 David is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, Okara. He has extensive experience in leading major reforms at both national and state level and a deep personal passion for and understanding of education. Immediately prior to Okara, he was CEO of the New South Wales Education Standards Authority. He has held senior roles in the New South Wales Department of Family and Community Services and Commonwealth Departments from Treasury, Health and Aging, Finance and Delegation, Education and Prime Minister and Cabinet. From 1998 to 2003, he was CEO of the National Catholic Education Commission. He started his career as a secondary school teacher and has served on the boards of the Australian Council of Educational Research and the Curriculum Corporation, now Education Services Australia. David will now share his presentation, Education as Cultural Transmission or Transformation. Thank you, David. Great. Thank you very much, Emily and good evening, everybody. It's great to be with you. Just so that you know, I'll be talking for about 40 minutes and that should leave us about 15 minutes for questions at the end. I came up with this idea for this talk in February before COVID-19 took hold and it seemed like a good idea at the time. As I started to write, however, it occurred to me that perhaps I had bitten off a little bit more than I could chew and certainly that the context had changed and I began to get a tad worried that I might not do a good job. But I was consoled by GK Chesterton's observation that some things that are worth doing are worth doing badly. And tonight what I'm doing, and I'll leave it to you to judge how well, is doing something worth doing. That is grappling with the issue of education's relationship to culture. Now, some might challenge me. Why am I talking about such an esoteric subject so far removed from the practical realities of schools about long dead thinkers at a time like this? We're in the midst of a crisis. There's a job to be done. Why aren't we talking about COVID? To which I would reply, yes, we are in the midst of a crisis, but it's not necessarily the one that everybody is talking about. COVID is a health crisis for sure, and it's given rise to an economic crisis and possibly leading to a political crisis. But arguably, it has also exposed a deeper cultural crisis that has been unfolding for decades. This is important because it is our culture that shapes how we respond both individually and collectively to new circumstances and new challenges. And our culture both shapes and is shaped by how we are educated. Accordingly, educators, and especially aspiring educational leaders who are involved in this program, need to have a clear vision about education's purpose and its relationship to culture. What is the purpose of education? Is it as per the classical tradition to transmit the values of our culture by exposing students, in the words of Matthew Arnold, to the best that has ever been thought and said? Or is it more utilitarian to help students find a job and to support the social order? Is it humanistic, focusing on the development of the students' personal capabilities and potential? Is it progressive, as opposed to traditional, valing the child's own experience more than formal teaching? Or is it ultimately about affecting social reconstruction? Is it none of these or all of them? And what of culture? It's one of the most contested words in English. The sense of which I'm using it tonight is to indicate a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, or a group. We can trace this meaning back to the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, the 18th century German philosopher Theologian and poet, who is critical of the Enlightenment idea that the history of mankind was one of inexorable progress from savagery to 18th century Europe as the pinnacle of development. In his unfinished work, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, Herder addressed the following paragraph to peoples from all ages and places. Men of all quarters of the globe who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of nature. So how do we compare cultures? What makes a culture strong? Why do cultures decline? What is the relationship between education and culture? So my aim this evening is very simple, but also somewhat ambitious. It's to explore these questions by taking a tour through the educational ideas of some philosophers whose work has contributed to my own thinking about education's relationship to culture. But I should warn you that each of these thinkers I'll be discussing tonight weren't a lifetime study and all I can have to achieve is to wet your appetite for further exploration without being excessively guilty of injustice through the necessarily abbreviated nature of my remarks. But before we get to their ideas, let's meet them in person. First, perhaps the most well-known of this group of four, Friedrich Nietzsche, born 1844, into a deeply religious family, died 1900, having suffered a debilitating psychological breakdown in 1889. He never married arguably the philosopher who had most impact on the 20th century, whether through the way his writings about the will to power and the Superman were hijacked by the Nazis or through his preparing the ground for postmodern nihilism via his pronouncement of the death of God. Second, Simone Vey, a French philosopher, political activist and mystic who enlisted to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. Born 1909, she died 1943, aged only 34, from heart failure and self-imposed malnutrition in solidarity with starving French soldiers. The coroner's report said that the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat while the balance of her mind was disturbed. Albert Camus, author of The Plague and Nobel Prize winner, described her as the only great spirit of our times. Third, Hannah Arendt, 1906 to 1975, perhaps best known for her phrase, the banality of evil. Her observation about Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal, whose trial in Jerusalem in 1962 was the subject of one of her most controversial books. She wrote prolifically on topics ranging from totalitarianism to epistemology and is one of the most important political theorists of the 20th century. Finally, perhaps the least well-known, but someone who deserves to be far better known, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lodigan, 1904 to 1984, who according to Time magazine in 1970 was considered by many intellectuals to be the finest philosophic thinker of the 20th century. That's a big call. He wrote mainly on epistemology and in my view, his ideas are very relevant to the times in which we are living. So Friedrich Nietzsche wrote only one work quite early in his career that explicitly addressed the issue of the role of education and vis-a-vis culture, but the topic features in many of his subsequent writings. In 1872, at the age of only 27, he delivered five lectures with the title On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. He and Nietzsche describes what he sees as twin evils, ruinous changes in the Prussian education system. First, there is the extension of education too widely to sections of the population that may not want or need it. That is the broad masses, the working classes, a section of the population that in his later works, he refers to as the herd. In large states, education will always be mediocre for the same reason that in large kitchens, the cooking is always bad. He was not a fan of mass education. Second, there is the consequential pollution of the purposes of education so that its primary function was now to be at the service of the state and the economy. He deplores this as a dumbing down of educational standards that is particularly damaging for the more gifted teachers and students, such that culture is tolerated only in so far as it serves the cause of earning money. Seen in this light, Nietzsche is unashamedly elitist and anti-democratic in his educational philosophy. He deplores the prevailing ethic in the population at large that it creates the good life with happiness and happiness with wealth and consumption, such that these things are the only reason why one would seek an education. Education is consequently mechanized to mass produce the skills required by the economy and the state. What is the task of higher education? To turn a man into a machine. What other means employed? He is taught to suffer being bored. But the true purpose of education in Nietzsche's view is the cultivation of the individual's capacity to contemplate, appreciate and embody that which is beautiful, true and good. The capacity to do this is what Nietzsche calls genius and it is extremely rare. In later works Nietzsche expands on his elitist views about the purpose of education as it relates to culture and the role of the person of genius and the role of art, especially music. The genius is able to exercise a form of spiritual leadership in a culture war along with men like Nietzsche and they are always men to bring about, excuse me, cultural rebirth and transformation. But what is the nature of this cultural rebirth that Nietzsche seeks to lead? Nietzsche works through this issue over the rest of his life. He believed that Christian culture and what he called its slave morality with its emphasis on humanity as inherently sinful that can only be saved by a crucified God, with its focus on the next world rather than this, on meekness and compassion and guilt and forgiveness. He believes that this has suppressed the more robust, vital and healthy culture and morality of classical Greece and Rome. He sees Christianity as a kind of usurping weed that has grown up and choked off society's access to these truly life-affirming cultural roots and these weeds have to be cleared away so that classical culture can be reborn. In his view, Christian morality relies on a set of metaphysical beliefs about the existence of a loving God that are simply no longer credible. God is dead. We have killed him with our science and rationality. But Nietzsche himself is no enlightenment rationalist. He wants to replace the Christian God with a new religion, a new mythology, because science and rationality will never satisfy our deepest longings. So, interest in education will acquire great strength only when belief in God and his care is renounced. Just as the art of healing flourished when belief in miracle cures ceased. Nietzsche's educational philosophy was very much one of cultural transformation to be led by great men of genius and great artists formed in the virtues of the ancient Greeks and Romans before the Christian rot set in and began to cut the elite off from their true aristocratic and noble notches, natures and their will to power. Education should cultivate geniuses with the moral courage to say yes to life in the face of meaninglessness. Here it's worth quoting Nietzsche's famous text on the death of God, which he puts into the mouth of a madman in his most famous work, Thus Spake Therophluster. Take a minute to read this to yourself. Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? Nietzsche is not rejoicing. He is deeply concerned that this loss of metaphysical underpinnings of morality will lead to chaos and he predicts exactly that. Since God is dead, the morality that sustains a community must find a new source of authority. No longer able to sustain itself through the reward and punishment of the afterlife, it must turn to soft power, power without psychological coercion, the power of art. Education's role then in respect of the elite, Nietzsche doesn't care about the majority, is a radical cultural and artistic transformation that relies on a return to our cultural origins, the classical Greek tragic vision of fate and suffering. Now like Nietzsche, Simone Ve is concerned for the rediscovery of cultural roots. The title of one of her most important works is The Need for Roots, published posthumously with a preface by T.S. Eliot. But unlike Nietzsche, Ve's attention is on the fate of workers and their suffering rather than a small band of elite culture warriors. Like Nietzsche, Ve is concerned about the atomisation of society and the damage to cultural roots that the industrial revolution has reached with its focus on mass production and consumption with no attention to questions of ultimate meaning and the true, the beautiful and the good. But unlike Nietzsche, who disdain political action, Ve sees cultural reconnection as an inherently political struggle. But before I go on to say more about Ve, I need to warn you, if worn is the right word, that she, like Bernard Lodigan, who will come to, are both people of religious faith, specifically Christianity. This runs against the grain of our increasingly secularised culture after the death of God. However, in my view, this enhances, rather than diminishes, their relevance to our age. The Polish poet Czesław Milosz regarded Ve as extremely important. And reflecting on the post-World War II artistic attitude to the subject of religion, he stated, to write on literature and art was considered an honourable occupation. Whereas any time notions taken from the language of religion appeared, the one who brought them up was immediately treated as lacking in tact, as if a silent pact had been broken. In the task of confronting cultural decline, tact is a luxury, and nobody would accuse Simone Ve of having excessive tact, or any tact at all for that matter. Now for Ve, the aim of education is the development of the capacity to work with attention. This concept of attention in Ve's philosophy is complex. For Ve, developing the capacity to pay attention, especially to things that one might not be intrinsically or initially interested in, is the purpose of schooling. Now this might seem very strange to claim as the purpose of education. But what does she mean by attention? As teachers, many of us would have spoken the words, pay attention to our students at one time or another. For Ve, attention is the disposition of the subject that is radically open and available to the reality of other people, especially those who suffer. To ourselves, to customs and traditions and ideas, and radically open to what is true, good and beautiful. In other words, to be attentive is to be curious about the whole of reality, and to have the capacity to focus one's mind on the task of asking and answering questions about reality. And if we are attentive to our world, we cannot help but be moved to act for justice out of love. Here are some quotes. Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Love of God is not the only substance of attention. Love of neighbour, which we know is the same love, consists of the same substance. The afflicted have no need of anything else in this world except someone capable of paying attention to them. The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult. It is nearly a miracle. Absolutely, unmixed attention is prayer. But what is this to do with culture? The loss of balance they saw in the culture of modern industrial society was the way it dehumanised factory workers in particular, and sacked them of any desire or interest in anything other than physical survival. She worked in a car factory for a year and experienced firsthand how the relentless machinery that demanded the workers constant and full attention and physical effort left them mentally exhausted with no capacity to engage in, to pay attention to anything else. All they could do through eating and sleeping and being entertained was in the words of Marx simply to reproduce themselves as factory fighter for the next day and the next on and on until you could no longer work. It is inhuman when one's attention has nothing worthy to engage it, but on the contrary is constrained to fix itself second by second upon the same trivial problem. So those focus on development of the capacity for attention as the purpose of schooling was entirely consistent with her view that the social order and the cultural underpinnings that sustained it needed transformation in order that workers could be free to engage with questions of meaning and purpose to inquire about what is true, beautiful and good. For they modern industrial society encourages a feeling of rootlessness, a lack of community and its education's role to overcome this rootlessness by reconstructing schools to help children discover meaning in their daily lives in the context of community. She feared that specialisation was becoming too dominant in schools, replacing general knowledge education that is education about things that all students have in common and roots them in a sense of community. Such schools she feared would produce students who could hold down a secure job but who didn't understand the meaning and purpose of their daily life nor had any desire to do so. They would have little interest or capacity to construct a framework that allows them to critique society. They never have been exposed to music, art, literature, philosophy, history or science other than to improve their value in the employment market or to widen the range of products they might be interested in consuming. Those advocacy for the rediscovery of social and communal roots through education was both conservative and progressive. The rediscovery of traditional culture was not only key to transforming and overcoming the soullessness of the culture of modern consumer capitalism but it was also a bulwark against totalitarianism. What would they say about developing the capacity for paying attention if she were alive today? I think she would be likely very concerned about how our so-called smart phones meant to be a means of communication have become as they say weapons of mass destruction, destruction, nodes of narcissism that hold us back from paying attention to and discerning the true nature of the problems that beset our culture. Hannah Arendt's essay, The Crisis of Education was first published in 1961 in a collection of essays entitled Between Past and Future. The title of the volume relates to the creative tension that exists between conservatism and radicalism, exemplified in both nature and way in different ways and its overarching theme is the crisis of authority in America in the mid 20th century of which the crisis of education is but one manifestation. Arendt's concept of authority is somewhat counterintuitive. Similar to Vey, she argues that fascism, communism, and totalitarian movements generally were possible because of communal rootlessness that follows a decline in traditional sources of authority. In other words, coercive authority filled a vacuum where communal traditional authority once was. So we should make a distinction between authority that is authoritarian and authority that is authoritative, which is based on voluntary deference to and trust in the wisdom of elders, their experience and their expertise. For Arendt, education is impossible without this kind of authority being exercised by teachers. The key concept for her is natality or newness. Education is a double process of gradually initiating children, new human beings, into the adult world, the old adult world into which they've been born and gradually empowering them to make that old world new. This educative process comes to an end when the young person must take their place in the world and begin to shape it according to their own lines. Education begins in the family, but then requires the school as the institution which acts as the passageway between the private space of the family and the public space of the adult world. Thus education mediates between the private world and the public world and also between the past and the future between old and new. This is a concern of many conservative educationists who fear loss of tradition. For example, in the closing of the American mind, Alan Bloom described tradition as a scene that connects the present with the past and provides a sense of unity to the different periods of human civilization through a grand narrative. The educator's role is to repair and nourish this scene or to protect and cultivate the delicate tendrils of tradition so that the past can continue to guide and provide the future with a sense of coherence and unity. It's a noble aim, but Arendt believed that the project to recover or strengthen the ligaments of tradition was a lost cause and that this has serious implications for education. For education relies on the authority of the teacher and that authority in turn has depended on cultural tradition, but with the decline of the power of tradition in the modern world, from where does the teacher get their authority? Here Arendt argues the teacher must become a kind of spokesperson for the world into which the young person is being initiated. Teachers as adults must own up to the fact that we, the adults, have created this world. We are responsible for it with all its strengths and weaknesses. Yet Arendt was deeply troubled by what she saw as the failure of the American public education system to accept this responsibility. She saw the abrogation of this responsibility by the system in the way it implemented progressive concepts such as child-centered education. She was critical of the view that teachers did not need to be subject matter experts, only pedagogical experts. Both these things led in her view to an undermining of the authority of the teacher. A further manifestation of this is that special importance was attached to obliterating as far as possible the distinction between play and work in favor of the former. Arendt is annoyed by this because the purpose of education in her view is the gradual initiation of the child into the adult world, where life is not just a game. But she was concerned that in contemporary schooling, the very thing that should prepare the child for the world of adults, the gradually acquired habit of work and of not playing, is done away with in favor of the autonomy of the world of childhood. Education must lead students from being children to being adults, able to cope with difficulty and act with moral responsibility for the world and make it new. There are echoes here of Simone Weil, where she said, whoever remains a child is never free in any state of society. So for Arendt, the role of education is cultural transmission as the necessary precursor to cultural transformation. What Arendt does not do however is specify what kind of transformation is needed in the future, how the next generation should exercise their responsibility for the world. She boldly states that the function of a school is to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living. It must not impose the political views of the adults onto the children. She explicitly eschews the temptation of revolutionary movements of a tyrannical caste to use the education system as a form of political indoctrination. The final sentences of the crisis of education read as follows and note the references to love. I'll give you a minute to read it for yourselves. I turn now, finally, to the thought of Bernard Lonegan. Like Nature, Vey and Arendt, education for Lonegan was just one of the many fields to which his overarching philosophical approach could be applied and for which it has practical implications. Where Lonegan differs from the others, however, is that his primary focus in his philosophy is epistemology, that is the theory of knowledge. What is it to know? Lonegan's major work is Insight, A Study in Human Understanding, published in 1957. Like Vey, for Lonegan it is our ability to be attentive to our experience, especially the experience of thinking and knowing that is the starting point. I'll take a little time to set out the key points of his theories then discuss how this relates to education and culture. Lonegan methodically sets out the process by which we come to know anything, including how we come to know. Lonegan makes a bold claim, thoroughly understand what it is to understand and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood, but you will possess a fixed base and invariant pattern opening upon all further developments of understanding. In brief, Lonegan's theory of cognition is that human knowing is a dynamic structure that relates the functions of experiencing, understanding and judging to one another. These are different levels of intentional consciousness with each level linked to the next by different types of questions. On the first level, we pay attention to the data of experience and we ask factual questions about what, when, who etc. Then we bring our intelligence to the task of noticing patterns and asking questions for insight about what explains the data, what could cause these patterns. On this second level of consciousness, answers to these questions take the form of concepts and ideas and hypotheses that could explain the data of experience. Then one has to exercise reason when judging between these potential understandings, asking which of them is true or at least most likely to be true. At this third level, when we have honestly asked and answered all the relevant reflective questions, we can make a judgment as to the truthful falsity of a proposition. And this is how we come to know in the broad. But, and this is a very important but, there remains a recognition that this knowledge is always to some extent contingent, not absolute. One has to make judgments about the world in order to live in it successfully, but one must always be open to the possibility that further data and reflective questions may lead one to a new judgment. Finally, one asks deliberative questions about how you are going to act in response to what you have come to know. Deciding to act responsibly is the fourth level of intentional consciousness. This is because we are not only knowers, we are doers. On this level, subjects both constitute themselves and make their world. On this level, we are responsible individually for the lives we lead and collectively for the worlds in which we lead them. Now, when we are deciding how to act, we act according to values. We seek to bring about things or states or situations that we value. Lonegan identifies an ascending scale of values. There is the vital level of value, which is the most basic, concerned with the particular goods essential to the quality of physical life such as food, health, shelter and earning a living. Then, social values are concerned with the good of order, the organization of the economy and the distribution of power for the sake of ensuring society as a whole has access to these vital level goods. Beyond physical survival and social order and supportive of them, there is the level of cultural value, which is concerned about the meaning of our common life together as mediated through story, myth, philosophy, science, history, the creative arts and literature and many other systems of meaning that have developed over thousands of years. But we are not just products of economic, social and cultural forces. These things may shape us, but they do not determine us. So personal values deal with issues of individual agency and integrity, of self-transcendence, of acting ethically and responsibly according to what we believe is good. But how do we come to know what is good? Here is where religious values make themselves felt in Lonegan's scheme. Religious value is that drive within us that urges the person to enter into communion with the source of all reality. The ultimate ground of all being and all goodness. This guides our ethical decision making at the personal level of value. However, we are held back from living according to these values by bias. Bias, for Lonegan, is whatever prevents us from questioning what we think we know and whatever prevents us from acting in a manner that is consistent with our inner drive to do what is good. So we must strive to overcome this bias in ourselves, we must strive to expand our perspective beyond the horizon into which we are born and live our lives and which frames our perceptions and our emotional responses to situations. This takes deep stores of self-awareness and humility and usually involves some form of conversion, intellectual or moral or religious. Through conversion, one is turned around from subtle, unacknowledged illusions about oneself and reality toward a critical appropriation of oneself as one really is and toward the real world for which one is truly responsible. How does this play out culturally? Well, just as bias can take hold of individuals and hold them back from approaching the true and the good more fully, so also bias can infect whole societies and the cultures that shape a society's ability to respond to new challenges. For Lonegan, it is the function of culture to discover, express, validate, criticize, correct, develop, improve such meaning and value as is needed to sustain a society's way of life. When a culture is functioning properly, it not only infuses social cooperation with meaning and purpose, but it also criticizes and revises social practices in response to new circumstances as they arise. Both internally and externally. A successful culture is resilient because it is adaptable. A crisis occurs whenever a culture is no longer able to perform its proper function and respond creatively to changing circumstances and social order begins to break down. Lonegan diagnosed the cultural failure of modernity as being a consequence of the optimistic hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment. Modernity has been unable to accept that virtually all the truths we hold to be self-evident common sense are in fact contingent, not absolute, and that the march of human progress is not inevitable. We could say that it is the failure to adapt to this reality that has given rise to the so-called culture wars with conservatives recalling in horror from the loss of traditional social and moral norms while post-modernists embrace and rejoice in the loss of normativity. Lonegan describes the process of a community or culture descending into crisis. Here, he describes the end game. Finally, the divided community, their conflicting actions and the messy situation are headed for disaster. For the messy situation is diagnosed differently by the divided community. Action is ever more at cross-purposes and the situation becomes still messier to provoke still sharper differences in diagnosis and policy, more radical criticism of one another's actions and an ever deeper crisis in the situation. The needed response to the crisis of culture is authenticity. Authenticity on the part of both individuals and societies. But authenticity is an ambiguous and contested term. For Lonegan, it means self-transcendence. At its most primordial level, self-transcendence comes back to the underlying human drive to know, that is, wonder and the ubiquitous phenomenon of questioning. Genuine questions draw us beyond anything we have as yet come to understand, accept, believe or value. Authenticity, being true to oneself, does not mean, as Nietzsche might suggest, following your own will to power. Rather, authenticity responds genuinely to the questions that one has put to oneself about oneself and one's culture. Lonegan's approach, then, can be summarised through what he referred to as a set of transcendental presets associated with each level of intentional consciousness. Be attentive when experiencing, be intelligent when seeking understanding, be reasonable when judging, be responsible when deciding how to act. And beyond this, at the effective level of emotion or feeling, where we are motivated to act according to what we value, we must be in love, in love with the world and with God. So, for Lonegan, the essence of education is nothing other than to foster attentiveness, intelligence and reasonableness. The judgments current in our society or any other, whether they are matters of common sense or science or value, these are to be affirmed, not as unquestionable dogmas, but simply as the best that attentiveness, intelligence and reasonableness have come up with thus far, even though those judgments may have been affected by collective bias. As new circumstances arise, there is more evidence to be attended to and more hypotheses to be envisaged, which will, in time, render many of these judgments liable to modification or even outright rejection. Education then must keep consciousness open and flexible by way of expanding it through the realization of how others have experienced, understood, judged and decided. In other words, education must foster critical respect for our past, for the culture we have inherited, always leaving open the possibility of amending cultural practices in response to new realities and new questions. Education therefore serves simultaneously the purposes of social and cultural continuity and social and cultural change, the purposes of cultural transmission and transformation. To conclude, the approach to education that each of these thinkers developed was in response to the cultural needs of their times as they saw them. Nietzsche and Ve were both concerned that education was in the process of just producing factory fodder. Nietzsche wanted education to form the cultural leaders who would create a new art for a society at risk of despair and chaos in the face of meninglessness, whereas they wanted the working classes to have the ability and freedom to pay attention to the true, the beautiful and the good. A rent like Ve saw rootlessness and lots of traditional authority as a precursor to totalitarianism and as an antidote, wanted educators to take responsibility for the adult world into which they were initiating their students. Fallonigan education plays a key role in the formation of human beings whose authenticity is crucial to a culture's ability to self-correct its course in the face of new situations and challenges. What new situation do we face today? What challenges? What are the needs of our time that our culture must meet and will our culture do its job? Reminded here of the opening stanza of WB Yeats's poem, The Second Coming, written shortly after World War I and ironically, coincidentally, in the context of the devastating flu pandemic. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon come out here, the falcon are. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, the anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood in tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. So what do you think is the role of education in relation to our sense of meaning and purpose as mediated through our culture? How will you work to cultivate young minds and hearts capable of understanding and loving themselves and the world into which we initiate them and then transforming both themselves and that world in accordance with their unrestricted and innate desire to know and to pursue what is good? These are questions we must ask ourselves constantly as educators and we must never be satisfied with the answers. Thank you. Thank you so much, David. These are indeed questions that we must ask ourselves and throughout this presentation I've been sent many questions through the live Q&A. Now I'm afraid I won't be able to take them all but I will be able to read through some and so David you may have time to address a few. The first question, David, is do you think that philosophy should be a part of the Australian curriculum? Oh well there's a review of the Australian curriculum on right at the moment. I would say that there are plenty of opportunities for the addressing of the kinds of questions that philosophy asks in the existing curriculum. Whether it's history or geography, even mathematics or science, there are many opportunities to address fundamental questions about what it means to know anything, how we constantly need to keep open our views in response to new information and new questions. Plenty of opportunities for comparing cultures and asking why is it that one you know people in one time live life this way and another community in another time in another place lived life in a different way? Asking questions about what are the things that these communities value? How is it that they could live such different lives? I think this is the way to teach philosophy or to introduce children into philosophical ideas rather than necessarily setting up separately a separate course around critical and creative thinking for example which is probably the general capability which is most fitted to the purposes of teaching philosophy. So that's the way I'd be thinking about the way to introduce these big questions that children need to be asking as they grow up. Thank you David. I have another question. The process of conversation is based upon the Gospel word, metonia, which means to change one's mind or to allow it to be changed. To what extent can teachers or curriculum writers encourage this state in children? Good. Well I'll give you a very practical story from my time as a teacher which might help give some flesh on the bones here. I was a history teacher as it said in the introduction in a secondary school and often one of the early lessons that I gave to my students was that I would walk into the class and I would pick two students and I would put them at either end of the platform in the days when classrooms had platforms and I had built ahead of time a little box, a 3D box and I painted it on three sides. I painted it red and on the other three sides I painted it blue and I asked these two students to close their eyes and face me and I was in the middle. I gave them a piece of chalk each and I said now I'm going to ask you to open your eyes and then look at what I'm holding and then I want you to answer a question by writing the answer on the board and all the class could see what was going on and then I said okay open your eyes and the boys looked at the boxes this boy could only see the red side that boy could only see the blue side and then I said what color was the box and so they both wrote down one boy wrote red the other boy wrote blue and then I said okay now check your answers and they looked across at one another and you know for about three or four seconds you could see their furrowed brows and you know scratching their heads until the penny dropped about what I had done and it's a very simple but practical lesson that things are not always what they seem. There is always another perspective on a situation and that if you want to arrive at the truth about a situation you've got to do your best to as I said in the talk expand your horizon beyond the one that you're currently in to try and understand the perspective of other people and this requires not only humility but empathy as well so I think that's just my way into answering that question and I think it might hopefully give the person who asked it you know some ideas. Yes good practical ideas now how about this one from Martin as a leader of an organization responsible for curriculum where does it leave you in a practical sense about your views of the cultural transformational role of contemporary education? Are we badly adrift in the grounding in the ideas you have outlined in an education that is increasingly transactional and instrumental? Look that's a really good question and a good observation. What I've tried to do tonight is to try to encourage people involved in education to critically reflect on their daily practice and its wider purpose. All of us in our daily work can get caught up in the job at hand in the task at hand and I know in particular for teachers this moment is extraordinarily busy and we're focused on getting the job done but it's always important that we take whatever opportunities we can to stand back from the hurly burly and to reflect on the bigger picture about what we're doing and I think the best thing to do is rather than to sort of tell teachers what they should be thinking it's more how school leaders can create opportunities within the school week or term for this kind of reflection and conversation to take place and I think for example the curriculum review which we're doing at the moment does provide that kind of opportunity. At the moment I'm in the process of undertaking conversations with 24 primary schools around the country, one in each sector in each state and territory, asking them about their experience of the Australian curriculum and invariably I get emails the next day from the principals saying how much the staff really valued the opportunity to think deeply about the curriculum about its broader purpose as opposed to simply you know day in, day out being focused on what's the task at hand, how do I get through the day? These things striking the right balance between the practical and the theoretical between being down in the on the dance floor if you like and being up on the balcony being able to look down on the dance floor and see what's going on and discern patterns. These are very important parts of the role and I think it's important on school leaders to be able to find opportunities for professional teachers to have these opportunities for reflection. Thank you, I'm all for getting down on the dance floor. I've got a great question from Jennifer. Do you think that many teachers in schools today would themselves have been taught about the philosophers and ideas you talked about this evening and would have applied thought to these concepts? I'd be very surprised if any teachers or many teachers who are teaching were taught about all four. These are all philosophers who I was only exposed to in in my adult life you know and I took an interest in as a result of my adult sort of education and I wouldn't expect that this kind of thing that these you know philosophers would necessarily be you know built into initial teacher education courses or other things but I do think as I said before whenever school leaders can find opportunities to help teachers find the time to read and reflect and to engage in the kind of professional development that encourages this broader contextualising of their day-to-day professional work that can only be a good thing. Thank you, I've got a question here from Jesse. What philosophical schools of thought are shaping our current curriculum and educational policies? Well again it's a difficult question because there are so many different approaches around particularly in the independent sector there you know many different educational philosophies that are in use in different faith-based schools for example then you've got schools like Steiner and Montessori who bring their own approach to education to the task. I think though if we're looking more broadly at the say the public school system that is very much structured and the curriculum there is very much structured around the the traditional key learning areas of that are represented in the in the Australian curriculum. Strong focus at the moment as there should be on excuse me giving young children the foundations that they need in terms of literacy and numeracy which are the building blocks for further learning. I think however what we could be looking more towards and this is an important message that we're getting through the curriculum review for teachers is where are the opportunities particularly in primary school for teachers to be able to help students join the dots across the siloed key learning areas. Now of course disciplinary thinking becomes very important in secondary school where you're introduced to the disciplines of you know science and history and geography English literature etc in a much more rigorous way than than in primary school but in primary school you do need to be exposed to a broad range of ideas and interests so that when you get to secondary school you've got an interest and you've got a desire to find out more about some of those fields that you learned about in primary school. I know that's not exactly going to the question but I do think that the current approach that we've got as per the theme of my lecture is very good in terms of setting up students for disciplinary specialisation as they get older but we do need to make sure that in primary school we're laying strong foundations for that learning and really fanning the flames of wonder in the early years and that that wonder is then carried on. I wouldn't want to see education simply becoming people either at one extreme saying it's just about pumping knowledge into people I don't think anybody believes that anymore but the other extreme I think the view that says look it's not about the knowledge it's just about the skills I think that's equally mistaken that both knowledge and skills are developed in a symbiotic relationship and I think that's where we need to focus. Thank you very much just before I ask this last question I'd like to say my favourite part of the week is running philosophy sessions with kindergarten to year two students it is awesome. Our last question for this evening is can you think of two to three things that educational policy makers should change to reflect the transmission and transformational function of education? Well I think I've so it's educational policy makers was it? Yes. Well I think some of the things that I previously mentioned I think are relevant here. Let's start with the curriculum which is our area and maybe I'll say one thing on each of curriculum teaching assessment and reporting maybe that might help structure my answer. I think I've already mentioned that I think we need to be careful about being divided into the knowledge camp or the skills camp we need to seriously reflect on how knowledge and skills and capabilities are developed together rather than separate so I think the more we can do to emphasise that reality through curriculum or through policy or through the implementation of curriculum that would be a good thing. In terms of teaching so while Akara hasn't got any direct mandate in the area of teaching I do think one of the things that we need to do in Australia and this has been written on a lot by people like Ben Jensen from Learning First is that I think we do we can do a lot more to help teachers in terms of the provision of high quality curriculum and teaching support materials so that teachers have got ready access to high quality support materials that allow them to access the curriculum without having to reinvent the wheel all the time in terms of spending excessive amounts of the precious time in lesson planning and unit planning and programming etc there's a lot more that can be done to help teachers in that respect. In terms of assessment I think the great initiative that's coming along at the moment is the online formative assessment initiative which has been jointly sponsored by all Australian governments and is a partnership between Akara our colleagues at Edsall and our colleagues at Education Services Australia. I think this will give teachers particularly in primary school a great tool to be able to undertake a good formative assessment using online resources that will then help them figure out where they need to go next to access high quality learning support materials. I think there needs to be a stronger focus on high quality formative assessment. Then in terms of reporting I think the issue of giving feedback to students is a form of reporting but giving feedback to parents as well about how their students are going based on those formative assessments is very important. I think we need to see those four elements much more holistically that is a curriculum teaching assessment and reporting. At the moment my feeling is that they're being dealt with in a policy sense in a somewhat siloed way. I'd much like to see them brought together much more holistically. Well thank you so much. Now that concludes our program for this evening. Thank you ever so much for tuning in. David you are absolutely amazing and so thought-provoking and thank you also to Kirsten Macaulay who orchestrated this wonderful leadership program to Annie Zimmerman and Nikki Riley. You are both seriously worth your weight in goal and a big shout out to Lee and Bigum our IT guru who made this possible for me. Thank you so much so thank you everybody and good night. Thank you.