74: Kevin Donnelly - Ways to fix the Australian Curriculum

Join James in this episode as he sits down to discuss the Australian Curriculum with Kevin Donnelley. We discuss what is is, what is meant by a knowledge rich curriculum, where it falls short, and what can be done to improve the education of young Australians everywhere.

Please consider becoming a founding donor for St John Henry Newman College, a new independent classical school in South Brisbane.

Music: 'Inspiring Dreams' by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back to another episode of Educating Humans. I'm your host, James, and today we are joined by Dr. Kevin Donnelly. Kevin Donnelly has been a teacher for 18 years in and around the Melbourne area. He's a educational critic and consultant. He um has been involved in numerous initiatives in the past, but he's he's a very staunch advocate of classical education and the good that it can bring for the Australian society. He uh is a often a writer in the Australian and has had lots to say in the past, and we just thought it would be a perfect idea to get him on the podcast to hear the different perspectives that he would like to bring. Because the last episode we just had was with Dr. Simon Haynes, uh, and we were talking about this at a tertiary level, the great conversation and the cultural inheritance and how now is not a moment for it to be lost. But Dr. Donnelly here brings a good introduction or perspective uh to the P to 12 context in particular, looking at this curriculum and what we can kind of do with it. So we just thought it'd be a great continuation of that discussion, maybe bringing it more relevant for the school teacher uh than for the student or the professor at an in at a tertiary institution. So Kevin, thanks for joining us. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Great to be involved, James, and congratulations on all all the work you're doing. It's much needed and very timely.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

So I just wanted us to talk today a little bit about, I mean, you've had lots to say and valuable insights on the Australian curriculum, the state of education in Australia, and why now is a really pressing time for us to consider or reconsider a classical education in Australia. So I just thought we'd start by talking about well, what are some of the concerns that have led you to think in this way before we talk about the solution and and some of the advantages? Let's start with well, what what are the concerns?

SPEAKER_02 2:15

Yeah, I mean, I as you said I taught for 18 years, mainly English, uh literature as well. And I got heavily involved in the debates back then, this is over 30 years ago, about uh really reviewing the curriculum, reviewing year 12, a lot was happening around Australia. And we had a move towards a national curriculum over the last 20 years in particular. So, as somebody who was a teacher, I was always very much interested in not just what happened every day, every week in the classroom, but where did it come from? Who was actually writing the syllabuses, the frameworks, the curriculum? And so I went back and did a master's and a doctorate looking at curriculum in schools, mainly in America, Europe, England, Australia. And that ended up, I co-chaired the review of the national curriculum in 2014. And arising out of that, it was obvious, a lot of teachers, some parents, but a lot of teachers, felt that the national curriculum, which the various states and territories have to adopt, was very superficial, very crowded, very politically correct, and there was very uh little over prep to year 10 in all the subjects, very little about Western civilization and Judeo-Christianity. So there's a lot in the national curriculum and the various state and territory equivalent documents, there's a lot there about Asia, sustainability, the environment, about indigenous, uh Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, but there's very little about Western culture. For example, students can go through 10 years of schooling and not ever having studied Babylonia or Egypt or ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and as Geoffrey Blaney said, our great historian, those civilizations are the basis, the grounding on which Western culture is built. And I know people talk about multiculturalism, about diversity and difference, about being part of Asia. But if you look at our political, legal institutions, if you look at our language, uh, a lot of our literature, music, art, certainly our religion, if you're talking about uh Judeo-Christianity, it all goes back to those ancient civilizations and over thousands of years, what happened in the United Kingdom and Europe in terms of uh the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Reformation, Modernity. So, to get to the point, looking at the national curriculum, it's very uh one-sided, and so that's one reason we have started having these national conferences. Uh, the next one's in Fremantle next week, for teachers and parents and academics who want to do more in schools to teach a classical liberal education.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Hmm. I love what you've brought up there. I mean, it's it's the the conferences are are fantastic. The first one I went to was I think a couple years ago in Brisbane. Um and uh I mean that that's the local capital city to me, so it was an easy one to go to, but it was very valuable uh not only for hearing some good perspectives, but for meeting some other people that were thinking similar things. Because I think that's you know, one of the difficulties of uh being in Australia and facing these issues is that we are so spread out. And so you can have people thinking similar things, but they're all so distant, and it can almost feel um not isolating because there's there's you're still able to be connected via the internet and other things like that. But it can there's no substitute to being in the same room with a bunch of people that think the same thing and feeling that that energy and the enthusiasm and maybe the inspiring nature of that fellowship. So I that was when I came away from it. Uh the thing that I found the most beneficial was the idea of this fellowship, of a communal pursuit of this good thing. Uh so I I couldn't recommend them more. By the time this episode comes out, I think we're the the free man to one will have passed. But people should definitely um keep an ear out for the next one because these are a yearly thing and and they're very valuable to go to, so I couldn't commend them enough. Um I wanted to jump on this idea that you spoke about. Oh, yeah, please. Good job.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Yeah, I mean what you said is uh 100% as as the young people say, 100% correct. Uh we started off in Melbourne four years ago with maybe 20 teachers and parents and academics. Then we moved to Sydney at Campion College, which was uh about 80 people, and many of your listeners might know of Campion. Uh it's a college in in Sydney uh dedicated to what the Americans would call a liberal arts education. One of the, well, could be the only one in Australia doing that. And then we went uh to Brisbane, uh, about 90 people again, and then last year was Adelaide, where we had a hundred people registering, and uh next week is Perth, again a hundred people. It it's I'm keeping it small. I mean, you could have a lot more people, but as you say, if it's somewhere, and we've moved around Australia to really address that issue, that we don't want to just do it on the East Coast or you know in Sydney, we want to move it around because there are parents and teachers in every state and territory starting up these schools or having already established them, dedicated to a liberal classical education. Now we can talk about the differences there because they're not the same, they share a lot in common, but they are quite different. But there are people all around Australia starting up these schools, and it's it's so crucial as I get back to in Australia. We have some of the highest rates of young people feeling anxious, depressed, uh isolated. There's a lot of self-harm. You've got all the influence of digital technology, uh, all the you know, young people living in a virtual world of the internet, now whether it's sexting or bullying, cyberbullying, there are all these issues now, and parents are primarily responsible, so it all begins in the home, but it also uh is good if schools and the curriculum can address that. So it gives young people a sense of being morally grounded by teaching about virtues and about uh ethics and morality and uh Christian virtues in particular, but it's also teaching about uh being part of something, Western culture, Judeo Christianity, Australia as a nation, where there's a sense of social cohesion, a stability, and a sense of pride that what we've achieved. So it's a very difficult world out there now, and I'm not telling your listeners anything they don't know. But what many of the parents and teachers I talk to argue is that education, the curriculum over the last 20-30 years, has failed to give young people this strong sense of cultural identity, uh moral grounding, and a sense of uh being academically rigorous as well, but a sense that it is possible to achieve and to overcome adversity and to with the help of others without feeling that you're simply by yourself in a digital world where it's uh you you're no longer having that face-to-face human contact.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Yeah, I think a big part of what you're pointing out is um maybe something that's coming up across the season, the year in in this podcast is this idea of incoherence and harmony. And I feel like we are imparting incoherence on our students, you know, and what we should be doing as as parents, as teachers, as a society, is imparting harmony. But all we do is give conflicting, incoherent accounts of things, and this is maybe why, whilst Australia is by its genetic makeup, uh multicultural, we cannot have a multicultural incoherence. We need to have some form of harmonizing element, principle, by which we as a society and we as individuals are able to live, particularly for our students who, as you have very rightly pointed out, are experiencing the negative effects of this incoherence at at catastrophically self-destructive levels.

SPEAKER_02 12:12

Yeah, I mean the point there too, and and you're right, uh part of what I did when I when I went back to study, and luckily I had a supervisor for the PhD, uh Brian Crittenden, who was very much committed to a liberal education. And so I started reading and thinking, and when I looked at what was happening as a teacher in in the schools I was teaching in, but also what was happening with the curriculum, it's very negative and very pessimistic. So, for example, I've seen to give the example of climate change, I've seen 14, 12-year-old girls being interviewed on demonstrate at demonstrations who were crying, saying we can't have babies because the world's about to end in 2030. I mean, if you look at what's happening in schools in terms of the climate alarmism, and there was a very good uh publication by the Institute of Public Affairs uh based in Melbourne on what was happening in the curriculum and in schools, with climate change, young people were given a very pessimistic negative view, and so there was very little to hope for in terms of overcoming or looking forward to something positive or worthwhile. And uh if you look at certainly universities, but also in schools with the history curriculum, even with the way literature is taught, it's been very much influenced by uh critical theory, and what that means is uh if you're studying Shakespeare, you deconstruct it and critique it in terms of gender ideology, or in terms of uh racism, or in terms of classism, um, power, elites, and this all goes back to the Frankfurt School in Germany during the 1920s, 1930s, and the idea of cultural Marxism and the long march through the institutions, which is a whole other discussion to have. But it's important for your viewers to understand that what's happening in schools and the curriculum and in teacher training has been heavily influenced by what I call a cultural left, critical theory, uh, cultural Marxism, and you only have to see that with uh the way they teach the First Fleet and European settlement. So 1788 is an invasion leading to genocide. There is nothing positive or beneficial about uh the arrival of the British, uh, and whether it's climate change, whether it's history, or whether it's uh looking at uh Western culture over time, it's very negative, very pessimistic. And uh often students leave school with very little positive sense that there's something, as you say, harmony, beneficial, positive. And the interesting thing about a classical liberal education is it is about beauty and truth, and about a sense of enlightenment, and it's uh about human flourishing and about individual fulfillment. So it's not this sort of neo-Marxist critique where it's negative and always uh looking at the dark side, it's actually recognizing there are faults and flaws and there's nothing perfect, but at the same time, to give a young people a sense of affirmation of being part of something that's beneficial and worthwhile that's all very helpful and I and I agree with it.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Um I think one of the things it could be worth discussing then is this um if the curriculum has one leaning to it, right? Well what were the what are the recommendations to repair the ruins of Australian education, so to say, if you want to be so um maybe cataclysmic with the dis the current state, the well what what what do we do? What is the move forward in terms of what needs to be addressed in the curriculum?

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Yeah, when I co-chaired the review of the national curriculum, it's called the Australian curriculum, in 2014. When I co-chaired that review, we made a number of recommendations, as you would. Now, one is at the moment the curriculum, and there are probably at least I'll I'll say there are three or four issues here. The curriculum's overcrowded. So primary school teachers in particular just can't cover it. It's overcrowded. It's superficial, so that you can't spend enough time on a particular top topic on any depth. It it you're sort of going from one thing to the other very quickly. It's also uh very politically correct, or some would say woke, in terms of the focus. Now, whether it's indigenous, the environment, sustainability, Asia perspective. It it it's only ever giving one view rather than being balanced. So the good thing about a classical liberal education is that teachers are impartial, objective, and it's about giving young people the ability to think independently and to think critically and to weigh all sides of a debate and issue. But if you look at the national curriculum, uh overcrowded, superficial, politically correct, and bureaucratic. So there's a lot of education jargon, and it's obviously been written by people who have never taught in a classroom or a school or have not had that experience recently. So it's actually de-skilling teachers. So we recommended, for example, and I recommended in particular, that if you were to say the national curriculum took up the entire week of a school, five days, cut it back to 60%. So one thing you could do very quickly, uh, if you're reviewing the curriculum, is to say instead of a hundred percent, cut it back to sixty percent. So the other 40% of time in the school, teachers and and parents in the community could work out what it is that they wanted to focus on and uh what they thought was beneficial and worthwhile. So you cut it right back. What we have at the moment is you've got the content, you've got cross-curricular priorities, and you've got general capabilities. Get rid of all of that, the recommendation was, and to just focus on content. So instead of having a hundred, two hundred pages of of curriculum documents for English and maths and science and art and music, you cut it back. So English might be twenty pages, mathematics might be twenty pages. So you cut it right back to what's the essential knowledge understanding in schools rather than all these capabilities like generic schools and being creative. And if you've ever looked at the ACARA webpage and tried to read the national curriculum, it's really a checklist mentality. It's bureaucratic, it's tick the boxes, and it doesn't have that rigor substance that we need. So what should we do? Cut it back to 60%, get rid of the capabilities and generic schools, focus on essential content, make it more teacher-friendly, so that teachers can actually implement it, and that gets back to teacher training, which is an issue, which is going to take a long a lot of time to overcome. There's a real problem here that a lot of teachers are not subject experts, as I call them. So if you're trying to teach year 10, year 11, year 12 literature, you need to know as a teacher. You need to have had a pretty solid undergraduate degree in literature, where you've studied, you know, whether it's Australian literature, uh, tragedy, uh, whatever it might be. So you know about assonance, about alliteration, about metaphors, about you you you're a subject expert. So that's the other issue here that we need to talk about. And the good thing about these classical liberal schools, they're very much aware of that. And I mentioned Campion College. A lot of the graduates from Campion College uh would make excellent teachers because they've done an undergraduate uh three years, I think it is, to become very much uh, as I say, subject experts. So we can't just Be negative, we have to actually say how do we how do we improve it? Uh and frankly, a lot of people are homeschooling as well, and that's something else that uh I've been made aware of with these conferences. That one of the good things about technology, there are now increasing numbers of web web pages, websites, where Australian people are putting together Australian content for parents who want to have homeschooling. And that's a whole other area.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

That's all all very good. I think um I mean the homeschooling piece is a big one in terms of you know, if not that I want to put homeschooling forward as the as the last alternative kind of thing, but you know, there's there is a a freedom and a flexibility which is good that Australia still maintains with parents who are dissatisfied with the educational options present to them to homeschool. Uh I think one of the things there's so much that you've said there that we could talk more about. I think it's important for teachers to consider that idea of subject specialty um is big because it makes the it brings life to the classroom, especially and not to say that you have to be not because the teacher is uh lecturing in a way that they just know everything. It just gives them understanding of the terrain that the students are covering. Um the last thing I I wanted to bring up is those, it's it's funny how those two the two first critiques of the Australian curriculum are solved by the first two principles of classical education. If you go off Christopher Perrin and Carrie Evans' book, The Good Teacher, uh, which is Festina Lente, Make Haste Slowly, and Maltum non Malta, much not many. And we have this idea that you're right, it's if if we are bloated in any way with our with our curriculum, then that forces us to take a superficial approach, you know, to be like jet skis skimming over the water instead of being able to do deep dives. Because and it's so it doesn't it doesn't take much to recognize that a key step in trying to make whether it's an individual teacher's classroom uh or whether it's dealing with the curriculum, whether it's policy decisions, a a key step to being able to bring a more classical or liberal education is to find where you can cut out, where you can bring down so that you can have room to investigate the true, the good, and the beautiful more clearly. Right, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 24:59

I mean, the other point, I'll jump in there if I can, James.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Please.

SPEAKER_02 25:03

Uh and I've written about this and we'll talk about it in Fremantle. One of the one of the issues we're trying to address in Fremantle is there's a move now in in England and Australia towards what they're calling a knowledge-rich curriculum. So that's the current jargon that they're all using. When Kevin Rudd was prime minister, it was the digital age and every student would have a computer, and we have to be 21st century learners and digital natives and blah blah blah. But what they're now thinking is, well, maybe, golly, golly, maybe kids need to know something uh about knowledge, which kind of oh wow, how how long's it taken? But a knowledge-rich curriculum, what does that actually mean? Now, a good example or a good answer is Michael Oakshot, who was an English philosopher who wrote about the conversations of mankind, and he also uses the the the analogy of a conversation. That if you were to say, Well, what should you teach, or what should students learn, or what is the basis for a curriculum? He said, the basis is this within Western culture, a conversation that it goes back thousands of years to ancient Rome, ancient Greece. Uh, now whether it's uh, you know, I read somewhere the other day that everything that Aristotle and Plato talked about, ever since we've only been trying to work out how to add to it, how how to refine it, how to actually, you know, bring it up to date if we could, because that they state the territory back then in terms of virtues and ethics and epistemology and you know, philosophy of knowledge. And so, anyway, what Oakshop talks about is the conversation. Now, if I'm having a conversation with you or with someone, I would hope in Fremantle, and I and I was to say, Well, look, this conversation goes back thousands of years, it includes the great books, it includes much of music and literature, but also mathematics and science. So you need to know about Pythagoras, you need to know about Euclid. And if I was to say to you, uh, you know, Donald Trump he's he's met his Waterloo in terms of what's happening in the Middle East, you kind of would know what I meant. Achilles heel, you know, there are lots of expressions. So you want this conversation to be the basis of the curriculum. And another educationalist, E.D. Hirsch Jr., talks about cultural literacy. So that if you've gone through 12 years or 10 years of schooling, what is it the knowledge you need to know to be able to understand and participate in the public debate? When issues are being discussed or debated in the media, around the barbecue, by politicians, often there are references, like if you were to say, well, you know, what's the problem with coal and gas? Why are we shutting down coal stations? And and they tell you, oh, it's they're destroying the environment, they're killing the planet. Well, hold on, why is that? Uh what are they emitting? So is is what they're emitting carbon, why is that the problem? And how much does Australia actually contribute to the problem? So there's a lot there you've got to start to work through. And so if you haven't had a a pretty solid education, you won't be able to address those issues. So Oakshop talks about a conversation. Edge talks about cultural literacy, being familiar with. And the other one, I read a very good book a couple of years ago about what constitutes a Christian education, more importantly, in the book, a Catholic, and it went back to uh Saint Newman and Aquinas and the idea of what does a what does education, what's the purpose? If it's about truth and and beauty and being closer to God, then what does that actually mean? It means that as well as being secular, being of this world, it's also a spiritual transcendent view of education based on the virtues, based on uh you know, I'd say the the New Testament. So there's a lot there to think about, but the problem in the current curriculum is that none of that has ever been discussed or included. And one of the issues when we reviewed the curriculum in 2014, again and again we were told it's a very bureaucratic process putting it together. They never started by addressing the question, what is the purpose of education? Is it 21st century learning, lifelong learning? Is it to be a digital native, a knowledge navigator? Is it child-centered, student agency, all about the world of the child, contemporary, relevant? Is it about critical literacy, critical theory, helping young kids change the world in terms of a cultural left perspective? Or is it about something more significant, something more lasting, something more powerful? And that's what was never addressed in the national curriculum, or all the various uh declarations. There was a Melbourne Declaration, uh, a Hobart Declaration, the latest was the Yellow Springs Declaration, which are the roadmaps for education, school education. They all talk in general vague terms, but they never address the fundamental question, which I argue you you must do before you do anything else. What is the purpose of education? Once you've established that, generally all the rest will follow.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

I like that. And well, I think if we want to talk about knowledge rich being the um the new terminology, that that that's helpful for people to be able to recognize where the conversation is at this point with the curriculum. Um I think it begs the question as to what knowledge is. How do you know something? And again, I think it comes back to that. Well, if you want to talk about knowing something, I mean it's a it's a sad state of affairs if you want to look at a student's education. Christopher Perrin wrote this great book uh called The Skolay Way. And in the introduction to it, he he starts with discussing uh an anxious education. And he says it the he says most people who end up moving towards some sort of renewal um start because they themselves have been disappointed with what they've experienced. And he said, if we if we look back on our on our education, we we f feel like it went between two extremes, swinging on a pendulum, between that of tedium and boredom, and then that of stress and anxiety. And it was just a schooling of between these two things. Um and this is experienced not just you know emotionally, this is experienced cognitively, because you'll find that these students that undergo these kinds of two polar opposite polar extremes and kinds of their way of the peaks and valleys of learning, that they don't remember what they've learned because they very clearly store a lot of information in their short-term memory to be able to answer the questions on the test. But there's no meaning or value or or deep learning happening there. So they don't actually really retain all the information that they're learning. And then so then the question comes well, what's the niche sorry, what's the rich knowledge that they've had? And have they learnt anything? We've filled them with so much that they've forgotten all of it.

SPEAKER_02 34:08

I mean, the other point here, and and you're correct, I mean T. S. Elliott made the point, uh information is not knowledge, and understanding is not wisdom. So a lot of what's happening in schools is about information, and a lot of teachers now are even uh using AI as well to to put lessons together, and kids are using AI to answer the questions. But another point, you know, I I'm briefly mentioned, but I'll get back to it. And you made me think about it, a knowledge-rich curriculum. Well, whose knowledge? What type of knowledge and what what what's the purpose of this knowledge? Now, one of the most dangerous things over the last 20-30 years, especially in universities and teacher training, is the impact of what they call the sociology of education. So when I when I did the doctorate, I did it with Brian Crittenden, and he was very much versed in liberal education, philosophy of education. That all went by the by during the 70s and 80s, and what took over was the sociology of education, where knowledge had no inherent meaning or benefit. Knowledge was simply a social cultural construct imposed by what ulcers are called the ideological state apparatus. Now I I I mentioned the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School in Germany, a lot of the academics have have had a profound impact on on the West in terms of the question of knowledge. What they realized was that, and they were Marxists, they realized the revolution would never occur in the West, as it did in Russia and China. The workers would never take to the barricades. So what they realized was they had to work on the institutions in the West: schools, universities, family, church, intermediate organizations, the media. So cultural Marxism has become the preeminent force, if you like. And Olsaar calls it the ideological state apparatus. So their argument is that education, schools, knowledge are all instruments to enforce capitalist hegemony or hegemony. And Joan Kerner back in the day when she was education minister, she became premier in Victoria. She gave a speech at a Favian Society where she argued schools must be an instrument to overthrow capitalism and to bring about the socialist utopia. Now, this is a whole other discussion about you know the city of God and the city of man. That if you look at Marxism going back to the French Revolution, the whole idea was to create a utopia, a man-made utopia. So you close the churches, you imprison or kill the nuns and the priests, you you ban the Bible or the whatever it might be. But it never worked. History tells us it's never worked. You have the gulags in Russia, you have um Madame Guillotine and the French Revolution, you have Stalin, Lenin. Anyway, I'm getting up the point. But to get back to it, it's all very well to now say we need a knowledge-rich curriculum. The danger will be that will be taken by the academics and the teacher, those training the teachers, because they're very much influenced by cultural Marxism, they will put their bent on it. So they will say that a knowledge-rich curriculum is about uh equity, social justice, overcoming disadvantage, uh, getting rid of competition. Competition's bad, obviously, because some do better than others, uh, and some we certainly can't talk about failure. Uh, we we can't have the great books because if you probably were a post-colonial theory, that the argument there is that you can't have, and there's a couple of universities in the UK where even biology and science now uh they condemn enlightenment science as imperialistic and colonial uh supremacism, and so in the Australian curriculum, it's led to this argument you now have aboriginal algebra and aboriginal science. So it makes you think.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

Yeah, it does, it makes you think, and and we're coming near the um the end of our time together, but it does make you think well, at least for me, it makes me so grateful for what is a liberal education and a classical education. And really I would be thinking, look, ultimately the learner is responsible for their learning. If I'm looking at myself and going, I I was fed all of this stuff that was nonsense or or maybe just wasn't taught in the right way. There's just difficulties with the education that I'd had. I would say, well, thank goodness I have control over what I do next, you know, over what I do next. And then the same would be for parents and for teachers and for for adults who are wanting to educate themselves, parents thinking about, well, how do I make sure my child gets the right things? But then it makes me think of one of the most important books I I would argue written uh in the 20th century, which is Lewis's abolition man.

SPEAKER_02 40:49

Yeah, I was gonna mention that. I was rereading it yesterday. It was it's um because he worked this out, I think the book was published in 1945.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

And he's it was presented as a set of lectures. Yeah. And it's well, it's important because what he's arguing is very much you know, he uses education as a way to get into it, but then what he really hones in on is this idea, and it and you know, people are rereading it now because of how relevant it feels for AI, but the idea that we can undo ourselves because the more power we have is the more power we have over ourselves, or more maybe the more power some men have over other men, and if we've rejected natural law and objective value, then we do have this ability to undo ourselves, and that makes me worried because that thing I just said then about how grateful I am for my ability to then go, well, I didn't get this, so let me go learn it now. Well, what happens if we get to a point where, by way of technology or educational propaganda, that that option becomes no longer enticing or valuable or even an option?

SPEAKER_02 42:08

I mean that that's a fundamental question. Uh I've done a lot of work over the last 20-30 years, if you like, with with ministers of education and with bureaucracies and if you like at that level. To my mind, the work I've been doing over the last four years with teachers and parents starting their own schools has proven to be far more valuable for me. And I keep using the expression, lighting small fires, that education is like a huge oil tanker, it it's impossible to stop or to steer it takes so much time. If you're trying to work at that level of policy or at the national level, even at the state level, to improve education, it's gonna take five, ten years. But if you're thinking of supporting or helping parents and teachers starting classical liberal schools, that's ever growing. And it's people lighting small fires. As I said, we've had conferences uh Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, now Perth. All around Australia, people are starting these schools or uh having already established them. There's a new one in Brisbane, James Power and Dith Crowther have got that going this year. Uh a boys school within the Catholic tradition, uh St Newman, uh boys' school, I think it's called. So and the other thing where I'm still positive, the highest enrolment growth is in Christian schools across Australia. So parents are voting with their feet away from government schools in particular and going to Christian schools, where there generally is a stronger sense of Christian education based on virtues and a strong moral engagement. So, yeah, there are a lot of issues there that we could talk about, but you know, I think I'd like to end on that positive note that people are lighting small fires, and uh it's a matter of supporting that and ensuring that it that it that it grows. And one way, if it's true that at the federal level they're moving towards a knowledge-rich curriculum, that's what the conference next week is all about. What is a knowledge-rich curriculum within a classical or a liberal perspective? And and these talks will be videoed, you know. Hopefully, at some stage, people might even write, uh put together a small report on it. We have to try and enter the debate and public debate, because if we don't put this point of view strongly, it'll it won't be it won't be considered.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

That's a great point to end on. I appreciate your time, Kevin, and the uh what I would probably say is the just the valuable insight you're able to bring to the understanding and approaching the Australian curriculum and knowing its faults, um, but also being realistic within the idea of well, we are where we are and what can we do moving forward as individuals. So I appreciate the time and your contribution, uh, and I'm sure the listeners will have as well. So thank you.

SPEAKER_02 45:58

Thank you very much, James.