Given the parlous state of Australia's education system, which sees so many students leave school morally adrift, emotionally fraught and culturally illiterate, it’s not surprising hundreds of parents and teachers around Australia are seeking alternatives. From Perth to Sydney schools committed to an education that is intellectually rigorous, morally grounded and emotionally and spiritually uplifting are being established.
While schools need to teach the basic skills, prepare students for the world of work and further study, as well teaching life skills, equally as important is introducing students to Western culture’s best validated knowledge and artistic achievements. This cultural inheritance is the lifeblood of Western societies such as Australia and it needs to be passed from one generation to the next. This inheritance doesn’t happen by accident and, while parents have a vital role to play, it’s the duty of schools to keep it alive.
On Friday 3 October 2025, Dr Kevin Donnelly hosted the fourth annual Australian liberal arts forum, this time at the Glenelg Pier Hotel by the beach in Adelaide. The event was emceed by Simon Haines, the inaugural CEO of the Ramsay Centre, and attended by over one hundred guests (with many more on the waiting list, a vastly increased turnout from the 25 attendees at the first conference in 2022).
Almost every form of distance communication today is done online. Even this article, advocating writing to newspapers and your local MPs to encourage discussion around classical education, is appearing on an online blog! (And, realistically, our letters aren’t likely to be handwritten but rather emails…)
Still, through whatever medium you do it, just do it: write letters to newspapers and MPs. Perhaps the main reason why the liberal arts do not have a greater presence in Australia’s educational landscape is because people are ignorant of it as a viable – and venerable – alternative. We need to make the public more aware, or else our movement will remain a fringe one. If major newspapers and pollies receive dozens (perhaps hundreds) of letters to this effect, they will begin to become curious and we know how dangerous a little bit of curiosity can be!
One of the more challenging aspects of explaining classical education to a curious inquirer or neophyte is in identifying precisely how it deviates from the progressive model we’ve all been brought up with. Although there are many differences between the two, what best encapsulates the essence of classical learning simply and concisely?
No one uses it rightly, as a thing that in every way is apt to draw men toward being.
Plato, Republic, Book VII, 523a
Nobody teaches arithmetic anymore, not in the way the ancients understood it. Walk into any elementary mathematics classroom today, and you'll find students drilling multiplication tables, calculating percentages, and solving word problems. What you will rarely find is the contemplative study of number itself: the profound patterns that emerge when we examine odd and even numbers, the mysterious properties of primes, or the elegant relationships between deficient, perfect, and abundant numbers. We have reduced the mathematical arts to mere computation, trading the wonder of arithmetikos for the utility of logistikos.
Everyone knows the old rhyme about the little girl who had a little curl ‘right in the middle of her forehead’. When she was good, ‘she was very very good, / But when she was bad, she was horrid’. So it is with many aspects of life. Take the Internet, for example. As the author of several books, over as many decades, my research activity has changed from time-consuming and often fruitless hours spent in libraries, in the 1980s, here and overseas, to find what I was looking for to resolve this or that knotty problem as I was developing my thesis and providing examples in support of it; to today, in 2025, when I rarely have to leave home and computer, with access to the Internet, to find the answer - often in a matter of minutes.
The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful. — Plato, Republic, Book III
We are living through a quiet revolution. You won’t hear it shouted from the rooftops. You’ll find it in a room where a child is reading Homer aloud. You’ll glimpse it in a teacher guiding students through a Socratic dialogue. You’ll feel it in schools where poetry still matters, where words are loved, and where truth is not an embarrassment. Across the world, and here in Australia, the classical education movement is gaining momentum.
St John's College Information Evening The Ramsay Centre is hosting an evening to find out more about St John’s with Associate Professor Andrew Poe. He will deliver a lecture on “Thinking and Unthinking Political Necessity: ADemocratic Reading of Book 2 of Plato’s Republic" and share his experience of the Great Books education he received at St John’s College. The talk will be followed by light refreshments and conversation.
