Classical Liberal Education Seminar

As Campion College in Sydney is one of the few tertiary institutions dedicated to the liberal/arts it should not surprise it was chosen as the location for the Classical Liberal Education Seminar dedicated to exploring the nature and importance of a classical school education. The first presentation by Dr. Kevin Donnelly argued existing models of school education, ranging from a student-centred approach to one focused on teaching generic skills and 21st century competencies, failed to address the more urgent need to initiate each succeeding generation into the culture in which they are born. Kevin Donnelly (BA, DipEd, MEd, PhD) is a Senior Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and Director of Impetus Consultants. Kevin specialises in analysing and evaluating curriculum and pedagogy within a national and international perspective and is one of Australia’s leading education authors and commentators. Books include: Why our schools are failing, Dumbing Down, Australia’s Education Revolution, The Dictionary of Woke, Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March and Christianity Matters. Kevin taught English and Humanities for 18 years in Victorian government and non-government secondary schools and has also been a member of state and national curriculum bodies, including: the Year 12 English Panel of Examiners, the Victorian Board of Studies and the federally funded Discovering Democracy Programme and inquiry into the Australian Certificate of Education. Kevin also co-chaired the 2014 Commonwealth Government’s review of the national curriculum and has undertaken 3 international benchmarking curriculum projects for state and national governments plus the New Zealand Business Roundtable. Kevin is a Member of the Order of Australia for services to education. Involving parents, teachers, academics and educationalists from across Australia, everywhere from Perth to Brisbane and Narre Warren to Toowoomba, discussion centred on the parlous state of the existing school curriculum and the need to provide a more intellectually challenging, morally grounded and spiritually uplifting education.

Tracey Rowland holds the St John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.  She also holds degrees in law and government from the University of Queensland, in philosophy from the University of Melbourne, as well as a doctorate in Divinity from Cambridge University and a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Lateran University. She is a member of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences and from 2014-2019 was a member of the International Theological Commission.  She has written 8 books and published 3 others. As argued by the American academic Christopher J Lucas, “education basically means enculturation. The culture of a society must be internalised by each generation.” Such an education does not happen intuitively or by accident and, while parents are their children’s primary educators, schools have a significant role to play. The challenge then is to decide what type of education is the most relevant and the best able to provide students with a rigorous and beneficial school experience. Professor Tracey Rowland, in addressing such a challenge, explores the concept of a classical education—one, she argues, with a number of defining characteristics. Instead of being utilitarian and practical, such as education is associated with “the acquisition of a table of virtues, habits and dispositions.” Seen through a Christian perspective, Professor Rowland also suggests a classical education seeks to enrich and cultivate “the intellect, the will, the memory, the imagination and the affective dimension of the soul.”

Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen Shimon Cowen is the son of a former Governor General of Australia, Sir Zelman Cowen. In the midst of his PhD in the history of ideas, he experienced a spiritual “awakening” and returned to his Jewish religious roots, undertaking traditional Jewish religious studies. After marrying in 1981, he entered an institute of traditional Jewish studies, keeping his PhD and university activities running alongside. In 1984 he was awarded both his PhD and Rabbinic Ordination. In 1998 he established the Institute for Judaism and Civilization, with which he sought to explore the “interface” of traditional religious learning with the arts, sciences and value- concerns of general society. Within this framework, he became increasingly interested in the common denominator values or universal ethics of the world faiths and cultures, known as the “Noahide laws”. These constitute a primordial moral covenant completed with Noah, the survivor of the biblical Flood, and ancestor of humanity. He has sought to demonstrate the resonance of its universal, historical moral compass, amongst the world cultures, and its relevance to the moral, cultural, social and legislative challenges of the present. He is the author of Politics and Universal Ethics; Homosexuality, Marriage and Society; The Theory and Practice of Universal Ethics – the Noahide Laws; Aesthetics and Divine; The Rediscovery of the Human – Psychological Writings of Viktor E Frankl on the Human in the Image of the Divine. His most recent book is A Populism of the Spirit – further Essays on Politics and Universal Ethics. Much like St John Henry Newman’s concept of a liberal education, the ideal of a classical education is to educate students “who have a sense of place in history, who are not prisoners of their own time and culture, but have an understanding of the philosophical and theological traditions of Western culture and its history” so they can better deal with contemporary issues. As argued by the third speaker, Rabbi Shimon Cohen, the challenge for parents and teachers seeking a classical education is that students live in a society where there “is no cognisance of the spiritual as a factor or dimension of the human being.” Even worse, while the road map for Australian schools, the Alice Springs Declaration, mentions the importance of spirituality, contemporary education is based on the premise “the child has no soul” and that there is no place for religion in the curriculum. In opposition to the radical secularism that prevails in the curriculum, best illustrated by the neo-Marxist inspired Safe Schools gender fluidity program, Rabbi Cohen argues it is time to reassert the central importance of the spiritual and the transcendent that only a commitment to a higher good can provide. Drawing on the work of Viktor Frankel, he describes this as “the awakening of the highest faculty in the human being, the soul or conscience through the practice of self-transcendence.” Rather than associating this transcendence with one religion, Rabbi Cowen suggests it draws on the Noahide laws. Such laws provide the basis for a universal ethics teaching “the true, the beautiful and the good” that underpins the world’s great religions as well the concept of a classical education that first appeared in ancient Greece and Rome. As a result, it is relevant to people of religious faith as well as those more secularly minded.

Barry Spurr was educated at the universities of Sydney and Oxford. He was a member of the English Department at Sydney University for forty years and as Australia's first Professor of Poetry. He is a Fellow of the Australian College of Educators and has taught and published widely on both renaissance and Modernist verse. Professor Spurr is a leading authority on the life and work of T.S. Eliot, his study of Eliot's faith, Anglo-Catholic in Religion, being the standard account of its subject. Professor Spurr's other books include an account of liturgical language controversies, The Word in the Desert; a study of representations of the Virgin Mary in English poetry, See the Virgin Blest and the textbook, Studying Poetry (now in its second edition). He is a regular contributor to Quadrant magazine, of which he was appointed the Literary Editor in 2019.

Monica Doumit is the Director of Public Affairs and Engagement for the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, engaging in policy and communications for issues such as abortion, euthanasia, marriage and religious freedom. She is an adjunct senior lecturer in law at the University of Notre Dame Australia, a regular columnist for the Catholic Weekly and was the communications director and spokeswoman for the Coalition for Marriage during the 2017 marriage plebiscite. She holds undergraduate degrees in law and medical science, a masters in bioethics and a diploma in finance. Prior to working for the Archdiocese, Monica spent ten years working as a corporate lawyer in Sydney and London.

Simon Kennedy is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the T. C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest. He was recently a Visiting Fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary, and teaches at Queensland Theological College and the Lachlan Macquarie Institute. His first book, Reforming the Law of Nature, was published by Edinburgh University Press, and he has a forthcoming book with Lexham Press on Christian worldview and education.

Kenneth Crowther is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Queensland, where he is researching literary history, examining the syncretic nexus of humoralism, demonology and meteorology in the plays of William Shakespeare and John Webster. After teaching for thirteen years in the secondary and tertiary sectors, he is now an independent consultant working in classical education and operational strategy, with a current engagement to help set up St John Henry Newman College, an independent classical Catholic school proposed for Brisbane. He lives with his wife and four daughters near Toowoomba, Queensland. Michael Mendieta has over 10 years’ experience as both a Director and Executive leader. With a Business Banking background, he became a Director at Campion College, and has been an Executive Director for various not-for-profits. He is currently the CEO of Hartford College and Chair of Family Enrichment Australia. He has a Bachelor of Arts, in the Liberal Arts, and a Master in Business Administration.

John Smyth is a Secondary School Teacher specialising in Science, Maths and Religion. He currently teaches at St Thomas Aquinas College in Tynong, Victoria. He studied at Monash University and the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies. He and his wife Kate have four children. Sam McClelland has been shot at by Victorian police; toured Jordan Peterson; awarded ‘excellent’ stickers by his grade 3 students and drives a big diesel-guzzling 4wd. He was a professional jazz / classical guitarist and is a Kodaly music-teacher. After teaching in international schools, Sam returned to work in Australia to discover children being indoctrinated in education. After speaking up and learning what speaking up gets you, he was driven to create True Arrow Events and started by single-handedly organising Dr. Jordan Peterson's sold-out, debut Australian speaking tour in 2018. He then toured Jacinta Price and Stephen Hicks. In 2020, Sam time-travelled to covid-1984 and began documenting the loss of liberty in Victoria, and despite not knowing how to document things, achieved millions of views via short documentative videos. The idea of True Arrow Academy was born in 2021. An education platform with lessons written and run by smart people from around the world, to provide youth and young-adults with an alternative education resource, with each short lesson likely to prevent or undo years of indoctrination while equipping them with critical thinking skills and empirical knowledge. The Academy aims to be an alternative education resource platform and a lifeguard for educators, parents, grandparents and youth staying afloat in the ideologically engulfing current of education. An arduous but important project helped along by coffee and weekly anecdotes from Grade 1s about all things important to six-year-olds.