The Ethics of Teaching and Learning

INTRODUCTION

In 1993, various conferences were organised at universities around Australia to explore a vital area of education, although one not often faced squarely:  the moral dimension of schooling.  My speeches delivered at these conferences, and a part of the discussion generated by those speeches, are contained in this booklet.

The question of moral education is, in fact, inescapable for schools.  Facts cannot be taught in complete isolation from values.  By the simple acts of choosing to teach calculus rather than numerology, and science rather than sorcery, schools make a judgment about the value of truth.  These choices may seem relatively easy.  More difficult choices arise in connection with the humanities.  Should children learning about other cultures, for example, be led into making moral judgments about those cultures, concluding perhaps that one is superior to another?  We may feel uneasy about this, viewing it as fostering ethnocentrism and as contrary to the ethos of a multicultural society.  But, on the other hand, would we wish our children to make no moral distinction between slavery and freedom, or between a religion requiring human sacrifice and another premised on the sanctity of human life, or between a racially tolerant culture and another which made possible the murder of millions in gas ovens?  It seems artificial, even inhuman, to study acts of great cruelty or experiences of great suffering without expressing an ethical response.

Four and a half years ago results were published of a modest survey of the guidelines issued by Education Departments about the teaching of moral values.  Most of the guidelines recognised the inevitability and, indeed, the desirability of teaching values in schools;  but they also reflected a growing uncertainty about which values could legitimately be taught.  Among the most frequently mentioned values was self-esteem, a term arising out of ego psychology and denoting psychic satisfaction.  But high self-esteem is not necessarily the corollary of virtuous conduct.  Exemplary actions may be accompanied by -- even impelled by -- a sense of personal unworthiness.  Equally, a person behaving in a cruel and depraved way could conceivably maintain a robust self-esteem, providing he did not let feelings of guilt intrude.  So, self-esteem in itself seems a particularly misleading beacon for ethical education.

Much more recently -- in August 1993 -- a survey of young Victorians was published by Melbourne's Sunday Age.  Of the 700 surveyed, all of whom were Year 12 students, 44 per cent admitted to lying or cheating often at school.  Twenty-two per cent admitted to stealing from a shop in the last year.  Twenty-seven per cent said that if they found a wallet they would keep it rather than hand it in.  Forty per cent thought it acceptable to cheat to pass exams and three out of four believed cheating was common at their school.

I draw attention to these alarming figures not to suggest that schools are to blame for them, but to indicate the urgent need to tackle the issue of ethics among the young.  Of course, school is only one among several main influences on moral development.  Parents -- especially parents -- the media, the peer group, and the churches also play a significant part.  Nevertheless, children tend to learn attitudes from those in authority, and teachers are among the important authorities in a child's life.

The subject of ethics in teaching and learning is large and complex.  A single day's conference could not encompass all of its dimensions.  Nevertheless the papers in this collection shine considerable light on it.  One theme which emerged on the day -- and this accounts for part of the inherent difficulty of the subject -- is that moral education is not a discrete entity:  it cannot be confined to a corner of the curriculum, but must be woven into the fabric of a school's practices -- in the example set by its teachers in the classroom and in the games played by its pupils in the schoolyard, in its textbooks and in its rituals.  To a large extent, it is the subtext of the whole of a school's daily life.

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THE AUTHORITY TO TEACH

I shall restrict myself to first principles, steering clear of the complexities of practice.  I take my cue from a very successful commercial film from 1989, which focussed on the question of education, and in particular on what makes a good teacher.  Dead Poets' Society takes as its location a wealthy private boys school on the American East Coast -- although it was directed by an Australian, Peter Weir.  Its central figure is a charismatic poetry teacher, Mr Keating.

We first meet Mr Keating as he saunters into his first class whistling -- he is new at the school.  Instead of mounting the podium he walks straight through the room and out the rear door.  He reappears and impishly beckons to the boys to follow.  He leads them into the school's inner sanctum -- this school, being a good one, has such things, knows about them.  It is a heavily panelled room with the walls hung with photographs of past generations, and with the other holy relics, the trophies and honour boards.  Keating utters his first words here, in the heart of the school:  "O Captain!  My Captain!".  That is how the boys are to address him, if they are daring.  The words are from Walt Whitman and refer to Abraham Lincoln.  Keating then urges the boys forward to look at a photograph from 1902, and points out that the subjects look just like them, at the same stage in life, with the same hopes.  The difference is that they are all dead:  their bodies one and all now feed the worms.  What is the moral?  It is carpe diem, seize the day, for life is once and brief, so do not waste it.  From this moment carpe diem rules the film, as the new god replacing the school's four presiding virtues -- tradition, honour, discipline and excellence.  Keating's entrance has been dramatic, unconventional, mysterious:  he has woken the boys up, and sown the seed of his gospel, to suck the marrow out of life.

Keating acts out his philosophy in his own vocation, as teacher.  He loves his subject, projecting his passionate identification with his heroes, the Romantic poets, Whitman, Thoreau, Byron and Tennyson.  He also loves his boys.  His greatest achievement is with the insecure and inhibited Todd, who worries for days about the writing of a poem to be read aloud before the class.  His escape from the imagined humiliation is to write nothing.  Keating hauls him out in front of the boys and starts shouting at him, spins him around, and further intensifies the terror by breaking all courtesies by manhandling his face, covering his eyes with his own hands, demanding that he look at Whitman's portrait above the blackboard and shout out what first comes to his mind.  The induced trauma works, and Todd utters a stream of images.  Keating praises them.  The dam has finally cracked.  From then on Todd steadily gains in confidence.  Keating's triumph has been because he takes his vocation as teacher with seriousness, which means he takes each boy as he is, directing himself at each one with a personal intensity.  This is predicated on the teacher's respect for the student, the opposite of the only advice Todd's indifferent parents can offer their son in a moment of crisis -- Don't make trouble.  Todd feels worth something, for the first time.  Now he will be able to seize the day.  Any teacher can learn from Mr Keating.

The film sets up a stark polarity, of good and evil.  On the one hand there is Romantic virtue, celebrating the poetic, the sensitive and the individual.  On the other hand there is prosaic bourgeois conformity, represented by parents whose only interest is in their sons gaining prestigious jobs and establishing prosperous homes.  The stolid and pedantic headmaster kills poetry when he teaches it.

However, this is merely the superficial story.  Under the surface the film is pervaded by imagery of death.  Keating's opening gambit in the film's seminal scene is to shock the boys that one day they will be feeding the worms, like that photographed earlier generation before their eyes.  It is because mortality rules that we are in such a hurry:  seize the day is a way of cheating the inevitable, making a stand, so forget everything else.  The school hall is like a crypt.  The Indian cave in which the recreated Dead Poets' Society meets is funereal, the boys initially afraid lest they hear whispers from the dead.  When Neil -- the founder of the society and the leading Keating disciple -- plays Puck, in his pioneering role as an actor, the striking part of his costume is a huge crown of dead twigs, and more dead twigs simulating his hands.  It is in part a crown of thorns allusion, but the simpler and stronger thrust is towards a life that is desiccated.  When you have sucked the marrow out of life what is left but the dried bones?  The figure of Puck itself is outside life, the naughty sprite, the boy who cannot grow up, for whom time has stopped.  After playing Puck, Neil kills himself.  Then there are the dead poets themselves, whose portraits look down from above Keating's blackboard, the film's ultimate authorities.  Why bother to stress that they are dead?  Such is not a normal procedure.  The title of the film thus points to its driving subterranean current.

Why death?  Because Mr Keating believes in nothing but "Me", the all-creative "I" which must break all bounds in order to be free.  He encourages the boys to violate all rules, respect no limits.  He has them march in step mimicking the Marines, then one by one break ranks to invent their own individual steps.  He has them playing football to the thumping strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the anthem of German Romanticism, the hymn to passion and freedom compromised by the prominent use made of it by the Nazis in their own revolution against the traditional order.  What starts with pure egoism, rationalised in educational philosophy as "self-realisation", Whitman's "I celebrate myself", ends either in permanent childhood -- Puck -- or destruction.  In the film it ends in both together.

Of course Keating is right to bring poetry to life.  It is good to seize the day.  But the human condition is not that simple.  There are demonic forces in all of us, one of the reasons we need fairly strict hierarchies of order and control, external if not internal.  This is particularly true for what is the most innately unstable period in most people's lives, their adolescence.

Keating is irresponsible.  Neil is too weak to stand up to his father.  He needs his charismatic teacher's help in asserting himself, but the champion of carpe diem, who has inspired his most gifted student to seize the day, become an actor against his father's wishes, backs off, lowers his eyes in evasion, retreats into his own egoism.  Implicitly he supports Neil's childish response of withdrawal in cowardice and deceit.  Neil is Puck, and Puck trapped kills himself.

Keating is a prophet of death.  What he preaches is false.  That he is himself like Puck, the monstrous sprite who hates order and is fixated in perpetual childhood, is only the easy side -- for there is reason to mock bourgeois snobbery and materialism.  What Keating really hates is Law.  I do not just mean the meritorious values of the school -- tradition, honour, discipline and excellence -- which are vital to the good life, and unjustly caricatured in the film.  There is Law in the transcendental sense of the universal order that governs all things.  Mr Keating, being a true modern man, does not believe in it.  Hence his frenzy to seize the day, to beat the worms.  And at this point it is worth remembering that in modern perspectives on education he is not an eccentric;  indeed he is a vital and very attractive exemplar of the mainstream progressive view, deriving from Rousseau, that the teacher's goal is the self-realisation of the child.  The guiding axiom goes even further back:  it is the humanist belief that the centre of meaning on earth, the first social principle, is the individual human "I".  Education's task is to develop it.

The alternative view was put as well by Plato in old age as by anyone:

Education is the drawing and leading of children to the rule which has been pronounced right by the voice of the law ... Education is the rightly disciplined state of pleasures and pains whereby a man, from his first beginnings on, will abhor what he should abhor and relish what he should relish.

THE LAWS

Plato's key notion is that of "right fear", the essence of courage.  There are things that humans do that are such transgressions of universal law that we should be afraid in their vicinity, afraid because of the violation of higher order, whether or not we ourselves are the perpetrator.  Such was the ancient Greek case of Oedipus, when he found out that he had unwittingly killed his father and married his mother.  He was not culpable -- indeed he had done everything humanly possible to escape his parents -- but he was dreadfully guilty.  Cowardice is fear in the wrong place.

In practical educational terms what does this mean?  Right fear is not something that can be taught.  Neither is the existence and nature of universal law.  That is, they cannot be taught directly.  Indirectly, there is a role for learning, learning that reinforces instinct.  It occurs by example, the example of the teacher himself.

The teacher must have authority.  This means authority in the eye of the pupil, and a mastery that evokes not just admiration, and a desire to emulate, but awe -- or even, not to put too fine a gloss on it, right fear.  Authority is always close to arousing anxiety, the common manifestation of its implicit power to coerce.  To have authority means to be a centre of force and gravity, thereby having the capacity to direct without formalised directions.

There are particular and general features of the school-master -- to re-employ that old-fashioned term which is so apt in its resonances.  The particular is mastery of the subject, whatever it happens to be.  The general is that the authoritative teacher represents adulthood, what it means to be a man or woman moving with confidence, poise and command in the big, wide, threatening world.  Every child wants to become like this, and is dependent on admired adults for identification.  Thus the master-apprentice model on which all successful education hinges has two dimensions, the learning of specific disciplines, and the broader development of character to fit the child for maturity.

The authoritative teacher has aspects then of the idealised father or mother.  He also creates a mood in the classroom of alert and focused interest -- Mr Keating was a strong example.  This is authority as the basis of security, of a cocooning order which frees the pupils to dedicate themselves to their directed tasks, wholly absorbed.

A good teacher can arouse interest in any subject.  He may have something of both the salesman and the entertainer.  If that is all he has his pupils will, once the pleasure has passed, feel cheated.  That teacher is a charlatan.  The subject is itself important.  The genuine teacher loves his subject, which means that the seriousness with which he treats it, the state of deep and concentrated mind it elicits in him, bestows on it a sort of enchantment, which is infectious.  Again, Mr Keating is a powerful example of this -- he is a genuine teacher.  Any subject will certainly contain its humdrum and prosaic elements, ones which will predominate when it is taught badly, rendering it boring.  A part of the emotional chemistry created through the authority of the good teacher will be a type of love for him, which is then displaced onto the subject.  The child comes to love the subject.

Returning to Plato's notion of "right fear", there are two ways in which the subject taught is in itself significant.  Either it is a discipline, such as Euclidean geometry.  Or it is an area of knowledge, which is not conveyed just as knowledge for its own sake -- school is not a talking Encyclopedia.  Let us consider these in turn.

A discipline is an ordered way of practice, with its own laws and techniques.  Take a grand example, that of architect.  The discipline is to have so developed technique and judgment that when it comes to designing a building he gets it right.  For each building there is a right form, given the specifics, including the site, its terrain and climate, the building materials available, and the function which it is required to fulfil.  There is a law over each building, one which in most cases is broken.  Most buildings violate the laws of architectural form.  In a bad house, for instance, the spaces and materials do not harmonise, the planes jar, the colours clash, and it is difficult for the inhabitants to feel at ease -- truly at home.  Furthermore, to design a bad building is a crime, literally speaking, for a law has been broken, and guilt will follow.  It is a moderately serious case of Plato's right fear.

Architecture is like any discipline, in that once acquired it has itself, indirectly, taught a most important thing:  human action is governed by universal law, law which is sanctioned.  Colloquial English recognises this, in the expression "to do a job justice".  Every job should be done properly, for justice -- that is, Law -- is at stake.  Our outrage at shoddy work -- a new door that sticks, a clumsily drafted document -- is more than at the inconvenience.

Now in the classroom it is not different.  There are many disciplines taught at school.  A child that learns Euclidean geometry, for instance, is introduced into a domain of clear and distinct order.  Ultimately the beauty of this particular order is less to do with the logical facility with which proofs proceed once the method has been mastered, than that it provides a stark visual blueprint contradicting Mr Keating and what he embodies, that the human condition is condemned to wild swings between manic living and the worms.  The laws of Euclid are forever.  Moreover, to learn one discipline is to learn them all, for in Plato's terms, each one is a continuing lesson in rule and right fear.  To have been subjected to one, coming to obey its laws, practising its methods, accepting its authority, is to have learnt the main lesson that all teach:  there is something greater than myself, and it, not me, is what should be celebrated.

At school areas of knowledge are also taught, and not as a part of a discipline.  But if history, geography, biology, and so on are merely presented in themselves they will remain no more than a random assembly of profane facts -- suitable to the pedestrian intelligence exhibited on quiz shows.  To learn that Cairo is the capital of Egypt or Elizabeth the First had syphilis only makes sense if they are instances of a higher level of truth.  History's significance is in the end as myth, in the mode of ethically-charged truth about ancestors, the worth of those who came before, who prepared the way, and from whom we inherit, to whom we are responsible for caring for the world they left us.  Science's significance is ultimately, as both Newton and Einstein in their different ways proclaimed, as revelation of the wonderful divine order of Nature.  A teacher's authority depends in part on his work being inspired by attachment to this higher level of truth.

From where does the authority to teach come?  The answer is disarmingly simple.  It is a gift.  Teaching is a vocation, to which one is called.  Moreover, with the gifted hardly any training is necessary.  We all know how useless and dispiriting Diplomas of Education are in practice, apart that is from the weeks spent as apprentice teachers in the schools themselves.  Teaching is a vocation in the full sense, which means that it has its own set form, or universal law -- when broken there will be guilt.  Of course, that guilt will usually manifest itself in disguise, in cynicism, lethargy, irritability, or a false and unproductive busyness.

If teaching is treated merely as a job, then the fact of it being a chore, a painful duty to be got through, will instantly be communicated to the children.  Children are vulnerable to infection from nihilistic teachers, casting the pall over them that life is aimless and tedious, to be got through as best as possible.  Reciprocally, the reward for good teaching is to leave children who are cheerful, eager to enter the adult world, who like life, and because of that will feel a responsibility for the world they inherit.  They will want to renew it.  Ultimately they leave school grateful to be alive, and to be living here and now, in this place at this time.  We should all, in turn, be grateful to their teachers.

QUESTION PERIOD

PETER HUNT (Redfield College, Dural):  You mention Tennyson as one of Keating's favourite poets.  Does he have the kind of death wish mentality that you have so well described?

RICHARD WOOD:  There is a lot of gruesome, melancholy death imagery in Tennyson.  But is there another Tennyson?

PETER HUNT:  Although his early poetry was a bit self-indulgently melancholic, Tennyson rose above that.  Particularly in In Memorium, his sense of courage and duty was supreme.  Crossing the Bar verifies that at the end.  So I regard Tennyson as a superb example for young people.

RICHARD WOOD:  You mean he is unfairly included in Mr Keating's list?  He is not stressed in the film but he is mentioned.

REET KABl (Family Planning Association of NSW):  I think most people would resolve large problems in life and take on the world's care in their 20s, 30s or indeed their 40s.  Do you really see that adolescents at 17 or 18 have the necessary energy and clarity, not confusion and fear?

RICHARD WOOD:  I have seen some energy and clarity, but that's not really the point.  Education and schools are not primarily responsible for the morale and optimism and buoyancy of 17- and 18-year-old children.  Their families are.  Next in importance is the school.  I think we are more dependent now on good teaching than we were 30 or 40 years ago -- partly as a corrective to the greater instability in the family and partly as a corrective to the increasing, slovenly lack of direction and relativism in our wider culture.  We are now in a world in which fewer and fewer children are entering adulthood with the cheerfulness and enthusiasm that I've been talking about.  We are therefore even more dependent on a revival of true schooling.

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POLITICAL CORRECTNESS:  IDEOLOGY IN EDUCATION

I first encountered the term "political correctness" -- or at least focussed upon it -- in the late 1980s.  Perhaps I was a late developer.  What I remember was that as soon as I heard the term, I knew, more or less precisely, what it meant and was aware, more or less instantly, of the ideological phenomenon to which it referred.  For this phenomenon there had not existed, prior to the invention and adoption of the term "political correctness", any alternative.

To what, then, did and does "political correctness" refer?  First and most obviously, political correctness -- unlike, say, socialism or anarchism but like sexism or racism -- is a pejorative term.  It refers to a disapproved-of political-ideological position.  Secondly, political correctness clearly refers to something associated with what can be loosely called the Left.  What kind of force on the Left it refers to will be considered later.  Thirdly, political correctness refers to a certain style of thought and, in particular, to three aspects of this style:  intolerance, primness and conformism.

Those who are accused of the left-wing habit of mind known as political correctness are being accused of belonging to an intellectual pack which has elements in it of smugness, self-certainty and a kind of neo-puritanism or, as we Australians might put it, left-wing wowserism.  With political correctness the world is made manageable by the invocation of a contemporary catechism of sinful and worthy sentiments.  Those who are accused of political correctness are, in addition, being accused of belonging to a thought-police-force and of wishing to impose a conformity within the bailiwicks inhabited by the intelligentsia -- the universities, the quality media, the teaching profession and the public service.  They are also being accused of aspiring to re-educate wrong-thinkers or, if necessary, to silence the unexpectedly stubborn by acts of stigmatisation and exclusion.

This points to the last important defining element of political correctness.  The term refers essentially to an intra-intelligentsia conflict, to the cultural struggles between what one might call the left-wing moral majority at the university and its right-wing or neo-conservative minority opposition.  Both the enforcers of political correctness and their neo-conservative (like Irving Kristol) or neo-Dionysian (like Camille Paglia) opponents are located in or around the humanities and social science faculties of Western, especially Anglo-American, universities and radiate out from there to the media, the public service and schools.  Generally speaking, the most politically incorrect social strata of modern societies are the working class.  However, although they hold views on many issues -- on race or gender or punishment -- which are so politically incorrect that they would make even most neo-conservative intellectuals wince, this fact is rarely criticised or even noticed by the enforcers of political correctness.  The provenance of the argument over political correctness is, more or less exclusively, the academy.

At the heart of that academic, left-wing, neo-puritan habit of thought, which its neo-conservative opponents call political correctness, is a very broad-ranging hostility to the cultural traditions of the West.  Western or European civilisation is, firstly, assumed to have been since the time of the Greeks, and to be still, inherently racist -- in its supposed assumption of the superiority of its own culture to that of others in Asia or Africa, which it is seen to have treated with great contempt and great brutality.  Some of the genuinely darkest chapters of European history -- the enforcement of slavery;  Western imperial conquest and the attacks on indigenous cultures;  the long history of European anti-Semitism culminating in Nazi policies of extermination -- are seen not as European blackspots but as the defining episodes of European civilisation.  Similarly, European social history is now, characteristically, viewed as nothing but the story of a prolonged patriarchy, of the systematic suppression of women by men.  According to this view, women have suffered sexual abuse, inside and outside marriage, at the hands of the predatory male;  they have been coerced by men, through law, tradition and religious mumbo-jumbo, into leading subordinate lives as mothers and housekeepers;  they have been robbed of property rights and restrained from giving expression to their intellectual and artistic capacities, and so on.

European civilisation has built itself, in addition, according to the politically correct world view, on anti-democratic hierarchies of privilege, caste and class, and has always exploited the labour of the property-less for the benefit of these hierarchies.  To racism and sexism is added the sin of elitism.  Through philosophical arrogance, spiritual restlessness and insatiable materialism, we have exploited and despoiled the natural environment.  Europeans, particularly Christian Europeans, have long persecuted homosexuals.  Europeans have cruelly mistreated non-human animals.  European civilisation mistreats its elderly and its children.  It has long discriminated against, even incarcerated, those amongst us who are disabled or mentally ill.  It has stigmatised and punished so-called criminals with great brutality and vengefulness.

Judged against a child-like, a John Lennon-like, imagined paradisal utopia of the mind -- a utopia in which all people love each other;  in which all distinctions of species, race, nation, class, gender or talent have magically dissolved;  and in which evil has been banished from the world -- European civilisation is nothing to write home about.  It is racist, sexist, élitist, homophobic, speciesist, anti-environmentalist, ageist, ableist and so on.

Given all this, it is hardly surprising that the politically correct are uncompromisingly hostile to the pretensions and arrogances of Western civilisation.  The crowd which marched on Stanford University, chanting "Hey-ho, hey-ho, hey-ho, Western civilisation has got to go" captured its essence.  Those who cherish this tradition without thereby denying its imperfections and darknesses;  those who can live reasonably comfortably within this tradition without expressing formulaic, ersatz guilt concerning it;  and those who regard the utopianism of their dreamy colleagues as naive at best and dangerously authoritarian at worst -- are the enemies of the politically correct.

The politically correct claim to speak on behalf of the real or supposed victims of this civilisation.  Theirs is an activist doctrine.  It aims to vindicate the rights of these groups by stormy political campaigns in their favour;  by running courses and writing books which expose the dark side of this civilisation;  and finally, by the necessary intimidation of those who resist the politically correct worldview.

Language is at the front line of this battle.  In our daily speech and writing the political correct demand of us, for example, that we do not use the impersonal "he" and that we substitute for it the clumsy "he or she", or the grammatically unmanageable "they".  They demand that we abandon those nouns which use the suffix "man", especially with regard to those offices or professions from which, they believe, women have been excluded -- chairman, businessman, craftsman, sportsman.  They demand that we be required to stop attributing any qualities -- even positive ones -- to ethnic or racial groups as a whole.  They demand that we become ever more nimble in the invention of a language of euphemism to avoid offending those suffering from any form of real or supposed handicap or disability.

To some extent the linguistic program of the politically correct is unexceptionable.  I can sympathise with women's irritation with a system of formal titles which advertised their marital status while allowing men complete discretion.  Or again, I must admit that, in general, I have now succumbed to the abandonment of the impersonal "he" where I can stylistically justify "he or she" in its place.  However I do have considerable objection to the attempts made by the politically correct to impose a regime of euphemism on every form of personal misfortune.  Perhaps it is hoped that such euphemisms will soften its pain.  Perhaps it is hoped that circum-location is the way towards a "caring" society.  If so, both are foolish hopes.

There are two main reasons for opposing the euphemistic newspeak of political correctness.  Firstly its demands rob language of the naturalness and spontaneity which are at the root of its liveliness.  Secondly euphemism is a hopelessly self-defeating linguistic strategy.  All euphemisms have a strictly limited shelf-life.

More seriously, nowhere is the primness and intolerance of political correctness more obvious than in regard to its language diktats.  Happily, however, in regard to the politically correct language enforcers there seems to be one final weapon still in the hands of the counter-revolution -- namely humour.

Clearly, political correctness is a phenomenon of the Left.  However, as Irving Howe has eloquently pointed out, in its generalised hostility to Western civilisation, the political correctness style of thought is certainly not Marxist in any recognisable sense.  The intellectual roots may or may not lie in the radical relativism of deconstructionist and post-modernist strands of thought.  Its political roots lie elsewhere -- most importantly in what Edward Shils has called the antinomian revolution of the 1960s -- the revolution against authority, tradition, custom and institution -- unleashed during the Vietnam War.  Clearly, the ardour of that revolution has cooled.  Throughout the Anglo-American world, campuses are quiet.  However, in the lecture halls and classrooms a once revolutionary program, which wished to turn the world upside down, falls like "gentle drizzle" (Tom Wolfe) upon the heads of the new generation of students as the standard curricula taught by the "tenured radicals" (Roger Kimball) or derevolutionised teachers.  At a different level of the academy this once revolutionary program has become the basis for a new administrative code of good behaviour.  In 1990 -- or so I read -- students at Wisconsin were warned that they could be disciplined for "racist or discriminatory comments, epithets or other expressive behaviour directed at an individual or on separate occasions at different individuals".

There are a number of reasons for opposing the spread of the politically correct style of thought at our universities and schools.  To allow the Western tradition -- the so-called canon of religious thought, philosophy, literature, art, music and history -- to be discussed before our students, as the product of dead, white, European males, represents, especially in a television age like the present, an extraordinary betrayal.  Or again.  While I have no doubt that the perspectives of contemporary feminism or multiculturalism can disclose new ways of seeing and interrogating our tradition, to allow these ideologies to rewrite or to reinterpret altogether the way we view this tradition is to submit to a process of self-totalitarianisation whereby the past is savagely and systematically pressed into the service of prevailing ideology, leaving us anchorless and adrift in a sea of perpetual presentness.

Finally, to accede to the rise of the politically correct style of thought is also, in my view, to accede to the growth of a new form of intolerance in our universities and schools.  When Richard Grenier visited Australia last year he described universities as islands of repression in a sea of freedom.  No doubt he was exaggerating even with regard to the present situation at the American Universities, and very much more so in regard to Australian ones.  Nevertheless, he was speaking about something real.  There are good reasons to suppose that if the politically correct style of thought is not opposed, it will eventually curtail our freedom.  Why?

Political correctness, as I have argued, is a severe and prim doctrine.  It regards certain categories of thought as expressions of self-evident evils.  The lists of particular evils included in its general categories -- racism, sexism, élitism, homophobia etc -- are broad and ever-expanding.  The evil connected with homophobia, for example, may begin with genuinely reprehensible behaviour, like physical or verbal violence against homosexuals.  But it soon comes to include such things as arguments against, for example, the legal recognition of homosexual marriage or the right to advocate the practice of homosexuality to school students.  Before long, those who continue to put these arguments suffer stigmatisation as homophobes.  Eventually -- as already on some US campuses -- pressure builds to make the expression of such "offensive" views punishable.

In this atmosphere discussions of all questions central to the humanities and social sciences are affected.  Nothing is left untouched by the prim hand of political correctness.  In this atmosphere, certain particular questions gradually become more or less undiscussible.  Let me give a few examples that come to mind.  The case of Professor Geoffrey Blainey revealed that academics in Australia, by and large, will not tolerate arguments concerning the ethnic composition of our migrant intake.  The genetic component of intelligence is now virtually a no-go area.  Various questions concerning the AIDS epidemic are all but undiscussible.  Because of feminist-derived political correctness, only an extremely courageous academic would publicise research which took the view that institutional day-care for babies did them significant harm.  And so on.

Not only conservatives or civil libertarians are appalled by the movement to political correctness.  "The political correctness panic", to borrow from Meaghan Morris, has manifestly affected even parts of the Old Left.  There appeared in the 15 April 1991 issue of The New Republic a spirited defence of the idea of the university and an attack on political correctness on campus by the southern Marxist historian of slavery, Eugene Genovese.  Parodying Sidney Hook's Cold War polemic, Genovese called his piece, "Heresy, Yes -- Sensitivity No".  Let me quote from it:

Were today's Universities the place of high education that they jocularly pretend to be, we would have had a vigorous debate on the issues raised by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.  Instead, with some notable exceptions, the left settled for denunciations and the right for hosannas.  Now we have another chance.  Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education recounts, in a manner both responsible and chilling, the atrocities that ravage our campuses.

After calling for a campaign of what he calls counter-terrorism against those administrators and faculty who capitulate to the political correctness barbarians, Genovese explains their capitulation thus:

Who wants to be accused of insensitivity?  The answer is, those who recognise "sensitivity" as a codeword for the promulgation of a demagogic political program.  At Brooklyn College, which I attended in the late 1940s, everyone took for granted that students ought to challenge their professors and each other.  Professors acted as if they were paid to assault their students' sensibilities, to offend their most cherished values.

He concludes by calling for co-operation across the political spectrum in defence of the university:  "The defence of academic freedom requires an all-out counter-attack by a coalition that cuts across all the lines of politics, race, and gender.  It is time to close ranks."

To conclude my central case:  as a style of thought, political correctness is incurious, unironical, impatient, flatly political, morally charged, and highly intolerant.  We should be on our guard against the threat it poses to our schools and universities.

Having advanced my case against the political correctness style of thought I would like, in conclusion, to suggest two distinctions, both of which have a bearing on the future of our schools and universities.

In the past few months the term political correctness -- with all its negative connotations -- has passed beyond education and from the more or less esoteric discourse of intellectuals into the political mainstream.  Frequently when politicians or public figures say something unfashionable in the areas of race and gender, and when they are set upon for their comments by the media, the modern moral posse, they defend themselves by referring to their critics as the constabulary of the politically correct thought police.  On occasions this defence is justified.  Sometimes it is not.  Let me try to demonstrate what I mean by reference to two recent examples.

In May this year Quadrant published an essay on the European influence in Australia by the historian John Hirst.  One section of the essay dealt with questions about the aborigines and the evasive way some contemporary writers in Australia had come to deal with them.  Hirst pointed, for example, to the case of a government-sponsored handbook on the aborigines.  In its early editions it had spoken openly about aboriginal practices like infanticide or female circumcision or fierce tribal warfare.  In its most recent version all reference to practices which contemporary Australians might find offensive had been tactfully removed or redescribed.  Hirst disapproved of these evasions for much the same reason he would disapprove of an evasive history of the impact of white settlement on the aborigines.  There was nothing in Hirst's supple and penetrating essay, in either its content or its tone, that suggested any hostility to aboriginal culture and much that suggested otherwise.  And yet because he had written plainly and had refused to defer to the requirements of the academy, it was not long before an article appeared in The Age accusing him of the sin of "new racism".  Here was political correctness at work.

Shortly after Hirst's essay was published the former head of the NCSC, Henry Bosch, stumbled into the centre of Australian public debate.  In the course of a public address and of radio comments which followed it, Mr Bosch made clear that he thought aborigines were a backward Stone Age people who had, as he put it, been getting away with murder for 200 years.  Mr Bosch could not understand why so many Australians were interested in trying to find some basis for reconciliation with them.  For his part, he expressed considerable irritation with the whole process.

After his comments were published, Mr Bosch was subjected to very considerable criticism.  It was not long before he claimed that he had become a victim of political correctness.  I felt little sympathy for this claim.  The charge of crassness or moral thoughtlessness could not simply be avoided by claiming for oneself the status of politically incorrect victim.

The distinction between the kinds of issue raised in the Hirst and the Bosch cases is of fundamental importance to educators trying to think clearly about the problem of political correctness.  The political correctness style of thought seeks to deny the difference between unfashionable intelligence on matters of ethnicity or gender and simple-minded thoughtlessness in regard to them.  Precisely because of this, it is vital that those who oppose political correctness do not, in reaction, fall into the trap of also denying this kind of distinction.  If the defence of political correctness victimhood is available to Henry Bosch, how long will it be before we are told that the disapproval visited upon the Holocaust-denier, David Irving, is also a form of political correctness?  And if such a defence is to be mounted in favour of Henry Bosch or even David Irving, what possible use will it be to John Hirst?  To put my point simply:  Without the capacity to distinguish between the cases of a John Hirst and a Henry Bosch, it is hard to see how our schools and universities can be protected from the political correctness zealots.

Earlier I quoted, without demur, Eugene Genovese's contrast of the contemporary professors of political correctness and the spirit of those professors who taught him in the Brooklyn of the 1940s:  "Professors acted as if they were paid to assault their students' sensibilities, to offend their most cherished values."  I hear in this a not-too-distant echo of Professor John Anderson at a similar time at the University of Sydney.

Now although I am not unattracted to this line of defence against political correctness, I fear in the end it will not do.  Just as it seems to me to be a deep form of corruption to confuse education with a subtle form of ideological indoctrination (the sin of political correctness), so does it also seem to me a clear form of corruption to conceive of education, as Genovese does here, as the process whereby cherished values are questioned, challenged, subverted.  The model of teaching as indoctrination and the model of teaching as subversion seem to me to be two sides of a counterfeit coin.  At its finest, teaching is the common pursuit -- between a teacher and a student, within one of the basic disciplines of scientific or humane thought -- of what is true.  Under this light both political correctness and the Genovese alternative to it, education as subversion, represent not our real alternatives but merely different kinds of threat to the idea of education.

The brief questions asked after my talk were unfortunately lost through a tape malfunction.

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THE NATIONAL AGENDA:  CAN IT BE JUSTIFIED?

My subject is somewhat at odds with the theme of this conference.  It seems to be stretching a point to propose that the question of whether or not we should adopt a national curriculum has any ethical content.  I'm not going to strain at a gnat in an attempt to try to justify my comments, but it might be helpful to say, right at the outset, that what lies behind the national curriculum proposals is a collection of attitudes which have real implications for teachers, and pose problems for them as to how they present their subjects to students.

Let me say that the two reasons most frequently offered in justification of a national curriculum seem to be quite inadequate.

One is the desire to establish national standards in testing to provide information about how Australian students perform in essential subjects such as English and mathematics.  (There is of course room for discussion as to what should be tested nationally.)  The other is the fact that a number of school students (at one stage estimated to be about 250,000) move interstate each year.  This, it is said, disadvantages them, in that different State systems have different requirements, and that trying to place students in the appropriate classes when they move causes difficulties.  This might be, so, but in fact the problem could easily be solved by full reporting from the school the child is leaving to the one it is joining, and some flexibility in placing it.

It is not necessary to have a national curriculum in order to have national testing.  All that is necessary is to have some agreement about what students need to know and be able to do at various stages of their development.  There would then be a common core to school studies, which would form the basis for testing at whatever levels seem appropriate.

Before coming to some of the teaching issues related to the National Curriculum Statements I'd like to mention two recent papers from Britain and the United States.  Most of us would probably agree that solutions to problems in other school systems cannot be applied directly to problems in our own.  Nonetheless there are interesting similarities in the issues being discussed elsewhere.

The English Document was sent in January this year from the Chairman of the National Curriculum Council (NCC) to the Secretary of State for Education.  It relates the problems encountered by teachers in Key Stages 1 and 2 of the primary curriculum.  Most of the teachers who attended the NCC's primary seminars were in favour of the National Curriculum, but they voiced the following concerns.  This is not a complete list.

• The National Curriculum "Orders" are unrealistically encyclopedic and unnecessarily prescriptive in the knowledge, understanding and skills they require to be taught, and consequently "quality and depth of teaching have to be sacrificed if they are to cover all programs of study."
• At Key Stage 1 "there is now insufficient time to teach the basics of reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic which are essential for all future learning."
• There is a lack of knowledge (especially in science and technology), and resources are inadequate for some subjects.
• Too much time is spent on standard assessment tasks, continuous assessment and record keeping.

In return the NCC responded, on the basis of its own investigation, as follows:

• "The Orders" do not focus clearly and sharply enough on what is essential, and the curriculum is overloaded.
• there will be no departure from the subject framework, though primary schools "need not teach the curriculum in terms of separate subjects."
• classroom organisation, curriculum planning, teacher knowledge and support are not adequate to deliver the National Curriculum.
• evidence from classroom teachers supports the NCC's own monitoring and evaluation process in the view that the curriculum "is proving very difficult, if not impossible, to manage in its entirety."

The rest of the report makes some proposals about how these problems might be tackled, and includes a comment on a recent report into Aspects of Primary Education in France:  "French teachers were far more inclined than their English counterparts to teach the whole class the same things at the same time.  However, that is not to say that the teaching is dull and undemanding.  On the contrary, much of the work in French and Mathematics was thoroughly planned, effectively implemented and challenging.  Although some of the work in these subjects was too often pitched at the middle band of ability in the class, the teachers invariably expected a high output of work from children of all abilities and monitored their response continuously."  The NCC comments that "there are important messages here that deserve consideration by all schools."

Could I suggest to you that in those messages there are underlying values.  There are assumptions about what it is necessary to do in order to teach students well.  One of them is that you can teach the whole class the same thing at the same time without being boring.  That is another way of saying what John Carroll said -- namely that you can teach anybody anything if you go about it the right way.  Teaching ought to be planned and implemented effectively, and be challenging.  "The teachers invariably expected a high output of work from students ... and monitored their response continuously."  That expectation is important, because if a teacher does not have high expectations of students, students will not have high expectations of themselves.  It seems to me that students are much more likely to be bored if they are given too little to do than if they are given too much to do.

The other documents were issued by the US Department of Education under the title Goals 2000:  The Educate America Act.  This is essentially a revamping of the educational reform initiatives announced by President Bush at the end of 1990.  At the start it declares that "President Clinton and Secretary Riley, as former governors, feel very strongly that education is primarily a state and local responsibility.  They believe that the federal government must provide national leadership and support, but the real work of reform has to be done at the state and local levels."  From this, of course, it follows that the Bill "provides a mechanism for establishing voluntary national student content and performance standards, as well as support and incentives for states and local school districts to develop or adopt these standards.  States and school districts, not the federal government, will define and monitor these standards.  The federal government will not be involved in monitoring individual schools or teachers."  It also states that "Goals 2000 in no way advocates a national curriculum.  Standards will help define, in a broad sense, what students should know and be able to do.  There will continue to be state-by-state, community-by-community diversity in how students are taught and in what books and materials they use."

Despite these assurances some delegates at a Conference held in Pittsburgh in July to hear Secretary Riley and to discuss Goals 2000 expressed concern about various aspects of the Bill.  Theodore Sizer, for example, argued that the standards will have to be "lowest common denominator" and may encourage mediocrity;  that having one standard is dangerous because education is about diversity of ideas rather than conformity;  that value clashes will be inevitable in developing the standards;  that pre-conceived standards are especially undesirable in the humanities which are essentially about values;  and that standards are probably only possible in the basics of reading, writing and numeracy, not in higher order skills.

I have spent some time on these policy issues because, however they are resolved, they determine the environment in which teachers must work.  They cannot, realistically, control what happens in the classroom interaction between teacher and taught.  Perhaps we don't pay enough attention to the fact that in a free society the teaching process is not regulated.  You might feel at times that you are a cog in the large machine of government policy and bureaucratic implementation processes.  But, in the classroom, you are on your own, and the only real baggage you bring with you is your own set of values, attitudes, beliefs and knowledge.

This does not mean, however, that you have absolute freedom;  nor does it mean that you are bound to follow a recommended course of action if it seems to you to be contrary to the best interests of your students.  The question then becomes whether it is possible to generalise about those best interests.  I believe it is, and that there are a few general principles essential to the integrity (and authority) of the teacher in relation to the taught.

I shall illustrate these by reference to aspects of the National Curriculum Statements on Studies of Society and Environment and English.  In the Spring 1993 issue of Education Monitor Ken Baker writes of Studies of Environment:

The documents fail educationally for two principal reasons.  First, they subordinate mastery of bodies of knowledge to the accumulation of concepts, skills and learning techniques.  Second, they are overly influenced by "politically correct" causes rather than by educational values.

Ken Baker offers a number of examples of the second point, and I leave you to consider and evaluate them for yourselves.  It is clear, however, that the selective nature of the study suggestions made in the Statement (i.e.  Studies of Society and Environment) raises real ethical problems for teachers.  I want to refer to just one thing and this comes before the actual Curriculum Statement in the principles which underlie it.  Consider the requirements of "gender perspectives" on page seven of the National Statement.

Students should critically examine the extent to which socially constructed ideas of what is masculine and what is feminine shape their own and others' attitudes and experiences.  They should consider ways in which social justice for women and girls can be achieved.  This includes analysing the values and assumptions underlying ideas and images of gender.  They should learn about the past and present experiences of women and girls, recognising that they are diverse and consider why their experiences and achievements have been undervalued in many societies in the past.  Students should seek to understand the nature of sex-based harassment and violence against women and be active in trying to eliminate it.

There are four assumptions here which any teacher concerned about the best interests of students would have to question:

• The first is that attitudes are "socially constructed".  Values and beliefs that are socially constructed are not the product of individuals.  Now everybody knows that we live in a society which influences the way we think and act, but that is not really the point of the theory of "social construction".  It is that society, and only society, determines how things are for each of us individually.  If you believe that, then it is very easy for you to fall into the corresponding belief that you haven't any power over the ways things are.  If society is the principal determinant of individual attitudes, then you have to adjust yourself to its demands, the theory implies.  Can any teacher subscribe to that view?
• The next problem is the phrase "social justice".  In the context in which it appears, under the "Curriculum perspectives" heading, it has to be questioned too.  You have to ask yourself what is "social justice".  I agree with Robert Manne that social justice is not a very difficult concept to understand, but its application can change according to the context and, I believe, needs investigation here.
• Then there is a sentence which says that you must get students to consider why women's "experiences and achievements have been undervalued in many societies in the past".  I want to know why the word "why" instead of "whether" is used.  This is a when-will-you-stop-beating-your-wife proposition.  Why would you assume that anybody is discriminated against in a certain way, and tell your students that it is so instead of asking whether they can find evidence that it is so.  It is a crucial educational principle not to take something for granted.  I agree with Robert Manne that you don't have to confront your students everyday with questioning of every value they might hold.  That can be very disturbing, even distressing, to young people.  What you do need to encourage is the questioning of assumptions, especially those which underlie and underpin the nature of this curriculum material.
• Teachers are told that they must encourage their students to take action "against sex-based harrassment and violence against women."  Does that mean marching around the schoolyard at lunch-time holding up banners?  Is it really part of your job to encourage your students to take action?  I believe that to do so is distort the objectives and nature of learning, and of constructive critical analysis.  It is important that your students don't end up saying, when challenged, "Well I just happen to think I'm right."  In a well conducted classroom "happening to think" is not an option.  Offering an opinion and subjecting it to challenge should become a familiar practice, and students need to be persuaded to defend their opinion by referring to evidence and documentation if they want it to be taken seriously.

This section alone calls on teachers to exercise a basic principle of teaching -- namely to question the assumptions underlying the statements.  If you accept them as a reasonable basis for your teaching, I believe you will have abrogated your responsibility to generate discussion, and encourage different viewpoints.

The underlying principle on which I am drawing is that when you enter the classroom you leave your personal views outside.  You cannot shed all the baggage I referred to earlier.  But you can exercise a kind of self-censorship in order to encourage your students to develop their own views.  The weight of your authority is such that you will influence malleable minds to a degree very difficult to measure.  It's therefore essential to minimise your capacity to shape opinion;  and it's just as important to do that, as to make sure that opinion is founded in fact and documentation.

Let me now turn to the National Statement on English for Australian Schools.  The Statement does not recognise that learning to read is the single most important thing that happens in a child's life, and this failure is likely to make it difficult for children to learn to read as early or as well as they can and should.  The linking of reading and viewing in the National Profile is absolutely detrimental to the child's development of reading skills.

The other major problem is the poverty of the material proposed for learning English and for reading.  Talk-back and chat shows, for example, are mentioned.  If this is what you have to resort to in order to teach Australian children their language, something is seriously wrong with concept of teaching and teaching methodology.  Further, the inclusion of trivial and ephemeral material is likely to be particularly damaging to children from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

To be faced with these kinds of prescriptions is to face an ethical dilemma.  Do you follow the prescription whether you have faith in it or not?  Or do you trust your own knowledge and common sense, and break out of the patterns proposed?

The only way to solve the problem is to determine, from your own experience and principles, what is best for your students -- especially in primary school.  Do you feed them the idle, impoverished chatter of the transient gossip show, or do you feed their imaginations and satisfy their thirst for knowledge?

The National Statements and profiles offer no safe refuge from unending questions about the structure and quality of curriculum policy.  In the two areas I have touched on they reflect the vices of the politicisation of curriculum.  They are full of ideological baggage and are therefore anti-educational.  Teaching is about discovering and encouraging individual thinking and expression, not about programming students according to the latest "correct" position.

The poor quality of these particular National Curriculum Statements and Profiles is compounded by the pressure for key competency testing and central control of educational processes.  Theodore Sizer is right -- having one standard is dangerous because education is about diversity of ideas rather than conformity.

Finally, may I state the obvious and say that a teacher's first duty is to the students and the subject.  Where these conflict with policy requirements you need to make your views heard on the basis of carefully considered principles.  I am not advocating classroom revolution, nor am I advocating that you march in the streets and protest about National Statements and Profiles, but I am saying that your relationship with your students is at the heart of the matter, and that in pondering your responsibilities to them and to the demands of your teaching subjects, you cannot avoid examining the ethics of teaching and learning.

QUESTION PERIOD

KEN BAKER:  There have been two Senate Committees who have said that students in Australia know very little about their responsibilities as citizens and that more ought to be done to teach them about these things -- to give them a sense of being an active part of a body politic, since we live in a democracy.  That sounds fine to me, but how does one tell the difference between teaching democratic values and politicisation?  When is a curriculum politicised and when is it legitimately teaching political values?

RICHARD WOOD:  When I used the word "politicisation" I was referring to the fact that there are prescriptions in recent national documents relating to quasi-political subjects -- gender issues and others of that kind.  I see no problem with those being discussed as part of an educational program -- in fact, they are unavoidable, not something you have to be told by bureaucratic departments to take into account.  What I call politicisation is steering the nature of the debate, laying down the assumptions upon which classroom discussions must be based.  When it comes to citizenship, and to a number of other things for that matter, I think you have to combine what goes on in the classroom with what goes on outside it.  We all recognise the importance of the family context, but I think the style of the school, the sorts of principles which guide its organisation -- whether or not children are allowed to treat each other badly, whether certain forms of behaviour are unacceptable -- all these are things which lead to the pupils' getting some sense of what being a responsible citizen means.

PETER PAIGE (Headmaster, Cromer High School):  You said that among the tasks of educators is feeding the child's imagination.  It seems to me that imagination, which used to be taken for granted, is so damaged by the time the child gets to primary school that the task of feeding it is extremely difficult.  By high school, in many cases, the imagination is damaged beyond repair.  What do we do about this in schools?

RICHARD WOOD:  You are the experienced school teacher and I am not.  I know what you are saying and I think, unfortunately, that it is true for many children and maybe for an increasing number of children.  It may well be that what you have to do in primary school is, in the first instance, some kind of repair job.  There is always some way of alleviating the kind of problem you are describing if the child is young.  I don't think teachers can give up on these things.  This is why I made my remark about chat shows as material for English teaching.  I find that prospect completely horrifying because what characterises chat shows is that there is nothing in them.  You only have to listen to talkback radio for 10 minutes to realise that there is a tiny speck of gold in an enormous amount of dross.  Furthermore, people ring up talk shows because they are lonely.  They want to hear another voice in the day and they want to hear their own voice.  There is nothing instructive about that.  It might be an expression of some very serious social problems in our community, but it is not educationally beneficial.  I really do believe that students can do more than we think they can do.  I realise this now more clearly because I look at children and think about how extraordinary it is that they can do the things they do -- that, for instance, they can use the language they use when they are so young.  There is nothing special about them -- they are just children growing up and running around most of the time.  But you see in them such a capacity to absorb that to deny them the best kind of food is something no really self-respecting teacher could possibly do.  And you know when you see them that they need that kind of food in their schooling as much as they need milk and fruit and vegetables.

VlCKl VlVlAN (Deputy Principal, Engadine Primary School):  You said that you weren't so happy about Viewing being included with Reading in the National Profiles.  But I myself was delighted and excited when I saw Viewing in there -- both because visual contextual clues are so important in helping pupils to deal effectively with print and because study of the very visual world that we live in -- film, advertising and the like -- is so important.  Why were you not pleased with that inclusion?

RICHARD WOOD:  There are some reasons which other people are more competent to talk about than I am, and they have to do with methods of teaching reading in the first place:  recognition of symbols and letters is part of that process.  What I am concerned about is that if children are not able to read printed words on the page fluently at an early age, they will be disadvantaged for the rest of their lives.  Children go around looking and seeing all sorts of things.  Their visual expression and their visual capacities are being exercised all the time.  If you look at the word "viewing" in the context of the National Statements, it doesn't sound benign to me at all because it includes materials of an ephemeral and unimportant kind.  I really don't believe that you teach young children to learn to read effectively by including advertising as one of the things that they read.  There can be very clever language in advertising -- I wouldn't deny that -- but I think you are really saying that you want to give them things that they already have.  Why?  They see advertisements on television all the time, but they don't provide them with the substance that reading worthwhile things provides.  There is no time to waste on that.  I don't think you should teach students anything which they can learn for themselves.  Do you have to teach them cartoons, for example?  They might be useful in awakening interest in something, but that they would form anything central in a child's reading program is an idea with which I totally disagree.

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TEACHING THE VIRTUES

In a recent article on virtue in Osservatore Romano, the Auxiliary Bishop of Vienna, Christoph Schonborn, refers in a footnote to the three essential "pillars" of knowledge.  Citing Thomas Aquinas, he says that we must know what to believe, what to desire, and what to do.

During our teacher training, few of us would have been told in such plain English what supports centres of learning, keeping them upright.  Nor would we have been encouraged to explore the dimensions, or the nooks and crannies, of the building we ourselves were occupying.  In Education courses we'd have heard about the socio-economic roots of individual differences, stages in human development, see-saw battles between "traditional" and "progressive" thinkers, and the razing of ivory towers.  But about the foundations of civilisation, little would have been said either systematically or in passing.

If I could alter the content of teacher education, I would require for all students a year's course in Moral Reasoning.  For its duration we would concern ourselves with intellect and will -- knowing and loving -- and their relation to action.  Much of our discussion would focus on the four natural virtues sought by the ancient Greeks:  prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.  But we would not confine our study to philosophical works.  We would examine views of the essential virtues embodied in great literature, art, and music.  Among our guest lecturers would be art historians, poets, biographers, and theologians.

Our syllabus would contain extracts from discursive prose, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and selections from imaginative writing ancient and modern, starting with Dante and Shakespeare, including such luminaries as Bunyan, Dr. Johnson, Jane Austen, and Blake, and ending with moderns like Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens.  This reading would dramatise centuries-old debates about how to live.  It would explode the idea, pervasive in this century, that only explorations of sin are interesting.  And it would encourage reflection on the question posed near the end of James McAuley's poem Table Talk:  What is the wisdom that a child needs most?

STARTING WITH THE GREEKS

We'd begin with Plato and Aristotle because they understood something few contemporary educators think about, let alone grasp:  that the virtues can be grouped so that our understanding of them is more coherent and lasting;  that of the dozens of natural virtues which can be classified, four are primary;  and that these four virtues -- prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance -- are organically related:  they cannot exist or be understood separately, because each depends on the proper exercise of the other three.

Basic to the thought of Aristotle is the idea that all human beings share the same specific nature;  all of us have identical, inherent needs;  and our ultimate aim in life is happiness.  Happiness depends on two things:  good fortune and sound habit.  Sound habit, in turn, rests on deep knowledge.  Unless each of us knows what is genuinely and ultimately good for us, we cannot know what is good for others;  and unless we understand that we cannot attain real good if we injure ourselves and others, happiness will elude us.  Freely choosing what is good is the task of a lifetime.

Now, in case what I'm saying sounds self-evidently true, I want to stress the point -- made by Mortimer Adler, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others -- that since the 17th century, mainstream moral philosophers have rejected all or most of Aristotle's moral teaching.  Many have baulked at the view that there are desires which are natural and the same in all of us.  Others have scorned the idea that virtue is an accumulation of real, objective "goods" which depend for their realisation on habit.  Still others have rejected the notion that the essential virtues form a unity.

Over the past three centuries, we have witnessed a decline in moral awareness which it is difficult not to connect with this major development in the history of moral philosophy (and with other notable 17th-century events).  This conceptual decline has been obvious, not just to philosophers of the calibre of Adler and MacIntyre, but to serious students of Western literature who have been trained to think about the large moral questions which literature poses -- though I have never heard it discussed in a public forum quite like this one.  F.R. and Q.D. Leavis spoke of it, but in a different intellectual and social context;  and so, closer to home, did James McAuley.

It takes time, of course, for good ideas and good moral habits to languish;  but once they do, patterns of neglect are discernible.  The pattern to which I've been referring can be seen in literature produced from the late 17th century onwards, but especially in plays and novels published over the last 150 years.  There are exceptions, of course -- among them, the novels of Dostoyevsky.  But the overriding trend is clear.  Horace's concept of the Golden Mean -- the ideal moral state, marked by neither excesses nor defects in virtue -- has been allowed to disappear from ordinary consciousness.

In the history of fiction and drama, where personal relations normally occupy centre stage, an increasingly prominent weakness of moral fibre is apparent -- notably, in the depiction of sexual relations and family life.  In poems or philosophical reflections, where there is no need to emphasise weaknesses in human conduct in graphic detail, moral decline has been less obvious.  Contemporary poetry, philosophy, and theology suffer from intellectual confusion, rather than from dramatically enacted moral laxity.  How the mind and the will are best nourished and exercised is a question answered by only the finest artists and thinkers.

A literature whose overwhelming preoccupation is with forms of sin reflects a profound spiritual imbalance.  In the work of the greatest writers and their descendants -- some with brilliant, some with "ordinary", literary powers -- there is no such imbalance.  Vice and virtue enjoy an equally powerful hearing -- as in, for instance, the writing of Dickens and Hopkins, Martin Boyd and Les Murray;  and virtue is known, sometimes, to triumph.

MORAL DECLINE:  AN ILLUSTRATION

To illustrate more fully what the kind of imbalance I have been describing is like, and to suggest in the process why we need urgently to do something about it, I propose to read to you representative passages from two novels separated in time by over a century.

The first passage is from Susan Hinton's The Outsiders, written in 1970.  Hinton is among the most popular writers currently being taught in secondary English classes in Australia, America, and other English-speaking countries.  The following conversation, involving four teenagers, takes place in Chapter 4 of her best-known novel (subsequently made into two films).

"Hey, whatta ya know?" Bob said a little unsteadily, "here's the little greasers that picked up our girls.  Hey, greasers."

"You're outa your territory," Johnny warned in a low voice.  "You'd better watch it."

Randy swore at us and they stepped in closer.  Bob was eyeing Johnny.  "Nup, pal, yer the ones who'd better watch it.  Next time you want a broad, pick up yer own kind -- dirt."

I was getting mad.  I was hating them enough to lose my head.

"You know what a greaser is?" Bob asked.  "White trash with long hair."

I felt the blood draining from my face.  I've been cussed out and sworn at, but nothing ever hit me like that did.  Johnnycake made a kind of gasp and his eyes were smouldering.

"You know what a Soc is?" I said, my voice shaking with rage.  "White trash with Mustangs and madras."  And then, because I couldn't think of anything bad enough to call them, I spit at them.

Bob shook his head, smiling slowly.  "You could use a bath, greaser.  And a good working over.  And we've got all night to do it.  Give the kid a bath, David."

I ducked and tried to run for it, but the Soc caught my arm and twisted it behind my back, and shoved my face into the fountain.  I fought, but the hand at the back of my neck was strong and I had to hold my breath.  I'm dying, I thought ...

The next thing I knew I was lying on the pavement beside the fountain, coughing water and gasping ... Then I saw Johnny.

He was sitting next to me, one elbow on his knee, and staring straight ahead.  He was a strange greenish-white, and his eyes were huger than I'd ever seen them.

"I killed him," he said slowly.  "I killed that boy."

... I looked at Johnny's hand.  He was clutching his switchblade, and it was dark to the hilt.  My stomach gave a violent jump and my blood turned icy.  "Johnny," I managed to say, fighting the dizziness.  "I think I'm gonna be sick." ... "You really killed him, huh, Johnny?"

"Yeah."  His voice quavered slightly.  "I had to.  They were drowning you, Pony.  They might have killed you.  And they had a blade ... they were gonna beat me up ... like they did before."

"Johnny!" I nearly screamed.  "What are we gonna do?  They put you in the electric chair for killing people!" I was shaking.  I want a cigarette.  I want a cigarette.  I want a cigarette.  We had smoked our last pack.

The passage I'm going to compare with this one comes from Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain, which I've just finished reading.  Yonge was widely read a century and a half ago;  but she is almost never studied, either in schools or in universities, today.  Here is a typical section of dialogue from her most esteemed book, a 600-page best-seller published in 1856.  This dialogue takes place in the very first chapter -- where, now, it would almost certainly prevent a great many readers from going any further.  It involves a young man, his two teenage sisters, and their mother, who have just attended an Anglican Sunday morning service.

Ethel said, "I like the verse which explains that:

They who now sit lowest here,
When their Master shall appear,
He shall bid them higher rise,
And be highest in the skies."

"I did not think of that being the meaning of 'when He that bade thee cometh'," said Norman thoughtfully.

"It seemed to be only our worldly advantage that was meant before," said Ethel.

"Well, it means that too," said Flora.

"I suppose it does," said Mrs May;  "but the higher sense is the one chiefly to be dwelt on.  It is a lesson how those least known and regarded here, and humblest in their own eyes, shall be the highest hereafter."

... Norman tarried to put his books into a neat leather case, and Ethel stood thinking.  "It means altogether -- it is a lesson against ambition," said she.

"True," said her mother.  "The love of eminence for its own sake."

"...Aye, worldly greatness, riches, rank, beauty," said Flora.

"All sorts of false flash and nonsense, and liking to be higher than one ought to be," said Norman.  "I am sure there is nothing lower, or more mean and shabby, than getting places and praise a fellow does not deserve."

"Oh, yes!" cried Ethel.  "But no one fit to speak to would do that!"

"Plenty of people do, I can tell you," said Norman.

"Then I hope I shall never know who they are!" exclaimed Ethel.  "But I'll tell you what I was thinking of, mamma.  Caring to be clever, and get on, only for the sake of beating people."

"I think that might be better expressed."

"I know," said Ethel, bending her brow, with the fulness of her thought -- "I mean caring to do a thing only because nobody else can do it -- wanting to be first more than wanting to do one's best."

The difference in the subject matter, and the quality, of these two novels should be painfully obvious.  For Hinton home is the city streets.  The immediate object of life is survival:  getting others before they get you.  Loyalty is confined to gang members.  Barriers which prevent people from making any real contact are present everywhere.  Reflection is a luxury:  under ordinary conditions, there is no time for it.  Long-range goals do not exist, and there are no adults who possess moral authority.  The young cannot begin to love wisely -- not simply because it so hard for all human beings to want what they should and to exercise appropriate will power to achieve it (which is what loving wisely means), but because no grown-ups in The Outsiders are capable of imparting knowledge about what ought to be loved.

Charlotte Yonge, in contrast, knows not just that mind and heart (intellect and will) must be trained, and trained together;  but she knows something about how essential training is undertaken.  For her, home is The Home.  Values are imparted by the family, especially the mother.  At the table, and at other places in the house where people gather, there is regular conversation about the daily round, including aspects of it which pose large moral difficulties.  Children and adults together muse about how serious temptations should be handled, and most (not all) of their discussions get somewhere -- chiefly, because both parents provide knowledgeable instruction at key junctures.  The environment in which such teaching is offered is safe and secure.  Hence, even though errors -- some, quite serious -- are made by family members, growth takes place.

If our most talented pupils cared half as much as Etheldred May would have cared about what, in moral terms, the differences depicted in the worlds of these two novels mean, we would witness a sea change in the temper of the times.  But for such a change to occur, there would have to be major changes in the content of Humanities courses in schools and universities -- changes anchored in the awareness that minds and hearts require mature, balanced attention if they are to develop concurrently as they should.

SOLUTIONS TO REPRESENTATIVE ILLS

Recently a friend's daughter who won the only available scholarship to a respected Anglican girls' school told me that at the Grand Final of the Year 10 debate in which she had just participated, her team's topic was "Charity begins at home."  This subject is of interest to many writers whose subject is family life, not simply to Charlotte Yonge.  Yet when I asked this 15-year-old how her team had tackled the topic, she said that they had discussed it in "an international context", defining "home" as Australia.

Such a bald attempt to evade a subject with profound personal implications by comfortably distancing it did not surprise me -- not simply because intelligent people often do this, or because this particular young woman sometimes betrays a hardness of heart which chills me, but because I have met so few teenagers who have been asked by their teachers to look systematically at moral issues which would rock their complacency, topple their clichés, and force them to think seriously about the meaning of events which take place under their noses.

Although the music to which many young people are addicted does not speak about charity, in many of the rock lyrics which they know by heart, or the "creative writing" produced in their English classes, the word "love" is prominently featured.  A month ago The Sydney Morning Herald featured a piece of writing by a distraught teenager about her killer father which began like this:

Father, I loved you,
And you've made me feel this shame,
I wish I could point my finger at someone else,
But there's no-one else to blame.
It was you, dear Father, I loved,
The feelings you put me through,
The way you've made me cry.
I wish I could say I truly understand.
But deep down dad, I don't know how.

In many schools, painfully confused and inarticulate writing of this type -- writing which bears a family resemblance to Susan Hinton's -- is read aloud in classrooms and commended as love poetry.  Yet the prose of Charlotte Yonge, which is grounded in love, would be considered above pupils' heads and beyond their interest.  Also regarded as "too hard" for the usual adolescent is the writing of virtually every major thinker named in the first five minutes of this talk -- even though some of these same thinkers, earlier in this century, were staple fare in schools.

To restore a measure of sanity to the school curriculum, we need to mount dozens of teacher education programs in which trainees are expected to know, for instance, how the idea of moral balance is related to the concept of the Golden Mean;  why the ancients considered love the greatest virtue, and why many moderns still do;  and how the word "professionalism", applied to teaching, can best be defined.  Designing such programs would not be all that difficult.  But for it to happen, existing institutions would need to resist the temptation to do the predictable thing and say, "There's no room in the timetable.  Forget it!"

In my proposed course in Moral Reasoning for prospective teachers, staff and students would speak together about school situations requiring prudence -- proposing something disagreeable which needs doing, for example, or suggesting to a superior that a neglected matter deserves immediate attention.  With the help of pertinent literature, we would consider the need for fortitude -- analysing, for instance, occasions on which defending a friend, speaking out about witnessed cruelty, or rebuking someone whose behaviour merits stern criticism would almost certainly provoke anger, disapproval, or rejection.  We'd look, too, at forms of intemperate speech which promote daily miscarriages of justice in the playground:  gossip, back-biting, taunts, insults, false accusations, and lies.

Of course a great deal is asked of those of us who would reverse the habits of centuries.  But what is asked is not impossible.  In 1985, seminars on Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Liberty, Equality, and Justice, led by Mortimer Adler in a PBS television series called Six Great Ideas, were so popular with adult audiences that they had to be re-broadcast many times.  A typical response to the series came from a group of plumbers and construction workers:

We never knew a world of ideas existed.  [Your program has] completely turned around our impression of higher or lower education.  We only wish we had not wasted 25 to 35 years ... We thank you and we applaud you.

Mortimer Adler's A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (Macmillan, 1992), p. 216.

One plumber in the group subsequently sent a longer letter to Mr Adler describing an episode that had taken place at a construction site some time after the series first went to air.  He and his brother were discussing free will and determinism within the hearing of a group of brick layers.  After listening to their chortles and jeers, he fielded a cynical "philosophical" question about sexual pleasure by saying:

"Tell me, would you, which it would be better to be -- a pig satisfied or a man dissatisfied?

"After a very short discussion among themselves ... they heartily agreed that it would be much better to be a pig satisfied, to which I retorted "Well, you 'gentlemen' ought to be thankful that you have both the power and the ability to choose the level of life you wish to live, a pig doesn't."

A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror, p. 219.

QUESTION PERIOD

ROBERT MANNE:  I feel in sympathy with much of what you say.  Yet I wonder whether the case you make about the changes over 300 years needs to be put in such a large theoretical frame.  I think that you would agree that these ideas are problematic.  I am struck by some areas of education which I think have gone radically wrong since the 1960s.  Everyone my age or older will recall that when we were at school, students aged 13 or 14 were able to read Shakespeare quite well and were expected to do so year after year.  They were also expected to speak politely, and teachers stepped in if they didn't.  The staff at my daughter's school now worry that the students are foul-mouthed from the age of nine onwards.  These two quite different instances point towards something which has very radically changed in 30 years:  a moral capacity for reading literature.  I think that if the problem of change is put in that way it may appear more reversible than if it is given a much broader historical frame.

RICHARD WOOD:  Of course I agree that in the past 30 years there have been massive changes which none of us has been able to keep up with.  But because of my own training in literature and my own intellectual interests, especially in philosophy and theology, I've naturally looked back further to account for more recent change.  As I've examined the whole sweep of Western civilisation, going back very far, I've mused about how the largest questions about -- say -- authority and virtue, beginning with Plato, have been tackled.  These very large questions belong conceptually within a much broader context than the past thirty years, even though I agree that what has been going on recently is very significant.  One reason I read long passages from two novels separated in time by 120, not 30, years was that I wanted to illustrate the moral differences -- really quite enormous -- observable over a long period.  I frankly doubt that, 30 years ago, school kids could have read Charlotte Yonge.  Even then she'd have seemed quaint.  I don't mean to sound utterly pessimistic about changing present patterns.  Temperamentally, I'm an optimist.  But I can't minimise the size of the problem facing us.  I think it's very large, and that it pre-dates this last period we've been living through.  We can reverse the trends which everybody has been talking about today, but that will require an enormous expenditure of energy, will and courage.

BILL LlTTLE (Deputy Principal, Mamre Christian College):  Even as I listened to the two passages, they pointed out something in my own thinking:  not so much that the two situations were different in time, but in the first instance there was an expectation of what was going to happen next, whereas in the latter example it was more a case of trying to discern what was being said.  This established a very clear distinction between the literature that has wealth and value and the literature that doesn't.  It also highlighted the fact that it is not just change itself, but the rate of change, which makes it so difficult for schools to cope on a day to day basis.

RICHARD WOOD:  It's certainly true that in the passage by Charlotte Yonge, figuring out what is being said demands our immediate attention.  What all the teenage children in the May family say in this early conversation bears on their lives in ways which cannot be predicted at the start.  In fact, one of the teenagers who says that a concern with rank, beauty, and worldly position is not a good thing later succumbs to temptation in each area named.  Another of the children faces a school situation in which power of place -- and recognition and honour -- go to someone who isn't worthy of it and has cheated to get it.  What is of interest in the novel is how this all happens, and how these children cope with what happens after the premature death of their mother.  The larger difficulty explored by Yonge is that although Mrs. May's children have both an interest in very basic moral issues -- e.g. what is the difference between ambition and the desire for excellence, or virtue, for their own sake? -- and a knowledge of what such issues encompass, they don't necessarily love the virtues about which they've received important instruction.  The identical problem is of course very much with us today.  How, in the midst of all the changes we are facing, do we impart to the young not simply a knowledge of the virtues (something we're not doing very well), but a love of them?

JOHN CARROLL:  The practical question comes up, "How do we actually teach virtue?"  I'm thinking about reading Macbeth very carefully at school at age 16 or 17.  It is of course a play about over-weaning ambition.  We learnt all the crimes which Macbeth was guilty of, but they were rather abstract.  I don't think the moral lessons of Macbeth had much impact on me.  What had a huge impact was experiencing the wonderful language which I basically didn't understand, and which has stayed with me for the rest of my life.  There was something inspiring, exhilarating, in just reading and learning that wonderful Shakespearean language.  Virtue cannot be taught abstractly.  This is my concern about the drift of some of your remarks.  I think Dame Leonie was right that it is in the playground -- it is in real life -- that children have the values reinforced.  At school I also think it is in football and other sports, especially for boys, where courage and selflessness are a real teaching ground of virtue.  I am a bit sceptical about whether intellectually discussing Macbeth's over-weaning ambition in a classroom, however high-minded and fine that sounds in practice, really works.

RICHARD WOOD:  My big emphasis was on instructing teachers:  that is, altering our programs of teacher education so that a coherent effort is made, with young adults, to deal philosophically with the whole question of virtue.  We do need to ask what materials should be used in the classroom so that children really are given something to hold on to.  There is, yes, literature -- Shakespeare is a clear example -- which will be, in important respects, above their heads emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually;  and of course they need to be exposed to material they can handle fully.  Yet great literature which is too advanced linguistically and in other ways -- as aspects of Shakespeare are, even for very able school students -- nonetheless has a vital function.  It enables pupils to take in more, morally, than they realise.  Memorising passages from Shakespeare, which was done when I was in school, is immensely valuable because years later we recall and understand them as we couldn't in our youth.  Yes:  what happens outside the classroom is very important too.  Teachers need, as I said, to be thinking about ordinary episodes in the playground which generically, philosophically, can be traced to injustice, intemperance, and lack of courage.  If ordinary episodes, in and out of class, are seen as fitting into a larger, coherent conceptual frame, nitty-gritty moral problems can be more confidently handled.  Of course, yes, we learn through personal witness.  That is why teachers like Keating, or teachers very different from him, are so immensely important.  One can't under-estimate the power wielded by all the people at school (children too), and by the life experiences everyone has there;  but I certainly worry about the negative example to which so many kids are exposed.  By speaking about the playground you've raised in another way a question posed earlier about the equipment pupils bring with them to school.  They don't just start using foul language at the age of nine or ten;  they start using it at the age of two.  The young are exposed to all kinds of things in the real world, including the world of school, which are immensely disturbing.  That's why they need careful moral instruction, not just personal witness;  and that's why their teachers need it.  It does come through reading, discussion, and other concrete classroom activity -- not just the playground or the oval.

---

THE SINS OF SUCCESS:  THE AUTHORITY TO CHANGE

Something important was lost when sometime in the 19th century education became synonymous with schooling.  Today knowledge for use holds the centre of the field.  Politicians and economists say that to keep up in the technological race we must reap a proper return from investment in education in terms of people equipped to use their skills and knowledge in practical ways.  The problem with this concept of education is that it deliberately tries to create a dichotomy between the scholar who is taught to understand but not to act;  between the activities of analysis, criticism and acquisition of knowledge on the one hand, and those of problem-solving, doing, making, organising, constructing and creating on the other;  between pursuing knowledge for its own sake and learning to act wisely and live effectively.  Education, unlike prosperity, is an end in itself.  This is not to say that education should be pointless and irrelevant, but nor should it be geared solely to the achievement of greater commercial and industrial relevance.  What do we mean when we speak of education for the person?  Is it pie-in-the-sky to hope that learning can in some way be a satisfying personal experience?  What do students need?  Marjorie Reeves answers these questions elegantly in her book The Crisis in Higher Education (1988).  What people need is power to live their lives with power.  Power to make a significant impact on their world.  Power to be active in serving other people through making, doing, solving problems, leading or following.  Power to share experiences and thoughts, power to give and receive love.  Power to commit themselves to long-term causes and loyalties with an open-eyed and critical awareness.  Power to use language accurately and effectively.  Power to explore and in discovery to find wonder and delight.  Power to create something out of experience and knowledge.  Power to meet ills without being defeated by them.  Power to fail without losing composure and self-confidence.  Power to worship.  Power to meet death with dignity.

The person engaged in learning is enriched by a relationship which may not immediately be turned to any practical end at all.  The learner responds spontaneously to a sense of intrinsic worth in something outside himself.  Iris Murdoch says in The Sovereignty of Good (1970) that the ability to direct attention outward, away from self and towards the great surprising variety of the world, is love.  The activity of attending to something takes us clean out of ourselves and puts us under authority.  A learner is committed to a sense of intrinstic worth before he or she really knows much about the subject of investigation.  Ultimately, knowledge is for contemplation.  Contemplation is sustained attention, and attention to what is outside ourselves is the mainspring of living.

The two agents (teacher and student) who form the base of the learning triangle are oblivious of education techniques when, in relationship, their focal awareness is totally concentrated on the third point of the triangle, the subject.  It is not the educational sciences which relate students and disciplinary content together, but the teacher's personal commitment to what he or she is doing.  A teacher who continually puts up smoke screens to evade serious issues of judgment, purpose, belief, probably does not bamboozle his or her students into thinking that he or she is impartial, but sets up the model of a weak, indecisive or escapist character.  Young people need and enjoy the impact of exactly the opposite kind of character:  the person whose judgments are formed by reasoned beliefs and who presents the reality that to love is to make reasoned choices and to make them open-eyed.  All learning must be under some authority or under obligation.  The first authority is that of the outside reality to which the person responds.  The compelling motive in putting oneself under this authority is not to gain personal fulfilment or personal pleasure but to give glory (or love) to reality.  Personal enrichment is the by-product of this process, the unsolicited gift of reality.  Knowledge for use and knowledge for delight should not be set in opposition:  they are obverse and reverse of one coin.  Wordsworth expressed it thus:

For knowledge is delight;  and such delight
Breeds love;  yet, suited as it rather is
To thought and to the climbing intellect,
It teaches less to love than to adore;
If that be not indeed the highest love!

The Excursion, 346-50.

INSTITUTIONS LIVE AND GROW BY AUTHORITY

Authority is criticised as being an endorsement of people being determined from outside themselves in opposition to the freedom of human self-determination, even though in view of the limitations built into humane experience people cannot effectively opt out of being shaped by others in their awareness and desires.  The problem comes to a head when authority is considered in its social and institutional form and those endowed with authority are contrasted with others who are seen as decisively influenced by them.

The etymological derivation of the concept "authority" is from the Latin auctoritas which in turn derives from augere, to increase.  In his work on the State Cicero contrasts the authority (auctoritas) of the senate with the power (potestas) of officials and the freedom (libertas) of the people.  It is when authority is replaced by or identified with power that conflicts arise, because when authority is reduced to a position of power it can no longer be experienced as something promoting freedom but rather as something endangering, if not actually oppressing, freedom.

Yet the recognition of an authority does not exclude freedom.  On the contrary, I can only recognise someone as an authority if by my free decision I become involved in doing something that is backed by this other person's authority.  According to the classical understanding this free occurrence of endorsement and recognition is the actual fulfilment of human nature in practice.  And in this practical expression everyone is fundamentally equal in status.

When power is used as another term for authority, the latter becomes the object of suspicion.  This finds expression in the two adjectives "authoritative" and "authoritarian".  Authoritative behaviour means behaviour dependent on an authority that does not impede freedom but rather makes it possible.  Authoritarian behaviour means behaviour opposed to both freedom and reason and often means behaviour imposed by force.  Authoritarian behaviour as a caricature of the true exercise of authority increases to the extent that the authorities exercising power hide themselves in the anonymity of technocratic and bureaucratic procedures -- with the effect that who is exercising power and what his or her interests are becomes obscured.  The working of this kind of exercise of authority breeds not only a lack of freedom but also fears and anxieties.  The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer in his book Truth and Method (1975) attempts a useful rehabilitation of authority and tradition.  He argues that to the extent that the influence of authority takes the place of one's own judgment, authority is in fact a source of prejudices, but this does not exclude the possibility that it can also be a source of truth.  The authority of persons does not have its ultimate basis in an act of submission and in the abdication of reason but in the act of recognition and acknowledgement.  In this view of authority the primary factor is personal, not obedience but the recognition that someone else's judgment takes precedence over one's own.  The aspect of authority that commands the respect of reason is competence, which can be described as authority as a form of knowledge.  The recognition of authority does essentially imply an act of reason.

Degeneration has set in when the exercise of authority is determined by individual or collective self-interest and when genuine concern for the well-being and freedom of everyone in a society or community is lost sight of.  Where the use of authority is to serve freedom there must be a concept of consensus, where people jointly seek their orientation and with the help of language which expresses what all are agreed is true and sensible.  The question of consensus guides our thoughts back to authority.  Someone who possesses authority does so on the basis of objective superiority or competence with regard to others.  Human limitations mean that no individual can enjoy all-round competence.  More than ever before people today are aware of their inter-dependence.  Precisely for this reason someone who has authority must be concerned not to use or rather abuse this as an instrument of power but rather to use it as a way of setting people free, of creating spaces of freedom for the good of everyone.  Because of the danger of the abuse of authority it is up to those who bear authority continually to establish that what they do and how they go about it is capable of commanding consensus, and to pay explicit attention to the processes of forming consensus.  The attitude to consensus is one of the criteria for examining critically the relationship of authority, power and rule.  Confidence in authority, then, is the result not so much of conceptual working as of an actual experience which arises spontaneously as the consequence of previous experiences and insights that have been gained.  It is analogous to the artist's perception or the doctor's awareness in making a diagnosis.

TO LIVE IS TO CHANGE AND TO BE PERFECT IS TO HAVE CHANGED OFTEN

John Henry Newman's phrase from An Essay on the Development of Doctrine (1845) links together the themes of which I have spoken.  Schools are institutions and they are repositories of learning, wisdom and experience.  Institutions are necessary for the discovery, preservation and handing on of truth.  They are the dynamic and paradoxical space of conservation and growth, of stability and change.  This is to say they have authority in terms of their organic life and their purpose.  Their authority is their power, power not to oppress but to set free by order and reason.  A school must be a place of learning rather than schooling, where learning fosters wonder, delight, contemplation, personal commitment, love and glory.  In these things lie the empowerment and fulfilment of the educated person.  How is this to be pursued?  By a recognition of the authoritativeness of the school as institution and the creative enterprise within it of people who teach and people who learn.  Here we put into practice the disciplines of authority where tradition, freedom, reason and consensus interpret and reinterpret for the present day the culture of learning.

If a disciplined process of interpretation and re-interpretation is not built into the organic structure (the living and changing, the conservation and growth) of the school, it is prey to grave dangers.  The gravest are the sins of success when a period of success insidiously breeds complacency, narrowness and arrogance.  Among other things, public examination success has its dangers.  A school must build into its own life and character the very qualities of learning which ensure authoritative stability and change.

What in practical terms has this meant over recent years?  For the sake of freedom and consensus it has meant the drafting by the governing body of a clear and serviceable identification of the educational goals of the School in the light of tradition and the present;  the introduction of a salary scale to encourage good teachers to remain in the classroom;  annual assessment of teachers to encourage trust and self-criticism;  a professional manual for teachers which sets ethical standards and clarifies aims;  limitation of occupancy of senior positions to encourage flexibility and enthusiasm;  the extension of senior offices to widen opportunities for responsibility;  a network of consultative committees to ensure a culture of authority and consensus.  For the sake of a true culture of learning it has meant the introduction of a Tutorial system which brings small numbers of pupils into close and regular contact with a teacher who has a personal commitment to them in the common pursuit of intellectual inquiry;  the reform of a crudely competitive marks and ranking system to guard against selfishness and anti-intellectualism amongst younger boys;  the revision of the reporting system to encourage a conscious connection between objective performance and personal commitment;  a scheme to bring young teachers in regularly from America and Japan to enrich social and intellectual encounter;  the inter-disciplinary strengthening of the Humanities as the focal point of the connection between ethics and knowledge;  the simplification of the timetable to create a greater measure of calm.  There is more, but this list indicates the intensity of change and growth which has taken place.  Yet there has been no loss of stability and the School is at its heart still the same place, because its heart has always been the culture of learning and most of us have understood that change is essential for growth and the enrichment of the culture of learning.  All creative enterprise involves periods of disturbance, of course, and it would be ridiculous to pretend that it has all been beer and skittles.  Some, but only a few, have suffered dislocation and alienation.  Yet ready and vigorous recognition of authority has protected you from the sins of success, ensuring the integrity of consensus and the safety of order.  You shall never be perfect (at least not in this world) and the re-interpretation must continue and continue, for to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.

QUESTION PERIOD

How important are the playing fields for developing a moral sense in students?

RICHARD WOOD:  I think they do, for the obvious reasons that don't need very much explanation:  co-operation in a team, and the skills and awarenesses being on a team require, obviously do have ethical properties or at least inculcate ethical properties.  I do recognise the ethical value of participation in sport, and I have an appreciation of its grace.  There are intellectual properties, intellectual qualities, attached to sport that are obscured, I suppose, if it operates only in the world of macho-cult.  It seems to me the question which keeps coming up, which we haven't really answered, is:  How do you teach virtue?  or How do you teach right behaviour?  In reflecting on that, and I think principally in response to Susan Moore's suggestions, I was struck by a train of thought that goes like this:  By and large, as human beings, the moral lessons that strike us most forcefully and have the deepest impact on us come as a result of our own wrongdoing.  Often, in these cases, we may well not have known that we were doing something wrong in advance or even when we were doing it.  Some of the great works of literature are about precisely this.  We learn that we have done something wrong principally in the guilt and the shame that follow.  The real punishment or the inner punishment is these feelings that well up inside.  It was out of this train of thought that I responded to Dame Leonie's suggestion that, to a very significant degree, it is in the playground that the teaching of what one should and shouldn't do in practice takes place, and it also happens on the sporting fields.  What the playgrounds and the sporting fields have in common is a "fear of doing".  The children are actually doing things:  they're racing around, they're interacting, they're beating each other up, they're cheating.  Whatever they are doing, it is not abstract in the sense of sitting in a classroom and being taught.  Now it is probably not the case that it is only in the sphere of "doing" that we can significantly teach ethical behaviour;  and the one other type of education which seems plausible to me is a class in which a teacher puts before children a normal human situation of conflict or pressure:  What would you do?  What is the right thing to do in this situation?  You tell a story of betrayal or tragic conflict between values, and the children then start to think and reflect on what is the right and the wrong way to respond in this situation.  That is not teaching in the context of doing;  that is teaching through reflection.  Those are the two main areas that certainly seem pertinent to the question "How can virtue be taught?".

JACQUELINE DEVINE:  It has seemed to me that there is a point which has not been raised, which is that you can't have ethics without some basis for it, either religion or, in the case of the ancients, also religion I suppose.  Unless there is an overriding authority, one person's ethics may not be another's.  I really don't see the point in trying to teach ethics unless you have a values system already in place that all of society accepts.  It may be just manners, as in Jane Austen, or it may be Christian morality, but it has got to be something that is overriding and not just what you say in your classroom or what you say in your newspaper.

RICHARD WOOD:  The reason I spoke about the need for giving teachers a sound conceptual base -- having discussions about profound works which pose fundamental moral questions -- was precisely to get at that issue.  Unless you as a teacher are introduced to such material, how can you even begin to decide for yourself what your own sources of enlightenment are going to be?  You have to be bombarded with a wide range of substantial reading matter.  I wasn't talking about how one actually teaches teachers, or even how one teaches children, which is another matter.  Through probing questions about carefully chosen material, Socratic teachers enable large moral issues to be explored in manageable ways by young people, children, and adults.  Hence:  if I were concerned in class about things that happen in the playground behind teachers' backs, and the problem of, for example, bullying, taunting, mocking, and teasing (all of which occur every day in schools and often aren't addressed), one of the first things I would do is present literature which treats that kind of question.  A book I think of straight away is Aidan Chambers' The Present Takers, which is written for 10- and 1 l-year-olds.  It helps, of course, if one is familiar with a wide range of materials that dramatise questions which kids automatically want to talk about.  I have found in schools within the past couple of years, K to 12, that when pupils of every age are given very good reading matter, they don't want to stop talking.  They plead, "Can't we go on?  Do we have to move to the next activity?" because the materials, and the questions posed by them, are so inherently interesting.  An earlier question raised about whether one can have a morally fine society without a religious underpinning is so large that it would be absurd to start tackling it except at its margins.  But I can say three things about it.  One is that all of us must know people without religion who are ethically fine and developed;  secondly, we all must know people who are religious and not at all ethically fine;  and thirdly, there are some societies about which I have a kind of glimmering -- like, for example, Japan -- whose ethical systems are not grounded in the same kind of religious sense that is common in Europe.  So I am sceptical of a proposition as simple as the one that we need religion to underpin ethics.  I think it is a rather gloomy proposition in the end because I don't think there is much likelihood that our kind of society is going to have religion in the way that Christian society has previously had it.

MARIE-THERESE GIBSON (Principal, Creston College, University of New South Wales):  You stated that we know we have done something wrong if we feel guilty or shameful afterwards.  I think that the guilt and then the shame come from reflection about whether or not we have acted in accord with right reason.  The guilt is an objective judgment about the wrong we've done, and the shame is the feeling aroused by that wrong.  Both are a consequence of our knowing that we have not behaved well.  In other words, I don't think that after the guilt we realise we have done something wrong.  It's the other way round.  You may want to disagree with me on that.  The second point I want to make is about religion itself.  It is almost impossible, I suppose, but I think that we can come to some common understanding of ethics if we come back and try to reach agreement on the nature of the human being.  We are human beings, whether we are black or white or whatever, and I think that there is something important in education for us to think about:  who we are, where we've come from, and what we are educating for.  If we look at the nature of the human being -- and my own point of view is anchored in metaphysical realism -- we perceive that we have an intellect and a will.  We know there is a need for virtue because we have an intellect which tells us what the truth is.  We love what is good and true, and the motivating force in the human being is love;  so if we can help children love truth through literature and then in small ways teach them how to be generous in practical things -- in the home, in the playground -- I think that is a way of helping in education.  Teachers have to be the first ones to be struggling to do that, to be a unified person and a better person for that.

RICHARD WOOD:  I personally don't think that reason comes before guilt or shame.  To give one example:  I knew an 18-year-old who had just got his licence and was driving down a back street in Melbourne one afternoon.  He wasn't speeding;  he hadn't had anything to drink.  A four-year-old girl ran in front of his car and was killed.  He felt absolutely devastated and virtually couldn't do anything for six months, and I'm sure his whole life is under the cloud of that particular event.  He hadn't done anything wrong, and correctly the law didn't prosecute him.  The best driver in the world couldn't have avoided this accident.  And yet we all know he was right to feel terrible, although he wasn't culpable.  The feelings that came up in him, I think, fit any normal psychological or religious description of guilt.  He was a normal modern 18-year-old, he hadn't been brought up a Catholic, in fact he hadn't had any religious education at all.  There was nothing his reason had been taught or could respond to in order for him to say "I've broken some terrible law and therefore it is right that I feel this crushing guilt."  His spontaneous instinctual response to this terrible tragedy that he happened to have become a part of, completely unwittingly and completely without any culpability, had really shattered him with guilt.  I think this boy's response was exactly the same as that of Oedipus thousands of years ago:  he had a sense that he had broken universal law.  He had the great misfortune to be the person who was the vehicle for the destruction of an innocent life, and he knew that in a way which had nothing to do with his reason or with anything he had ever been taught.  It had nothing to do with anything in the human environment around him that could possibly be picked up.  Anyone listening to that story would accept that it was right that he felt terrible.  But it is very hard in terms of rationalist ethics or, indeed, any modern notion of guilt, to explain why he felt so bad.

JlLL IRELAND (Founder of a school, K-12, soon to start, in Bega):  Regarding the choice of substantial texts for study:  having recently looked at the full list for the HSC for English, I was very impressed to see that its available texts cover a very wide range and give students a good opportunty to study material of real worth.  But, at the schools where I have been speaking to English teachers, the response has been, "Of course where there is an option we must choose the contemporary one because that's the only one that's relevant to the students."  Now having just read most of those contemporary texts, I am conscious that if that is the staple diet of those students, they are not being fed substantial fare which will give them the subjects for moral reflection which were possible in the older texts.  It just isn't good enough to say, as many schools are in practice saying, that only one pre-20th-century poet should be studied.

RICHARD WOOD:  This is why there is such a crying need for teachers to have an exposure, different from the one they are usually given, not just to literature but to a broad range of reading which will acquaint them with moral points of view going back to ancient Greece.  Teachers need to be given solid reading in their training so that more of them recognise that you don't have to limit yourself to right now to interest children.  There is a terrific prejudice at the moment that the contemporary is the only thing children will respond to.  This simply isn't true.  Teachers need to be familiar with a diverse range of materials which do the job -- and there is such a range of materials.

I am new to the concept of using philosophy in schools and I am not sure what the Government's position is on this subject.  We are supposed to be linking ourselves mentally more with Asia and the Asian region.  Surely there is an avenue for the exploration of Asian philosophy and a place for debating how ethics should be taught to our children.

RICHARD WOOD:  The ancient world is becoming more attractive precisely because people like to find new ways of looking at reality which are quite unlike their own.  This frees them and enriches them, enabling them as well to come back into their own world and be much more critical of it.  I think there are signs that classics, ancient history, the study of other cultures -- at either a linguistic or non-linguistic level -- are becoming very popular because children feel nourished and enriched by them.  Philosophical inquiry, in my opinion, should be part of all teaching.  But, of course, it requires particular practical circumstances.  It requires a small enough number of pupils, a small enough teacher-student ratio for it to be possible.  That is one of the difficulties in implementing the idea of a Socratic method in classroom teaching;  but it is highly desirable.  I think that overwhelmingly the first priority should be for students in our schools to get an understanding of their own tradition and later to do other things if they are so inclined at university.  It is extraordinarily hard even to have a half-deep understanding of the Western tradition, and if a school can get any way along that road, I think it has done more than well.  We will get into Asia in different ways at different times.  I think one should be a bit careful about comparisons when one isn't grounded in something rather firm of one's own.

GILBERT MANE:  John Colets School, of which I am the Headmaster, is only K-6 at this stage, but we start teaching the children Shakespeare when they arrive at four-and-a-half, and the King James version of the Bible.  We find that the children respond very much to all of that.  I took my sixth class boys to Coriolanus, which we hadn't studied at all, and they thought it was a great play and followed it perfectly.  The other thing we do is have a weekly philosophy class where we cover both Indian and Western philosophy, and the children respond very fully to that.  As you were saying, there is no limit.  The only limit that children have is the one we place on them, and we haven't yet actually discovered it.  I agree with both speakers about grounding the students in our tradition through the Bible and Shakespeare.  But we should start in primary school.  It is very difficult, in my experience, to overcome at high school any mismeasure that has been implanted at the primary stage.

PETER MARSHALL (Principal, Goulburn High School):  May I ask what you would do with Mr Keating?

RICHARD WOOD:  I can't resist commenting because I know what I would do with Mr Keating:  I would shunt him sideways and make him sportsmaster, since he spends most of his time on or under the desk and out on the playing field.  I would also require him to produce the school play every year because I don't think he was a teacher at all.  I think he was an actor.  What I'd like to add, just before we close, relates to a number of the questions, and it is about whether or not you can teach certain things to school children, especially at primary school.  The second last speaker who talked about Indian philosophy was very much in this area.  A few years ago I visited an all-black elementary school in one of the toughest districts in Chicago which Susan Moore has also visited.  Once a week they have a Socratic seminar run along Mortimer Adler/Paideia lines, and the rest of the time they are in their ordinary classroom.  While all the seminars stick in my mind, there is one that I want to pick out for a particular reason.  It involved a group of 10-year-olds who had read a story about a boy who went to school for the first time (Shirley Jackson's Charles).  Each day when he came home in the first week his mother asked him what he'd done at school that day, and he described the dreadful misdeeds of a particular boy -- different ones for every day of the week.  At the end of the week, by a twist of the plot that I no longer remember, it suddenly became clear that this little boy was talking about himself, ascribing his own acts of villany day by day to somebody else, some hypothetical child.  The question which was raised by the children in this class was, "What should be done about him?"  One of these boys I shall never forget.  He said, "Well, his father should punish him because it isn't right to tell lies to your parents."  I would love to have known which of the appalling conditions in that suburb of Chicago that boy had experienced.  The school was in an area of high unemployment, drugs, poverty.  Everything that could go wrong in a child's life would go wrong there.  The boy was very reflective about this.  About the story, he said, "But, of course, the reason why he did that was that his parents didn't talk to him enough."  For a 10-year-old I thought that was amazingly perceptive.  What was really happening in the story was that the child was coming home with babble about the naughty child, and his mother was just saying "What did you do?" without listening to his answers.  The boy I won't forget had picked up from the story that there was something fundamentally wrong between the parents and the child that had produced this rather strange, fantastical behaviour on his part.  And so he said his father should certainly punish him -- it was interesting he said his father, by the way, not his mother -- but he added that the father should also talk to his son properly every day and then it wouldn't happen again.  I mention this because this incident said to me that that child, and many of the other children I heard in the school, did have a natural sense of how things ought to be.  They read and discussed their stories in a way that enabled them to reveal their incipient sense of what it was to do right and wrong.  At lunch-time that day the teachers were talking among themselves, and one of them said that she hadn't been very pleased with her seminar with eleven-year-olds that morning.  I had been to it and I thought it was splendid, but she found fault with it because there was something missing, something the children seemed not to have known about.  So she turned to one of the other teachers and said, "Did you teach that class Antigone last year?"  And the other teacher responded, "No, I didn't.  They missed out on it."  They there and then decided that they had to teach Antigone to that class in that year when I was there.  This group of about half a dozen or more made an immediate decision that they would give up their whole weekend to convene the whole staff to have a seminar on Antigone because they all agreed that they shouldn't teach it again without having taught it to each other first, to make sure they would bring out of it all the things that the children would need to understand.  That was one of the things that made me feel you can teach what you want to teach if you go about it the right way.