TAKING BACK THE CLASSROOM – RECLAIMING EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA

Dr Catherine Runcie is a contributing editor of Reclaiming Education: Renewing Schools and Universities in Contemporary Western Culture and David Furse-Roberts, Research fellow at the Menzies Research Centre and editor of Menzies – The Forgotten Speeches joined forces 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?

TAKING BACK THE CLASSROOM – RECLAIMING EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA

CATHERINE RUNCIE

Recently I had the privilege to complete my editing of a book I had been working on for quite some time. It was launched by the very Honorable Peter Baldwin. Retracing some of my steps to its completion with co-editor, David Brooks, a former colleague at the University of Sydney, was my Introduction to Reclaiming Education: Renewing Schools and Universities in Contemporary Western Culture.

In the time allotted, may I sketch how this book began.  It began modestly with a telephone call from a dear family friend – in fact, godfather to one of our children. Our friend was lamenting how no one remembered his Uncle Bob anymore.  No one even realised his views on education. That struck me particularly, as I too did not fully realise Sir Robert Menzies’ ideas on education

– nor did a celebrity or two who thanked another politician for the new idea of free university education.  We fell to lamenting education itself which David Menzies knew well. After all, he lived in Victoria and Victoria had been going through the so-called “Safe Schools” controversy, the “Safe Space” controversy, the “sexist” traffic light controversy and much much more.

But I did know this: that education in whatever Australian state, is a never-ending source of opinion. Issues are debated in newspapers and magazines across the land every day.

Phonics is good. Phonics is bad. Rote learning is good. Rote learning is bad. Sight words are good. Sight words are bad. Times tables are good. Times tables are bad.

 Calculators are good. Calculators are bad. Online is good. Online is bad. Naplan is good. Naplan is bad. Exam stress is good. Exam stress is bad.

And it gets more complicated and more indecisive as you move up through the years at school. I suspect today’s teachers have a tough time. Teachers should be your Buddy.  Teachers should not be your Buddy. And if you have to give a pupil or student a low mark that might be “Buddy Betrayal”. Teachers have to remember that egalitarianism MUST reign supreme and in the Land of Oz, egalitarianism means SAMENESS – in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Of course, if you are a sportsperson, you are allowed to be “an elite”, the best, the greatest, a superstar and so on. Just not so in the classroom where you’re merely learning to be earning for the rest of your life.

By the time the Higher School Certificate rolls around – or should that be the Baccalaureate? – if a teacher is still confident and happy in the job (has anyone asked them?) and if a student is still confident and optimistic too, have they missed the national neurosis of doubt and dismay and endless opinions that yank your mind this way and that? Small wonder that Australia came in below Kazakhstan in literacy and numeracy.

A very dear learned friend from Sri Lanka, a Cambridge educated citizen of the world, and now retired professor of English, once asked me decades ago – in the 1970s: “When are Australians going to stop experimenting on themselves, in education?” And after all these years later, one might answer “Never”. But “Never” is too long a time.

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I decided to do a book of essays that would show some certainty, some clarity, essays which would yield helpful, deep learning, written by scholars who would KNOW that they KNOW.

 I had read hundreds, maybe thousands of contradictory newspaper items, articles from magazines, and even surfed heavy tomes – like that of the Royal Society of Economics, whose most recent issue is on – gender!  I knew a brainy willing publisher; and I consulted friends, who were and are outstanding teachers, colleagues and scholars.

Thus, former colleagues, Barry Spurr and David Brooks helped generously and right away; and Karina Hepner, who knew high school teaching in various countries and in more than one language, helped instantly, as did the other learned scholars whom we approached or who were recommended. For some scholars, I searched down Memory Lane, recalling outstanding papers, given to The Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, a society formed with philosophers and other language departments as well as my own, the English department, in the 1980s to get papers that would run an argument: learned, logical, and lucid. Not bombastic, blustering and bent. Alas, we so often get this today – just mention the words ‘Ramsay Centre’ and you know blustering, bombastic and bent. That we did not want, and that we did not get.

The scholars who so willingly gave papers to the project of this book, eschewed all ‘faux’ learning and “faux” reasoning and tricky argument.

 The scholars simply knew too much and were too serious to slant what they had to say into what The Economist calls “millennial Marxism”. Or what one might call “Kitsch Marxism”. I prefer the phrase Kitsch Marxism as it indicates the symbiotic, the watered down, the misunderstood.  (Is it the Andy Warhol of politics?) In fact it is not Marxism at all. An older understanding of Marxism led 40 per cent of humanity to famine, gulags, and constant fear. It blindsided many thinkers/politicians with so much of the “scientific”, the “dialectical”, and therefore the inevitable, that they let totalitarianism trample the Utopian fading away of the state and trample those human beings who got in the way of scientific inevitability.

“Millennial Marxism” or “Kitsch Marxism” of today is less Marxism than parasitic opportunism; it is aiming largely to “ramp” up your rage or revenge or envy or ignorance, to get a power edge,

ironically, in the midst of democracy and its plenitude of rights. You could not have tried the manoeuvres of the Kitsch Marxists in a country that is attempting to be Marxist, which, as it just so happens, has to be totalitarian.

When applied to the education of the young, Kitsch Marxism nevertheless has a single taproot that is one of history’s crimes: using others, using the young or the infirm or the poor or vulnerable to your own ends. A significant but tiny presage, however, does exist in the older genuine Marx and it has seeped through as Marx’s legacy inside a democracy. You need no “scientism” for it. In Marx’s letters, a litany of mooching and manipulation, he writes this in 1868 to Ludwig Kugelmann, when planning the First International: “Anybody who knows anything of history also knows that great social changes are impossible without the female ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social status of the beautiful sex (the ugly ones included)…” ( S.K. Padover, ed. The Letters of Karl Marx (1979) p. 259).

Use the vulnerable. Use the vulnerable as a means to an end.

It is no surprise, just profoundly sad, to know Joan Kirner, the erstwhile premier of the state of Victoria, said at a Fabian Society meeting that schools had to become “part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change…” (Kevin Donnelly, How Political Correctness is Destroying Australia – Melbourne, 2018 p.38). What she says is the canary in the mine of democracy.

In other words USE young persons’ minds during school. Use the vulnerable, the innocent.

The scholars who so kindly said yes to Reclaiming Education were learned enough to know right from wrong, to have good will towards the whole enterprise of learning, the past and present for the future. I was so fortunate in the responses from scholars who are now in the book, persons of integrity.

Did I have knockbacks? Yes. Several. Some were unexpected. I found no IT expert, although I tried in Australia, in the UK and in Canada, where I had contacts. I could not contact some deeply learned Aboriginals even though I went through the minister, Nigel Scullion, and he was helpful with addresses. No reply to my queries. I suppose the rudest knockback was from a female academic lawyer teaching at an unnamed university. Her reply to me went along the lines of: “Why bother with Western civilisation anyway?” Her position and her opinion were in such patently ironic contrast – a lawyer in a university today – that I did write back and say so.

In spite of knockbacks, I did get to the stage of an Ur–text. Apart from a dazzling array of learned essays, the Ur-text had also dazzling visuals – photographs from scholars, Lyn Ashcroft, Ivan Head, David Daintree. Seeing is believing and in a collection of essays, seeing is also relieving.

The Ur-text had shrewd but kind help from a philosophical mathematician, Professor James Franklin, and shrewd but kind editorial help from a lady who eschews airheads, Shelley Gare. And then Dr Christopher Allen, the pre-eminent art historian, suggested to me the Vincenzo Foppi fresco of 1464 of young innocent Cicero “reading”; and David Brooks, co-editor and essay writer, bought the copyright for us from The Wallace Collection, London.

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Alas! All this bounty of photography was too expensive to reproduce and the Ur-Text was boiled down to just two visuals – a black and white frontispiece of Southwark Cathedral and The Shard. No, not monuments to God and Mammon, but both attributes of Western culture: the cathedral was built over the site of 800 years of churches and The Shard by Renzo Piano solved amazing engineering problems as did the Sydney Opera House. Edwin Lowe designed the cover.  And in this case you can tell a book by its cover.

What emerges in this book is collegial generosity, sheer brainpower, outstanding insights, amid deep and varied learning, and that sine qua non, bravery, a refusal to be intimidated.

The writers and thinkers, whom I was lucky enough to have contribute, truly want the youth of today to know the accumulated and interlocking truths of mankind, to show modern youth, those “shoulders of giants” to stand on, available in our society as never before – and which are necessary to prepare the young for the future.

Getting to the final text was a three-year process. Scholars wrote sometimes through great sadness, some – like the beloved late Richard Gill, through great sickness. And in my own household, we came close to needing a stand-by ambulance to St Vincent’s.

But even if Reclaiming Education finally is just a pebble in a pond, we all know pebbles create widening ripples and that pebbles are tough.

I hope that you enjoy this effort and that one gets a better understanding of many things, one of which is Sir Robert Menzies and education.