policy & reform
contributes, and that brings people out of themselves, which is
literally what education means. The students learn from each other
to some extent.
So you’ve got the object of study in front of you, you’re all sitting
in a small group around the object of study, and it’s drawing from
you as a conversation, things that you didn’t know about yourself,
about the text, and about each other.
It’s a wonderful model, and I’m not pretending that we can fund it
at a level that would make this possible everywhere. But at least if we
can set an example of what might be possible, given ingenuity and
After all, being fascinated by your own
culture and civilisation doesn’t mean that you’re
disparaging or snooty about somebody else’s.
It just means you’re interested in your own.
other sources of funding in the future, then hopefully we will at least
be able to do that.
But there’s no doubt, I think, in any pedagogical theory that this is
a fantastic learning environment for students.
Students have suffered because of the massification of universities
over the last generation or so, together with the drive to prioritise
rankings and research, and also the tendencies for university
managers to focus the funding on faculties other than good old arts
and humanities. I think the students have tended to be the victims of
this process.
We’re just hoping to maybe help some faculties set an example of,
I won’t say a return to a golden age in the past, because there never
was one, but possibly a golden age in the future.
Another concern has been expressed over the study of the Western
canon. What’s so beneficial about this corpus of texts?
One misconception that people sometimes have when they use
phrases like ‘corpus’ and ‘canon’, is that they have a set of fixed
monuments in their mind, kind of like the pyramids. We’re all
supposed to go and stand at a distance and marvel at these huge
stone things that are impassive and you can’t access but are
huge and famous.
That is a total misconception. These texts are not just transmitting
the wisdom of the past, they’re dynamic, endlessly renewable
sources of intellectual energy. They’re like a renewable energy grid
that extends backwards 3000 years across time.
Each new generation that thinks about them, thinks about them
differently, sees all over again that this was or is a civilisation which
constantly critically explores and reinvents itself.
These are books and works of art and music that show us that so
much of what we assume is modern or correct in our thinking and
our attitudes is just the recycling of very ancient insights. So much of
what we take for granted is just the hard-won outcome of centuries
of struggle and progress.
All of this is really what it means to be educated in who you
are and where you come from, and the texts that do it are alive,
not dead.
The concerns I think very often reflect certain ideological stances
and attitudes that are rather narrow, divisive, and non-inclusive in
their attitude. They tend to assume that, simply because you study
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David Hume, Jonathan Swift or Jane Austin or Virginia Woolf, that
this is somehow being triumphalist or supremacist about the West.
This is completely the opposite of the case. So many of these
writers are the sources of openness to non-Western cultures and
civilisations. So much of the Enlightenment French tradition and
European tradition was a matter of opening our culture to non-
Western, non-European cultures.
In many ways, the West is the exemplary opening civilisation and
culture, to a degree that very few others have ever been.
Just because the course we’re proposing has a predominance
of texts from the Western canon doesn’t mean there is no room
in it for texts from other cultures. For example, if you wanted to
look at Confucius’ Analects alongside Aristotle’s Ethics, you could
do that. If you wanted to look at The Epic of Gilgamesh alongside
the Old Testament, you could do that. Nothing in the structure
precludes that.
And another thing, the way that it’s structured allows students
to take other courses alongside, which need not be in any way
Western-oriented. Neither internally nor externally in terms of its
structure is it triumphalist or supremacist. After all, being fascinated
by your own culture and civilisation doesn’t mean that you’re
disparaging or snooty about somebody else’s. It just means you’re
interested in your own.
By all means, be aware of the awful things that have happened
in the past in our civilisation – just as in any other – but don’t be
endlessly foolishly apologetic about it all.
Can you talk a bit more about how flexible the program is?
It is almost the most important thing I wanted to say. So often I’ve
found myself talking informally to students around campuses, and
this is the thing they haven’t grasped.
The first thing to say is that the program is developed by the
universities, not by us. It is up to them to prepare the curriculum and
make sure that the program, as they develop it, fits in properly with
their existing structures, and we do not ever seek to interfere with
any of that.
So, if I’m talking about ‘our program’, I’m not meaning to imply
that were telling our partner universities what to do.
The great books part of this Western civilisation degree would
be like a somewhat extended major within your arts degree. But if
you’re just doing an arts degree, it would leave the students room
to do, for example, an Indigenous studies major or an Asian studies
major or career studies major, or anything you like alongside it. It
would be a terrific complement, like a foil.
Let’s say as an arts student you wanted to become a professional
historian. In this strand, you would be able to do enough history or
enough philosophy so that you could qualify to do graduate work in
a discipline.
At the same time, if you’re doing this as part of a combined
degree – which we believe most students will want because we’re
offering five-year scholarships for students, not just four or three – in
your extended major, you’ve got room for a bit of other arts stuff in
there as well to get a wide taste of what else is available.
It is potentially very flexible. We’ve been having very productive
discussions with Queensland University, which is developing a very
flexible curriculum within its existing structures which also allows for
a fair bit of manoeuvrability and variety.
Obviously, it’s optional whether you do this at all. But if you do, it
gives you lots of flexibility to build other things around it as well. ■