern governments should follow his example of investing in “pure learning” as well as in vocational training.

Now with many of the liberal arts faculties in today’s universities succumbing to modern fads such as Critical Theory and postmodernism, widely seen as giving rise to political correctness and identity politics,many conservatives, who are understandably disturbed by these developments, have favoured a reduction in funding support for universities and arts faculties.

The proper solution, however, is not to starve the liberal arts but to redeem them and to help them recover their original purpose of inculcating students with the traditions and values that built our civilisation. In this vein, the establishment of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is a welcome development.  By offering to contribute greater resources to the arts faculties of selected public universities, it will help point more students to the riches of our civilisation found in the Western canon of literature and great books.

As well as reforming the arts faculties of the established public universities, there is an important niche for the establishment of independent liberal arts colleges.

Unlike the United States, Australia does not have a proliferation of these institutions, but they have much to offer in their traditional focus on the humanities. If Australians benefit from the existing diversity of public and private education options at the school level, then why not offer the same at the tertiary level? To be sure, these new liberal arts colleges may not boast the sandstone cloisters and spires of the old universities, but in many respects, they stand much closer to the founding purpose of the academy to nurture civilisation and advance human understanding.

Already, in Australia, there are some promising signs of alternative higher education options. Sydney’s Campion College, founded by Karl Schmude in 2006, is a small liberal arts college in the Catholic tradition that offers degrees in theology, philosophy, literature and history. In addition to this, we have the Universities of Notre Dame in Sydney and Perth, and Alphacrucis College in Sydney, a Protestant, Pentecostal College that is expanding into the liberal arts.

To conclude, Menzies vested heavily in education to both cultivate culture and promote human wellbeing.

Importantly, he appreciated that politics runs downstream from culture. Therefore, if the community desired a more edifying political and social climate, Menzies realised that the culture first of all needed to be transformed, and this, to a large extent, started with the mission to enhance the quality of Australia’s schools and universities.