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.
As argued by the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, schools have a duty to introduce students to their “intellectual, imaginative, moral, and emotional inheritance”. Such a view of education is described as a classical/liberal one, and it can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosophers, including Plato and Socrates. Plato believed education should enable students to be critically minded and committed to a life of virtue, beauty and the search for truth. Socrates gave us the Socratic Method: instead of teaching what to think an interactive dialogue fosters critical thinking based on rationality and truth.
Catholic theologian and saint, Henry Newman, describes a classical/liberal education as ‘a habit of mind’, one characterised by “freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom”. Such an education takes years to develop and requires discipline, concentration, patience and humility. More recently, Victoria’s Blackburn Report argues students must be introduced to humanity’s “best validated knowledge and artistic achievements”. The purpose of education, as suggested by T. S. Eliot involves “the pursuit of truth, and in so far as men are capable of it, the attainment of wisdom”.
How literature is dealt with provides a good example of what should be taught. The curriculum should include the Iliad and the Odyssey, plays like Medea and Oedipus Rex, classical myths and fables, and plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen and Arthur Miller. Poems by William Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Yeats and William Slessor should be included as well as novels and short stories by Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain and Henry Lawson.
As detailed in the Review of the National Curriculum Final Report I co-wrote in 2014, the reality is that, over the last 40 to 50 years, education in Australia has turned its back on a classical/liberal education. Instead of essential content represented by key subjects, teachers are made to adopt a process, enquiry-based model where students are centre stage and teachers are facilitators and guides instead of authority figures.
What students encounter is based on what is contemporary and relevant instead of introducing students to Western civilisation’s heritage. Every year students encounter Aboriginal culture and history, thus leaving school with a meagre knowledge of Australia’s history and evolution as a nation.
The school curriculum has long since been dominated by political correctness – now rebadged as woke. Primary school children are taught gender and sexuality are fluid and limitless and taught the world is about to end because of global warming. Instead of acknowledging, for all its faults, Western liberal democracies like Australia are bastions of freedom and prosperity students are told such societies are structurally sexist, racist, classist and guilty of heteronormativity. The curriculum, instead of dealing with what Matthew Arnold terms “the best that has been thought and said”, focuses on generic skills and competencies like being creative, working in teams and intercultural understanding making what is taught superficial and trite.
What’s to be done? As previously mentioned, around Australia parents and teachers are establishing schools committed to a classical/liberal education. Such schools are community-based and, unlike government schools, have a high degree of flexibility regarding curriculum and staffing. This renaissance in school education is not just in Australia. The American Heritage website lists over 900 schools teaching a classical/liberal education. In England under Chris Woodhead, Cognita schools are committed to teaching a rich and rigorous subject-based curriculum.
Whether Narre Warren’s Harkaway Hill’s College, Sydney’s Hartford College, Brisbane’s Saint John Henry Newman College, Wagga Wagga’s Saint Mary MacKillop College, Adelaide’s St Benedict School or Western Australia’s The Classical School, people are lighting small fires to once more illuminate beauty, truth and goodness.
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Dr Kevin Donnelly AM is an Australian educator, author and commentator. He is Senior Fellow at the PM Glynn Institute, Australian Catholic University. In addition to the numerous articles and books he has written on contemporary education, culture and politics (the most recent being Wake Up To Woke: It's Time, Australia, 2024), Dr Donnelly has organised yearly national classical/liberal arts conferences since 2022.
This article was originally published in Quadrant Online, 2 October 2025.
