Classical Christian Education: the culture wars go to school
The corporate world is afraid of youth demanding change, particularly as rapacious business practices look set to drive us over the climate cliff into a frightening future. One solution the Right has implemented is the Christian Classical Education movement.
It is an ultraconservative educational fashion from the US. Michigan’s Hillsdale College is its lodestar, celebrated by American Trumpists. Tony Abbott delivered an awkward speech at the National Symposium for Classical Education in Arizona in January.
One of its leading lights, Andrew Kern of the CiRCE Institute, recently delivered three lectures in Australia. Kern diagnosed us as living in “a broken and fragmented age in which we are going through a crisis of deliberation, of meaning and of glory.”
Our thought began to disintegrate into discord from coherence, apparently, from around 1600, the start of the Modern Age. Now we live in chaos and our education system inculcates children with discordance, a disease. Not only does it lead to disorder in our world, but modern education even drives children to suicide, he alleges.
Kern believe that education’s “primary function” is to be “ordering their minds.” Students’ minds can be ordered by an education that nourishes their soul. Christianity and the treasures of the Western canon are taught to celebrate glory. Latin is taught to provide discipline.
The students tend not to be taught functional Latin to read the works of the ancients, because there is far too much to upset a well-ordered Christian mind there. The language is taught like a puzzle and out of all-consuming “piety,” or reverence for the past.
Teaching the “Great Books” is not an inherently concerning mission; there is much there to be admired. It becomes problematic when the pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful, as Kern describes his work, involves trapping people in ideas that cannot change.
Kern diagnoses that study of the “liberating [rather than liberal] arts” was debased into “subjects.” Subjects became debased into “studies,” which were intended to make us into “activists.” The activists are the problem, rather than attempting to solve problems. They reflect and make discord. This is the change conservatism was birthed to prevent.
Tradition, for Kern, is an inheritance to pass on unscuffed. Tradition does not gleam so, however, if one is traditionally oppressed. For this reason, CCE teaching must be bowdlerised to prevent exposing the cruel undercurrents of the story. Not only might students learn that being Black or Queer is not a defect, but they might also learn of traditions of resistance to power.
The schools see themselves as “the last real halls of learning, a bulwark against the barbarian hordes of liberalism and ignorance.”
There are several CCE schools in Australia currently. They are also fostered by the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies, a Catholic “intellectual society” in Hobart. David Daintree, its director, organises anti-trans activities and shares climate denial material with his mailing list.
CCE is affiliated with other problematic movements.
One is the “Western Civilisation” movement. This is a trend on the Right that sees White and Christian and Western men as threatened individually, and existentially as an identity, by efforts to incorporate newer voices into understanding the world and our places within it. Mediocre men from comfortable backgrounds have long had an unearned advantage. Some are aggrieved at having to compete in a wider pool of excellent candidates for preferment and for defining reality.
Defending “Western Civilisation” at National Conservative (NatCon) events becomes code for defending White or Christian or Western men against Muslims, against non-White people, against LGBTQIA+ people, against feminists. Life was better before any one of those other “identities” were allowed to hold a microphone in the civic space.
Augusto Zimmerman, in 2018, exposed how the Western Civilisation movement defines itself (through sleight of hand) as the saviour of “indigenous populations from utter annihilation” and against Islam as an inferior civilisation, explaining multiculturalism as an “anti-Western ideology.” He also wants schools to include study of the “crimes of communism.” The CIA roots of Quadrant live on.
The plutocrats’ influence machines are embedded in that movement. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is entwined in this NatCon mission, nostalgic for a world where God and fossil fuels were respected. It intends to reimpose that natural order.
The ARC is interlinked with the Atlas Network. The Australian Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is a likely partner. The Atlas Network has made its partner organisations secret in recent years, but Ramsay now appears alongside the known partner organisations such as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and Mannkal at Atlas-linked events.
Embedding conservative and neoliberal beachheads in academia is a near century-old strategy of the neoliberal movement that created the Atlas Network. It began with the original colonisation of three departments at the University of Chicago in the 1940s.
The Ramsay centre has established three such beachheads in the University of Wollongong, the University of Queensland and the Australian Catholic University, despite arguments that they would become “weaponised learning.” The first chairman of the board was John Howard who was listed on the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) rolls when they were last leaked. The MPS is the inner sanctum of the Atlas Network. Tony Abbott is also on the board. He has long links with Atlas partners such as the IPA and, more recently, Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute (now affiliated with leading American junktank, the Heritage Foundation).
Andrew Kern spoke in Australia to the Ramsay Centre. Simon Haines, the CEO, began his introduction with, “As usual I’d like to start by acknowledging…” He followed this formula with a pause, then concluded, “our wonderful benefactor, the late, great Paul Ramsay.” This parody of the Welcome to Country is predictable in an organisation whose founding was coordinated by Tony Abbott.
Haines boasted in this introduction to the sophomoric lecture that Ramsay collaborates with those three universities to stage summer schools for Year 11 and 12 students, interviewing 100 of them annually for allocations of Scholar status. Gaining access to secondary schools was important, he asserted, because schooling is “where the foundation is laid for what young people, future university students and future citizens, think of their society and the wider world that they will inherit.” One of Atlas’s strategies has been finding and lucratively promoting the careers of young “conservatives” from university days through into the professions. It seems that the model is now working to ensure school students are prevented from become feisty before university. The “School strike for Climate” movement was no doubt inconvenient for a deeply fossil fuel-funded network.
CCE is also connected to the “charter school” movement. This is a movement that takes public education money for privately run schools. Some of the schools it produces educate well, offering students a better education than they might find in their community. Others are terrible. Some are reputation-laundering philanthropic exercises by exploitative plutocrats. Paul Marshall, scandal-plagued hedge-fund multimillionaire, is a backer of the ARC and was chair and trustee of Ark Charter Schools. As an ultraconservative Evangelical his mission to promote the private use of public school money is suspect.
The transnational Right is at war with public schooling. This American campaign was born in anger at the idea that White students might be educated alongside Black ones, but it has transformed into a fear that public school teachers will undermine the reactionary “truths” the right wants taught. Atlas’s Heritage Foundation is in the thick of trying to dismantle public education in America.
In Australia, this campaign is powered along by the IPA, led by Bella D’Abrera. Trisha Jha has campaigned for charter schools in Australia from as early as 2015 with the CIS. She spoke on them again at CIS’s Consilium in 2023 with Macke Raymond, of the Atlas-partner Hoover Institute. The benign-sounding “school choice” is a wedge aiming to undermine further our desperately underfunded public school system.
Most teachers would embrace a curriculum that nourished students instead of preparing them for neoliberal benchmarks. Most Australians would prefer to see excellence in a properly-funded state school system, not taking that public funding to give to private projects.
As we debate solving the outrageous overpayment of private schools and drastic underfunding of public, we must beware right wing figures disguising reactionary control as educational “choice.”
This was first published at Pearls and Irritations as The Right’s War to Control Education
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18 comments
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Phil Pryor -
Bert -
paul walter -
Steve Davis -
old bloke -
Zathras -
wam -
corvusboreus -
Clakka -
John C -
Zathras -
corvusboreus -
New England Cocky -
corvusboreus -
Wam -
Clakka -
Andrew Smith -
corvusboreus
Return to home pageAll grants to schools should be halted, as being bribery, indoctrination and filthy acculturation openly. It is parents who should receive aid, means tested and applied sensibly for purpose, including for clothes, fees, books and equipment. Fair aid to educate each child openly and properly must come first, and then grants to satisfy applications for essential capital works, for agreed recurrent expenses, for sensible running costs, this should follow. The idea of a supremacist savagery, a mediaeval mindset of triumphalism, is repugnant, horrible, nexcusable. The abrahamic religions are far too vicious, intrusive, dishonest. Indoctrination of children in refined fiction, fraud, faith, fantasy and foul falsehood is ruining civilised progress, discourse, sense, world peace, a better future. Yet some still listen to a skinful of hot anal gas like T Abbott, or to my empty old classmate Jack Howard, with a skull cavity as arid as Arizona. These are worthless examples, useless images to follow. Become self educated, using reason, logic, analysis, the arts and sciences, to achieve what enlightment you might. That is the way.
Well said Phil.
Public schools are underfunded, under resourced while wealthy privates schools have snouts in the government money trough.
The right to discriminate bill, currently on hold in the federal parliament, if passed will see private schools able to employ (an dismiss) teachers who do not conform to dogma prescribed standards, entrenching relious based biases, anti queer, anti biblical teaching.
I agree as to Phil’s comments also.
To reach my age and find Ive not even begun to untangle from the world of bullshit is disheartening. This century-long effort by conservatives to embrace authoritarianism as Nirvana for brain dead humanity shows evidence in incidents like Gaza, and with this yet another perversion of Habeas Corpus law: presumption of innocence, open courts, evidence, reason. for medieval illiteracy.
I suspect the mulish ALP Right faction embraces it,
The main problem with the capture of young minds by a distorted version of history is, as Lucy points out, “finding and lucratively promoting the careers of young conservatives from university days through into the professions” and using them to shape society.
Lucy says further “we must beware right wing figures disguising reactionary control as educational choice,” as though this is a recent phenomenon. But it’s not new.
Lucy knows this. As in “Mediocre men from comfortable backgrounds have long had an unearned advantage.”
This problem has existed for as long as we’ve had private schools. This is the very purpose of private schools.
This is how the British Empire was built. “Playing fields of Eton” and all that.
This is how democracy has been subverted from the beginning.
Lucy stated elsewhere of her regard for representative democracy, but this process of molding the young would be nowhere near as effective without representative democracy to actually put it into practice.
The numbers of those molded in this way is quite small, and always will be, but they become consequential when they infiltrate political parties, gain pre-selection and enter parliament. This is helped by the sheep-like nature of even the politically active. It’s a long-standing joke in the Labor Party that if there’s a pre-selection battle between two candidates, one of whom is a labourer and the other a doctor or lawyer, the professional gets the nod every time.
So yes, we can watch them. We can be aware of them. We can worry ourselves sick about them. But it will make no difference until we change the system. The system was built to entrench their power.
“where the foundation is laid for what young people, future university students and future citizens, think of their society and the wider world that they will inherit.” So school students are not citizens? Eh? When do they become citizens? When they can vote? Do they not have the same protections, civil rights and obligations as the rest of us. What absolute tripe! Just like the Jesuits: ‘you give me the boy and we will give you the man’. These RWNJs will if allowed mold youth to be their servants and soldiers. Makes me sick!
I remember when people were losing their minds over the idea of Muslim Madrasas indoctrinating young children and some canvassed courses praising the success of Western Civilisation, which was more like code for promoting the dominance of White Supremacy though conquest and assimilation.
If religion has to be taught for some reason it should be on a comparative basis and not for the sake of dividing people.
Kern, Jha, Dawson et al are not interested in most students nor most teachers. They look at the 115+ because they already have those whose mummy and daddy are right and the below 100 can be tricked. But the bright may cause trouble if left free to learn??
Zathras,
Laying aside the predictable ‘fire with fire’ response of the Christian nationalists, is there no legitimate justification to concerns about the potential influence of Islamic schools?
Beyond application of universality of standards, there is also the added factor that many of the suburban Islamic schools & youth centres are founded through Saudi funded programmes specifically aiming to indoctrinationally promote hardline ‘Wahhabi-Salafist’ variant faith.
Nearly all societies remain saturated with god BS and reverence for supremacists, like ‘God save the King’. It remains as an enticement and a threat to / against free thinking, gender, sexuality, animalia, plantae, science, academia, art and the observance of the natural phenomena of the world and universe. It merely provides cannon fodder.
It’s coercive tentacles emerge from the shadowy cabals preying on the happy-clapping fearsome perfectionists and their automoton defenders, and worst of all democratic process and children. Its modus operandi is to deny human propensity for playing with metaphor, invent the mind and words of non-existent gods as reality, then con their prey that only they have the ‘power’ to carry god’s messages. That obedience and obeisance to them will lead their prey to wealth and enlightenment and on to a non-existent ‘other’ paradise, or be left to ‘hell’ that they too invented.
Clearly, history reveals that in every way, across the world, this system of puritanical corruption has failed. It is clearly responsible for exploitative ‘othering’, blood-soaked death and destruction and the collapse of societies and all their tangible structures. A process now so industrialized that the exploitation and their self-aggrandizing accumulations have depleted and toxified the earthly resources upon which humanity relies. They may no longer insist upon sacrifice by overt infanticide, but their persistent corruption has lead to the same effect upon all of humanity.
That today’s politicians move in fear and caution with small increments, putting paid to such corruptors, jeopardizes existence. And is proof-positive of the mass devastating affect of such corruptor’s cyclical exploitative coercion. That now the corruption is being revealed and tackled, the bastardizers are doubling down, creating a mirage that they are peaking, generating at the root a ‘western’ plague of insecurity, helplessness and flight from reason to panicked absolutism, the very cleft that the bastardizers desire.
That these cringing, clutching bastardizers go on about ‘civilization’ is anathema to existence. Every skerrick of their BS and calls for supremacy should be eliminated from all our writs and practices and exposed loudly for its detriment, allowing us to go on without their enticements and threats, to dwell in universal consideration and wellbeing, the expansion of freedom by invention, and the playing through metaphor.
Typical right wing conservative view point. Brainwash them from a young age and they are yours for ever to manipulate and mould to whatever shape you want to make them. Perhaps that very fact explains the myriad of gullible ‘adults’ America wide now. Ronnie Ray-gun started the conservative lying policy in the 80s and the repugnants have never stopped lying ever since.
corvusboreus
I certainly agree about the Muslim hardline indoctrination aspect but the Christian schools are no less influential.
For example the statistically odd number of Opus Dei representatives in State and Federal politics have influenced public policy as do various religious Lobby Groups and some private schools (such as The Exclusive Brethren) are known to have “laundered” taxpayer school grant money back into political party coffers.
The political rise of Christian fundamentalism in the USA has put itself at the heart of policy making and groups like AIPAC also greatly influence politicans themselves and the resulting social divisions make the USA seem more and more like a version of the Taliban.
Zathras,
Acknowledged that Christian variant brands of Abrahamism wield way more political flex in our particular patch of dirt.
Tony Abbott, the peasant who dubbed royalty, owed much of his sinecured ascendancy to Catholic connections.
Sent by God to save us from deliberately barren witches.
Scomo’s multi-ministerial snake-oil show was sponsored by the telemarket mountebanks of the ‘prosperity gospel’ megachurches.
Auspiciously ordained with divine blessings by a print of a photo of an eagle.
For comparison by example, when I saw recent news that ‘Muslim Vote’ was planning to target 2 ALP HoR seats in Sydney (Blaxland & Watson) I did some quick divisional backgrounding including voting patterns and religious demographics, applied some mathematics, and came away reasonably assured that the 2 seats should remain relatively safe.
However, the desire of internationally organised institutions of Islamic religious power to increase their influence on our government and society is as real as the theocratic agenda being pursued by the likes of the ACL, or global networks like Heritage, and should likewise be acknowledged and subjected to scrutiny.
@ Phil Pryor: Damn!! You have said it all, and much better expressed than I could manage. Well done!!
@ Steve Davis: I seem to remember that the Roman Church holds that ”Give me a child of seven and I have an adult for life”. Seems most cults have a similar philosophy.
@ old bloke: The descriptor term is ”Neo-Feudalism” where the rich control the circulation of money and credit for their own advantage to the disadvantage of everybody else.
@ cb 1: If you are ”going after” Madrassas then why are you excepting the synagogue schools that indoctrinate ZION@ZI principles encouraging the amoral ZION@ZI IDF to pursue the GENOCIDE of 37,000+ Palestinian mainly women & children so that the Indigenous residents are displaced and dispossessed to be replaced by fresh ZION@ZI colonist settlers?
@ Zathras: Too true. Perhaps that is why any reduction in government over-funding of private schools is unlikely regardless of the needs of public schools. Rome has gotta get its cut of the financial action!!
@cb 2: The feral LABOR government has a problem that was exposed by Senator Fatima Payman; A paper policy that they chose or were told NOT to implement ….. so LABOR shot the messenger and betrayed the thousands of Palestinian dead by backing the enormous profits being generated for the US NE military industrial complex shareholders.
NEC,
Incidental omission does not equal exemption.
I am no more in favour of Jewish religious indoctrination than I am of Christian or Muslim (or Hindi for that matter), and the more extreme and dogmatic the sectarian interpretations being peddled, the more my hackles get raised.
Great, Corvus, I was hung up on Opus Dei in 2013 when there was only 4 Jesuit schools in Australia. Yet, perhaps, the top 6 federal pollies were ex-students including (the only 3 I can remember) Shorten, the rabbott and his Joey.
They believe in AMDG and have a licence to lie for god. Indeed Catholics believe Opus Dei cannot lie even if they lie because they do god’s work.
.
Perhaps, over the last few years we are seeing a purely egocentric individualism hijacked by exclusionary mercantile exploitation. An exploitation that will use any device to divide, conquer and dominate. It seems to affect mostly the individualized, absolutist young and inexperienced, who appear to mostly forsake the experience and nuanced ideas of the old, and the scholars, marking them es either ditherers or dogged. A process where the quest for universal fairness is underpinned by philosophy and the reading of history is supplanted by jingoism.
It would seem that the process has increasingly infected Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism and the secular democratic process via the wiles of politics hypnotized by its own opportunities proffered by the cabals of supremacist merchants. As if the ‘separation of powers’ from whatever perspective, is being attacked as a weakness and a discombobulation against simple, but direct on-the-ground action of the merchants, who as concealed supremacists in the shadows, circumvent by any means all politics, sovereignty and all ordinary folk.
In just one recent example, the Sen Payman / Bandt, Israel / Palestine matter. It would seem that jingoism is at play, disguised as erudite idealism, in a quest for disaffection and votes. A political designer pincer movement against carefully reasoned political rationalization and international resolution, versus a heightening of selective ill-informed emotionalism.
I ask myself, in the scheme of proclaimed universal idealism, in this particular case, why haven’t we heard from Payman / Bandt an iota about other ongoing disasters wrought by hostilit?, For example:
Afghanistan (Payman’s place of origin) incl. Taliban / Iran / Pakistan:
28 million in dire need of aid. 800 extrajudicial killings. 3.2 million children under 5 with acute malnutrition. Horrendous oppression of women & girls.
Myanmar civil war driven by Junta:
50 thousand killed, 2.6 million displaced.
Sudan civil war:
10s of thousands killed, millions displaced and starving.
Are they not convenient to the plans of Payman / Bandt?
It’s notable, that in all cases it’s always women and children that are most vulnerable, and men and male youth that are press ganged as canon fodder. I am dissatisfied with the omission of these examples in this case. It smacks of selective and political divisiveness and opportunism. There are many other situations on the brink.
CB: On Fox Board’s ‘family values’ Tony Abbott, he got a gift from the Russians being sanctioned, hence, he obviously has no shared sentiments with their fossil fueled white Christian nationalist autocracy, then anti-EU, woke, west, NATO, LBGT, liberal democracy, immigrants etc.
He needs a heads up on his alleged pro-western and pro-Christian views, as his employers in Budapest i.e. Danube Institute is both partnered with Koch Heritage Foundation and supported by a foundation funded by government of PM ‘mini Putin’ Orban (whose national bank gave Le Pen a financial loan facility other year); Orban has visited Kiev, Moscow and now Beijing on his peace mission for Russia in recent days, nothing to see here?
Meanwhile, why didn’t his boss John O’Sullivan (former Thatcher aide, US National Review journo and Quadrant’s Euro correspondent) and Abbott’s own (Russian speaking & alleged spy/ONA) international advisor* attract the same sanctions; very convenient….. yet both seem far right a la UK Reform….
*He had been a ‘fellow’ at same Danube Institute, but then ‘disappeared’ from their website after Applebaum called them out after Putin’s invasion…..but still around….
AS,
The Danube Institute aims to provide a comfortably relaxed atmosphere where hard-right ultra-conservatives of the western political sphere can intermingle with minions from Putin’s regime and discover a shared appreciation of authoritarian-traditionalist values.
A straya-centric perspective;