Recently the Minister for Education Christopher Pyne announced his intentions to review the national school curriculum ‘amid fears a “cultural Left” agenda is failing students’ (The Australian). Mr Pyne wants to restore an “orthodox” curriculum and named former teacher Kevin Donnelly and business professor Ken Wiltshire to lead the review.
Mr Donnelly has expressed a view that the curriculum had become “too secular” and the federation’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage should be better reflected in the curriculum, (ABC Radio-News). ‘Judeo-Christian’ is an interesting term that from around the 1950s began to reflect an ideological value rather than historical reality.
On the whole the idea of reviewing and re-examining the western and later Christian values of our nation is not bad in itself. A genuine enquiry could revisit the ethics and values upon which the West was built.
This enquiry may examine the historical and cultural links between the West and East from pre-Christian times, through to Eastern Christian Churches of Asia Minor, the Middle East and Ethiopia. But, an enquiry into ethics must look at the Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian philosophy, Confucian ethics and Hindu values. The four pillars of rational, human-centred civilizations, Greece, Israel, China and India, need serious thought, particularly as China and India reassert their power and importance on a global level.
Conservative social values underwrite, at least for the three linked monotheist faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In contrast, many of us who believe in western values are anti-clerical. We view religion at best as cultural and moral tradition, which should be respected in liberal democratic society, and worse as a threat to freedom and rationalism.
Somehow, I can’t help but believe that the ‘Judeo-Christian’ values touted by Mr Donnelly through the media are confined to a narrow band of modern Catholic-Protestant values.
I would be excited at the prospect of Australian school students examining Western values pre-dating Christianity by thousands of years, values that were reborn to attack ignorance and church autocracy.
In 2006, as a participant in a delegation to China, we visited the ancient city Xi-An and my hosts – knowing of my Greek background – showed me ancient steles of philosophical writing in Hebrew, Greek, Hindi and Mandarin. These historical artefacts reflected the ongoing links between west and east which predate any notion of east and west in Australian neo-Conservative minds.
An assessment of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman histories and values requires an examination of Asian, Asia Minor and Middle Eastern and African traditions. Australian students would be aware of the importance of western heritage, and be prepared to engage with the Middle East, Africa and Asia with a sense of dignity, historical respect and knowledge.
Let’s face it, Athenian democracy, Spartan discipline, Hebrew justice and Roman republicanism had by far the most impact on the development of the west. As Paul Cartledge, the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University underscores, the British public (private) school system owes more to Sparta and Athens than to any church. The late Thomas McEvilley, a distinguished historian of Greek and Indian philosophies, revealed the constant transference of ideas between Greek and Indian societies over thousands of years.
Let’s move forward to a space that Minister Pyne and his enquiry colleagues may feel more comfortable with; Anglo-Saxon values. Surely they too are built on Greek ethics, Hebrew law and Roman statism.
The rod that hold up British liberalism, French and American republicanism, Nordic and German social democracy was forged in Ancient Greece and Rome. Christianity, the Hellenic rebranding of Hebrew humanism and law, comes later and needed Aristotle’s ethics to secure an institutional legitimacy in the Byzantium, or Holy Eastern Roman Catholic Empire.
Sadly, it seems that the enquiry may commit the same intellectual laziness of the postmodern left. By using the term ‘Judeo-Christian values’ to leapfrog ancient Greek and Asian ethics, history, values and political discourse we may never find the appropriate balance in our education system between function and value.
The notion of Judeo-Christian values, especially in the minds of the ideological right, may add to the miasma of the postmodern curriculum that many of us are concerned about. Only by knowing how the west was born and how it impacted on the east, and vice versa, can we articulate a rational understanding of the world and Australia’s place in it.
As American scriptwriter, teacher and humorist Leo Rosten, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, said, “A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead.”
Will the new enquiry examine the Magna Carta as the first attack against royal decree and the beginning of the new west? How about the secular utilitarian philosophers, the fathers of British liberalism, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill? How will we look at the republican revolution against the British Empire, the ensuing rise of the United States of America, the apotheosis of Western values, under the stewardship of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and others who were considered treacherous radicals by the Imperial British?
Naturally, if we are keen on the west, we should reread Rousseau and Voltaire and understand the impact of the French Revolution on our western values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Then we can move onto Hegel, Marx and Webber, fathers of social democracy and modern socialism in modern Europe.
Will we be revising modern conservation and conservatives, modernists and socialists in the enquiry? What of the anticlerical renaissance, the rebirth of rational enquiry after Christian dogma?
In Australia, as part of the proposed refocus on the Western traditions, will we examine the settlement of British and non-British peoples on Australia? How will we look at Afghans, Chinese immigrants, Pacific Islanders, and Jewish, Greek and Italian sailors on the first fleet? How will we view the Eureka Stockade? Was it not a revolt premised on western values? How about the women’s vote, women’s rights and gender equality, they fit well in the western canon, but how do they fit in the orthodox Christian values?
What of gay marriage? Western canon, Hellenic, Roman, Renaissance and Liberal values accommodate it, but what of the conservative religious response to gay marriage? Most importantly, will we be revising our historical brutality towards Aborigines? Was not the Aboriginal civil rights movement part of the evolution of western values? And how will we look at multiculturalism and citizenship? How will the curriculum enquiry deal with Australian citizens who claim far more ancient connections to western values than nascent Conservative Australian Christian values.
Will the enquiry examine unionism and social rights movements as natural outcomes of Western political values? An enquiry that reflects on the true complexity of the west needs to reflect much more than just some predominantly Anglo Saxon Catholic Protestant conservative values.
Another issue raised by Mr Pyne was ANZAC Day. When I was taught in the traditional and western-biased Adelaide Boys High School, Anzac Day was a time for reflecting on the waste of young life and tragedy of an accidental and imperialist war, the bravery of many balanced against a failed British led operation.
Since the Howard years, Anzac Day has become a symbolic reference to the ‘birth of a nation’. In World War I, the ottoman Turks under the stewardship of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were defending their new nation and giving birth to a western style republic. If that is not the truth, then what is?
It was in World War II that we actually fought for democracy and nation, not empire. If any military endeavour can be exalted as a defence of western values such as, democracy and freedom, it would be our bloody fight against the totalitarian regimes of Royalist Japanese in the Pacific, after the British abandoned us, and our bravery against the fascist Nazis in Crete after our own generals failed us.
In Greece the Australians were taken into the Resistance as brothers and defenders of freedom and democracy. Our involvements in Afghanistan and Timor Leste can also be accommodated as actions in support for liberty, freedom and equality.
My greatest concern is that the education enquiry may not be a process of reintroducing western history, philosophy and politics as bases for our development, but rather the strange reinvention of a more limited and recent British/Australian Conservative agenda?
Maybe when we have a Chinese Australian Prime Minister with a Buddhist background, but secular values, fluent in Mandarin, English and Bahasa, schooled in ‘western’ and ‘Asian’ values, the issue of educational values will be less charged.
This opinion piece also appears in www.onlineopinion.com.au/ The author Fotis Kapetopoulos heads Kape Communications Pty Ltd, a cultural communications consultancy. He was Multicultural Media Adviser to Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu and former editor of Neos Kosmos English Edition. He lectures in communication and marketing at various academic institutions and will be undertaking a PHD at the University of Canberra.