This interesting article was sent to me by Kelleigh Nelson from America. You Australians seem too apathetic to notice an innovative thinker writing about Education in your own country. Praise God for an aware American willing to alert you! I am constantly amazed that you humans insist on teaching your children that they “evolved” from a cosmic soup over millions of years via the zoo. You then wonder why, when they are running your country, they make such a pigs ear of it.

To read the comprehensive biography of the writer, Joseph Pearce, click on his name just below.

Gibber! Gibber!

Chugley

A Crusade for True Education in Australia

By Joseph Pearce May 22nd, 2025 Categories: Classical Education, Classical Learning, Education, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors

I’ve recently returned from my first-ever visit to Australia. In its wake, I am basking in the afterglow of the experience, as well as enduring the jetlag of its aftermath. The purpose of the visit was a speaking tour to promote the need for a restoration of classical education. Its instigator and organizer was Tim Mitchell, the founder and chairman of Hartford College, a new classical school in Sydney, which aims to “engage and integrate its parental and teaching community to develop students with sound moral character, well-formed faith and a life-long passion for the pursuit of truth through a classical education”. As for its long-term goal, it is to “be the best school for boys in Sydney providing a classical education to develop academic excellence and virtue-based character in the Catholic tradition”. I was, therefore, on a noble mission, indeed a crusade, to play my own small part in Tim’s mission to restore goodness, truth and beauty to the heart of education in Australia.

I first met Tim Mitchell at a Chesterton Conference in Philadelphia at which he and I were both inspired by the phenomenal success of the Chesterton Schools Network. This initiative in Catholic classical education, the brainchild of the indomitable Dale Ahlquist, has had an impact nationally and internationally which is nothing less than explosive, a beneficent bomb which has ignited passion for the restoration of the traditional liberal arts. Dale founded the first Chesterton Academy in 2007 in a suburb of Minneapolis. There are now nearly seventy schools in the network worldwide.

By comparison, Tim Mitchell is ploughing a relatively lonely furrow. There is no network of classical schools in Australia for Hartford College to join. It might be hoped, however, that Tim’s pioneering spirit and the example of Hartford College will inspire others to follow in his adventurous footsteps and to join him on the crusade. Having toured the country in Tim’s company, I am greatly encouraged, finding it easy to believe that such a crusade is already beginning to happen.

Apart from guest teaching at Hartford College and speaking at a symposium on its campus, I also spoke at Campion College, a small undergraduate institution founded in 2006 which, as its motto proclaims, is “Educating for Eternity” (Educare ad Aeternitatem). In addition, I gave a public lecture at Warrane College, an independent residential college for men affiliated with the University of New South Wales and run by Opus Dei.

Although these independent educational initiatives offer a much-needed and ultimately essential alternative, I was also encouraged by the desire of mainstream Catholic schools to restore the classical liberal arts to the curriculum. The Archdioceses of both Sydney and Melbourne organized special conferences to coincide with my visit, enabling me to explain the case for classical education to senior administrators and teachers in the two largest cities in Australia. The Archbishops of both cities had appointed senior officials whose primary focus was the restoration of the liberal arts to the hundreds of Catholic schools under their jurisdiction. It was truly edifying to see the passion for goodness, truth and beauty in the hearts of these leaders in Catholic education and to witness the leadership of the two Archbishops in their appointment of such people to such influential positions within the school system.

Beyond the realm of institutional education, I was pleased to spend some time with a group of homeschooling parents and students in Melbourne, who had reached out to me upon hearing that I would be visiting the city. I was equally pleased to be given a tour of a boys school, run by Opus Dei, and to give a talk on education at the neighbouring girls school. Both these schools are growing in leaps and bounds, a testimony to the success of traditional educational models in the midst of the madness and mayhem of modern secular education and its all too evident failures.

Having visited Australia’s two largest cities, I headed north to Brisbane to give a public lecture sponsored by the soon-to-be-founded St. John Henry Newman College. The school will open in January 2026 and its imminent presence is causing much expectant excitement. More than 250 people attended my lecture on “Shakespeare and Tolkien: Literary Giants and Why the Great Books Matter” and the enthusiasm for classical education amongst those in attendance was palpable. I have no doubt that the soon-to-be-born school will be launched on a wave of fervent desire by local parents for its success.

As for myself, I am buoyed up by my experience of the exciting initiatives in classical education which are welling up on the other side of the world. I feel privileged that I was able to penetrate beneath the surface of Australian culture, beyond the world of the tourist. I didn’t spend my time skating the surface and seeing the sites, though I still found time to see the Sydney Opera House and to witness kangaroos in the wild, and flocks of cockatoos, flying foxes (giant bats!) and other exotic fauna and flora. These are memories that I will cherish, like any other first-time visitor to Australia, but they cannot replace the joy of getting “down under” Down Under, the exhilaration of the deep delve and dive into the real Australia where real Australians are working to restore their land to the culture of Christendom. Such exhilaration warrants the exhaustion of the grueling schedule of talks and travel, and the jetlagged jadedness which overcomes me as I conclude these musings. In the emergence of such a cultural awakening, who needs sleep!

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