Blog
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.
- Written by: Kevin Donnelly
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).
- Written by: Jonathan Hili
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!
- Written by: Jonathan Hili
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?
- Written by: Jonathan Hili
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.
- Written by: Dan Murphy
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.
- Written by: Barry Spurr
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.
- Written by: Steven Schwartz
The normal ways of teaching fiction are not working very well. In a nutshell, the typical approach to fiction places greater emphasis on historical, biographical, political, economic, and cultural context than on a piece of fiction as a work of art.
No wonder that the number of college students majoring in English is in significant decline. No wonder that high school students are reading less and less fiction. And no wonder that high school English instruction, scrambling to find a new form of relevance, is increasingly shifting away from its roots in the humanities and taking off in a utilitarian direction with an emphasis on reading workforce-related manuals and articles.
- Written by: Andrew J. Zwerneman
Toby Ratcliffe
L’imagination aide beaucoup l’intelligence.
Bossuet
Though human ingenuity is responsible for our greatest achievements, it also allows us to find uses in absolutely anything. As the world entertains itself in ever shallower ways, it grows increasingly disinterested in what it is becoming: incurious, unwilling to extend its hand, buried under its own self-promotion. This disinterest and detachment from self leads to a dangerous kind of abandon. Remaining conscious, each person today sees signs that speak of a gradual drainage of depth, which we in our habits have been responsible for. Even for those who wouldn’t consider themselves deep, this matters, for the depth that is simply there but never remarked upon still has the ability to make people more or less confident about living. If national particularities are on the way out and considered unworthy of preserving, let us agree and suggest depth as an alternative.
- Written by: Toby Ratcliffe
The good Aeneas am I called, a name,
While Fortune favoured, not unknown to fame.
My household gods, companions of my woes,
With pious care I rescued from our foes.
(Aeneid, Book I, 372)
Heroes, be they real or fictional, win our hearts and minds partly by what they accomplish against challenging odds but mostly for who they are as people. We admire their character and aspire, as best we can, to emulate their virtues: the courage of Achilles, the wisdom of Socrates, the compassion of St Francis of Assisi or the adventurous spirit of Luke Skywalker. Even contemporary Australia impresses upon us her own values: mateship, tolerance, authenticity and equality, and praises those who embody them. Yet, there is one virtue that distinguished few heroes of old and certainly, it must be said, modern society finds little interest in it. It is the forgotten virtue, piety.
- Written by: Jonathan Hili
In Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity, Joshua Gibbs successfully transplants his perceptive, witty, and soulful reflections into the wider realm of cultural observation beyond the familiar territory of his previous books based squarely in the world of classical education.
- Written by: Conor Ross
In the first of his lectures delivered in 1805-1806 on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, not to be confused with his later lectures on the Philosophy of History), Hegel penetratingly remarked:
The name of Greece strikes home to the hearts of men of education… The Greeks have a starting-point in history as truly as they have arisen from out of themselves; this starting-point, comprehended in thought, is the oriental substantiality of the natural unity between the spiritual and the natural.
- Written by: Jonathan Hili
Episode Description
Take a virtual journey down under to learn more about what is happening with classical Christian education in Australia. Dr. Patrick Egan talks with Kon Bouzikos, president of Australian Classical Education Society. Gain insights into the seven schools spread across Australia and the efforts that go into keeping the movement well coordinated and resourced.
Links from this episode:
The Educational Renaissance Podcast is a production of Educational Renaissance where we promote a rebirth of ancient wisdom for the modern era. We seek to inspire educators by fusing the best of modern research with the insights of the great philosophers of education. Join us in the great conversation and share with a friend or colleague to keep the renaissance spreading.
Dr. Patrick Egan's new book, published by Educational Renaissance, entitled Training the Prophetic Voice. is available now through Amazon.
Conor Ross
If the discourse within Australian education is to be believed, our classrooms have never been more inclusive, collaborative, interactive, empowering, and fun. At the same time Australian primary and secondary students have never been as disruptive, aggressive, disengaged, and miserable. In classroom behaviour Australian students ranked 33rd out of the 37 OECD nations, leading to calls for classroom behaviour to be explicitly taught as an academic subject alongside English, Math, and Science. Several longitudinal studies have also reported an increase in anti-social behaviour and violence committed by students against fellow students and staff. The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) comparing similar first-world nations has also shown that Australian students experience the second highest level of bullying, only ranking behind Latvia. Predictably this rise in misbehaviour has coincided with the increasing instability of student mental health and school refusal. Students are not the only ones dealing with violence, false rumours, and emotional abuse as this rampant misbehaviour has had a withering effect on the teaching profession. Over 70% of current Australian teachers are considering leaving the profession, 35% of new teachers leave within 5 years, and the fast-tracking of ill-prepared university students into classrooms is set to worsen this. Greater salaries may make a small difference to this shortage but consistently the calls from teachers have been for change to the culture. However, more than just a culture change, what is truly needed is a change to the entire philosophy of modern schools.
Cheree Harvey
“When I began teaching my children, I realized that even though the world said I was educated, I found out I was only schooled.” Leigh Bortins of Classical Conversations fame cuts to the heart of the matter in her book The Core, published in 2010. I am reading this fascinating book for the third time in as many years, as I practice what I preach - spending time thinking deeply with fellow parents about the reasons why and also how I teach my children in the classical, Christian tradition. Is it really the best way? How do I make sure I don’t leave gaps in their education? How will I find a like-minded community? What does it mean to be truly human – a test score or a soul? Slowly, reading one chapter a month has definitely allowed for the truths to be contemplated in a more meaningful, deeper way.
