education | Damien Cahill

THE RIGHT VALUES IN EDUCATION:
Neo-liberal think-tanks and the assault upon public schooling

To anyone with recent experience of public schooling in Australia, the idea that it is a hotbed of left-wing radicalism is likely to sound farcical. Nonetheless, throughout 2004, John Howard and his government were strident in their attacks upon what they claim is a teachers’ union capture of public education. Public-school curricula, argues the Coalition, embody a ‘values neutral’ approach and are devoid of serious intellectual content– reflecting instead the latest guilt-ridden ‘politically correct’ fashions of the Left. In the May 2004 federal budget such claims were given a hard edge. To address the perceived crisis of values, new strings were attached to federal funding of public schools: the requirement that every public school fly the Australian flag and undertake a program of ‘values education’.

That such actions and rhetoric constitute an ideological assault upon the legitimacy, independence and diversity of public education is probably clear to most readers of Overland. What may not be clear is that such actions are but the latest in a long campaign by the New Right in Australia, targeting public education at all levels. There are two aspects to this campaign. First, New Right think-tanks have mobilised to influence educational curricula, often using the institutions of public education to promote their own neo-liberal values. Second, the New Right has actively set out to undermine public education in Australia. The educational agenda of the Howard Government is the culmination of this campaign.

One of the keys to this campaign has been the disingenuous manner in which it has been conducted. What is essentially a fundamentalist economic creed – neo-liberalism – is presented as neutral and scientific analysis. This claim to legitimacy is further enhanced by the benign choice of names for neo-liberal think-tanks and ‘resource centres’ – the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), the Economics Education Resource Centre (EERC). At the same time – and despite the prominent position of many neo-liberal activists within universities, the infiltration by New Right think-tanks of public high-school curricula, and a series of neo-liberal reforms of secondary education at federal and state levels – the New Right have cried victim and underdog in debates about education. Finally, the rhetoric of ‘choice’ is employed by the New Right to mask a policy agenda aimed at denying universal educational opportunity.

A PRIVATE EDUCATION FOR ALL
The New Right – or radical neo-liberal movement, as I have described it elsewhere – emerged as a political force in Australia from the mid-1970s onwards. What was ‘new’ about the New Right, and what made it unique for its time, was its neo-liberal economic ideology. Drawing upon the works of economists such as Milton Friedman, Friederich von Hayek, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, the New Right argued that the market, when freed from state interference, was not only the most efficient, but also the most moral way of providing goods and services in society. They were thus vehemently opposed to social democracy, the welfare state and Keynesian-inspired economic management, all of which entailed a strong role for the state. Although the New Right’s ‘free market’ ideology had a long heritage within Australia, it was very much a fringe position in the 1970s and broke with the ruling consensus around managed capitalism and the necessary, positive role for the state, in the provision of services and the redistribution of income. Cohering through a series of think-tanks, and with its funding base provided by leading factions of Australian capital, the New Right aimed to dismantle this consensus and shape society according to its particular ideological vision.

The issue of education has always held a central place in neo-liberal ideology. Neo-liberals advocate the application of market mechanisms to schools and universities. The most common mechanism proposed by neo-liberals is that of ‘vouchers’, first outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955. Under a voucher scheme, rather than funding schools and universities, the state would provide vouchers – or ‘learning accounts’ – directly to students or their parents, which could be cashed in for educational services at an educational institution of their choice. Students would then become customers, with schools and universities turning into service providers. As with all neo-liberal markets, the service providers would be free to set their own fee levels. According to the neo-liberals, this would create a market for education in which schools and universities become responsive to ‘consumer demand’. With both public and private schools competing for government funding, the distinction between public and private education becomes redundant. Indeed the goal of the New Right is the destruction of the very institution of public education – as the title of the CIS publication, A Private Education For All, makes abundantly clear. Of course, the effect of a voucher scheme would be to further entrench the privileges of the already privileged and the disadvantages of the already disadvantaged.

But what explains the New Right’s almost paranoid concern with education? The mere belief in the advantages of market-based over state-run systems does not account for the vigour with which the neo-liberals have pursued their political campaign against public education. Neo-liberalism is about much more than removing restrictions on the free movement of capital. It also entails the attempt to reshape common sense. The shock troops for neo-liberalism – think-tanks – have played a prominent role in this. As one of the key sites for the transmission of political values, education has been an important target of their activism. They have helped to wage the battle of ideas not only over the direction of education policy, but within the education system itself.

THE NEW RIGHT’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST PUBLIC EDUCATION
Alex Carey detailed the process whereby corporations, employer associations and business-funded think-tanks during the 1970s and 1980s undertook an elaborate campaign of ‘economic education’ in Australian schools. Through the production and dissemination of economics textbooks, teaching materials and films, and the co-ordination of programs such as ‘Young Achievement Australia’, such groups helped to inculcate teachers and students with the values of the ‘free enterprise system’ and inoculate them against socialism. Beginning at the same time, more radical neo-liberal organisations and think-tanks engaged in a similar process, but with the aim of demonising not merely socialism, but social democracy and social justice as well.

In 1976 the Brisbane-based Foundation for Economics Education (Australia) was founded, one of its aims being to promote the radical neo-liberal ideology within schools. Based upon the American Foundation for Economic Education, one of its founders, Viv Forbes, received the ‘Adam Smith Award’ from the Australian Adam Smith Club in 1986 for ‘outstanding service to the free society’.

Building upon such activities, the IPA and the CIS co-ordinated well-organised attempts to intervene at the grassroots level in public education. In 1989 the CIS established the Economics Education Resource Centre (EERC), the aim of which was to target a radical neo-liberal agenda at high school economics teachers. As the EERC explained:

An interventionist position is often adopted in textbooks and by teachers in their exposition of controversial issues associated with many school topics . . . The main aim of the EERC is to update teachers’ knowledge of economic theory and policy and to promote an understanding of the role of markets in creating wealth through an efficient allocation of resources in the Australian economy.

The EERC produced the Economics Education Review (a bimonthly newsletter), organised the annual National Economics Teachers’ Conference, and held ‘Professional Development Activities’ for economics teachers, which consisted of a series of lectures on major economic topics. The Economics Education Review published articles interpreting economic issues from a neo-liberal framework, including reprints from leading neo-liberal activists.

Advertisements for upcoming CIS events and CIS publications, including its flagship journal, Policy, were also common in the pages of the Review. In 1991 “more than three hundred schools” had subscribed to Policy, and in 1993 the CIS boasted that EERC professional development days had attracted six hundred teachers, while more than eight hundred schools, colleges and libraries had subscribed to the Education Economics Review. As its name suggests, the EERC also provided a ‘resource centre’, and by 1993 this was reportedly “utilised regularly by individual students, teachers and student teachers alike. Class visits are becoming a regular occurrence” . The radical neo-liberals were not only talking to teachers, but to students as well. The CIS also attempted to bring university students into the fold through its ‘Liberty and Society’ program. Beginning in 1996, the program brought ‘over ninety outstanding students’ together over two separate weekend seminars to discuss radical neo-liberal themes.

The IPA also has a long history of promoting its agenda through the school system – both to teachers and their students – through the dissemination of IPA publications to schools. Between 1980 and 1989 the IPA’s Queensland branch (IPAQ) had involved “about seven thousand teachers and businessmen” in its ‘Business-Teacher Workshops’ which brought together teachers and business leaders in after-school forums. In 1988 the IPAQ organised these workshops with the assistance of the Queensland Department of Education.

Neo-liberalism in Australia has always had a socially conservative hue, and it is therefore not surprising that concern over ‘values’ has been part of the neo-liberal critique of education. The mental gymnastics required to sustain the marriage of these two contradictory ideologies is achieved by identifying a common enemy. The conservative sensibility blames the ‘decline of values’ in public education on ‘trade union capture’ and the ‘politically correct new class’ who inhabit the education bureaucracies. The neo-liberal sensibility sees trade union capture and bureaucratic control of schools as the reason that public education is unable to adequately reflect consumer demand. Such concerns inform the neo-liberal think-tanks’ campaign against public school curricula dealing with such topics as sex education, the history of Aboriginal dispossession, as well as the promotion of gender equity in schools. It was during the 1980s that the neo-liberal think-tanks began to rail against what they described as ‘values neutral’ teaching. For the conservative neo-liberals, a ‘values neutral’ approach was a euphemistic cover for the implementation of left-wing and ‘politically correct’ views on multiculturalism, the family, sexuality and religion. The following excerpt from the IPA’s critique of a Victorian Government safe-sex guide illustrates this position:

Marriage, fidelity, sexual restraint, and a declared belief in the desirability of heterosexual over homosexual activity are ‘out’ as far as the new breed of sex educators are concerned . . . [yet] it is traditional values which offer the best hope of protecting students against AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases.

The concept of ‘charter schools’, enthusiastically promoted by the CIS in particular, is another example of the marriage of neo-liberalism and conservatism. With charter schools, responsibility for what is taught, how it is taught and who teaches it are devolved to a management committee comprised of “parents, teachers or any qualified group”. Funding for charter schools would still be provided by the public (either directly or through the neo-liberals’ preferred method of vouchers). The schools themselves:

are freed from many government and union regulations and requirements, including those governing curriculum, teaching methods, and the hiring of staff.

For conservatives this offers the possibility of emulating the US experience and of having their own values imposed through school curricula.

One vehicle for such conservative neo-liberal challenges to public curricula was the IPA’s Education Policy Unit, established in 1988 under the leadership of Dame Leonie Kramer (and “funded by over seventy companies and 150 individuals”). The Unit’s brief was to bring an economically radical and socially conservative critique to bear on the nation’s public education system, and to attempt to influence both the curriculum and the policy agenda. In addition to regular publications, seminars and media statements, the Education Policy Unit produced Education Monitor, a thrice-yearly magazine. Education Monitor took over from Aces Review, the journal of the Australian Council for Educational Standards edited by Alan Barcan. It provided a forum for debating education policy among educators and education policy makers, but its editorial line was consistently morally conservative and economically neo-liberal. Education Monitor folded in 1996, citing “relatively high production and distribution costs”. However, during its lifetime it had a circulation of 3800.

In 1990 Dame Leonie Kramer was appointed by the NSW Greiner Liberal government to the executive of the NSW Board of Studies – the body responsible for setting school curricula. Premier Greiner opened the new IPA office in Sydney in 1989. In attendance was Sir John Carrick, Chairman of the NSW Committee of Review into Education. From these brief examples it is clear that the Australian Right had been successful at intervening directly in what was taught and what was read by students and teachers in Australia’s public education system.

This should put into context the common cries by neo-liberal think-tanks about left-wing hegemony within the public school system – it is a disingenuous claim that belies the infiltration of conservative neo-liberal ideas into high-school teaching and policy making. In academe too, neo-liberal intellectuals have long complained of persecution by a supposed ‘politically correct’ cabal which dominates Australia’s universities. Yet the research advisory boards and publication lists of neo-liberal think-tanks are filled with Professors and Associate Professors who enjoy highly successful academic careers in Australia’s university system. Radical neo-liberal think-tanks have made other inroads into tertiary education. Over the years they have achieved formal relationships with several public universities. For example, ‘The Full Employment Project’ was a ‘joint venture’ between the IPA and Melbourne University’s Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research, and in 1995 the IPA jointly organised the ‘Risk, Regulation and Responsibility Conference’ with the ANU’s Centre for Applied Economics. The most far reaching of these relationships however was the formal affiliation in 1995 of the Tasman Institute (a Melbourne-based, radical neo-liberal think-tank) with Melbourne University.

Furthermore, several leading think-tank activists have gone on to run a number of public universities – the IPA’s Dame Leonie Kramer was Chancellor of Sydney University; Ric Charlton of the CIS became Chancellor of Newcastle University in 1994; Lauchlan Chipman, an early supporter of the CIS, became the Vice-Chancellor of Central Queensland University in 1996; another early CIS supporter and former CIS Board Member, Maurice Newman, is currently Chancellor of Macquarie University; while current CIS Board Members John Phillips and Robert Champion de Crespigny, have recently held the Chancellorships at the Universities of Western Sydney and Adelaide respectively.

It was recently reported in the Australian that, while he was Chancellor, de Crespigny helped to negotiate the foundation of a private university, run by the American institution Carnegie Mellon, in the same city as his own University of Adelaide. This is but the latest example of neo-liberal activists mobilising to undermine the public university system by establishing private competitors to it. Neo-liberal think-tanks have joined with capitalists in several attempts to form private fee-paying universities, as a direct challenge to the public system. In the mid 1980s, neo-liberals joined with Lady Fairfax in an attempt to establish the Australian Simon University, using the brand name of the University of Rochester’s William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration. It was to be a fee-paying educational institution based in Sydney. CIS activists were well represented on the management council, including capitalists Maurice Newman, James Beatty and Andrew Kaldor, and intellectuals Peter Dodd and Greg Lindsay. A similar venture was the Tasman University project, driven by then Director of the Centre of Policy Studies, Michael Porter, and backed financially by capitalists John Elliott, Hugh Morgan and Will Bailey. Both institutions planned to offer business degrees and both failed to establish themselves as viable operations. Clearly, both were attempts to challenge the hegemony of welfare capitalism by putting radical neo-liberal philosophies into practice; to establish educational institutions based, both pedagogically and organisationally, around such philosophies; and in doing so, to challenge the legitimacy of public education in Australia.

Leading conservative figures were behind the recent establishment of Campion College, a private Catholic university dedicated to:

a fightback against secularisation of Christianity; against the influence of modernism and postmodernism in schools and universities; and against the influence of liberal Catholics who ignore the pope’s teachings against abortion and contraception and focus more on social justice than the mass and sacraments.

Clearly, this ‘university’ offers a retreat from reason as the antidote for troubled times. Again we can see the marriage of neo-liberalism and conservatism: the neo-liberal mantra of choice provides an economic rationale for the promotion of conservative ideology.

THE HOWARD AGENDA
The Right’s position on education is much like its position regarding the ABC. Despite stacking the ABC board with a stream of right-wing ideologues (Michael Kroger, Ron Brunton, Maurice Newman, Janet Albrechtsen) and despite the emergence of programs such as Insiders – a showcase of conservative neo-liberal diatribe – the Coalition government and its supporters in the think-tanks and the major newspapers continue to whine about the ABC’s ‘left-wing bias’. So too with public education. Despite such interventions as detailed above and despite the steady erosion of government funding of public education, which makes it difficult for teachers to teach anything, let alone undertake a radical pedagogy, the Right’s fantasies about left-wing indoctrination in public schools and universities continue.

Calls for the further dismantling of public education are likely to find a sympathetic audience in Canberra during the coming years. The Howard government embodies the conservative neo-liberal approach to public education. With control of the Senate now in Coalition hands, the apogee of the New Right campaign may well be nigh.

The further we move down the neo-liberal path, the more the reality of the neo-liberal program – as opposed to the rhetoric of its ideological cheerleaders – becomes apparent. The Coalition’s real agenda for public education (like its agenda for the ABC) is not ‘balance’, or ‘choice’, but the complete dismantling of the publicly owned and controlled system itself and its replacement with a fully commercial, privatised system. Behind the rhetoric of ‘choice’ and ‘values’ lies an apology for privilege and prejudice. When Howard speaks of choice in education, what he really means is the denial of opportunity for those unable to purchase a choice. When he speaks of values, he means the ‘right’ values – the stultifying retreat from reason that passes for conservative thought. This is Howard’s educational agenda. And in this agenda the government has willing accomplices.

Damien Cahill is a lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney.

Overland 179–winter 2005, pp.9–14