Woke teaching revolt drives classical learning push
Natasha Bita
The Australian - 11 August 2025
A backlash against woke teaching and cancel culture is kindling the creation of micro-schools that cater to parents seeking a classical education for their children.
Rejecting modern teaching fads, the tiny schools embrace explicit instruction methods and promote the traditional literature that so many mainstream competitors have banned for being confronting or politically incorrect. Children are encouraged to ask questions and debate issues, and are taught the fundamental literacy and mathematical skills that form the foundation of critical and creative thinking.
The classical learning renaissance emerged from the US, where 1500 schools serving more than 400,000 students have created a $12bn education sector.
The dangers of cancel culture were spelt out this week by a pioneer of classical schooling, American educator John Heitzenrater, who insists that touchy historical issues must be studied, instead of whitewashed.
As the headmaster of St John Chrysostom Academy in Pennsylvania and a former director of public charter schools in Texas, Mr Heitzenrater fought to retain scrutiny of slavery in the history curriculum.
“A book like Huckleberry Finn has a lot of language in it which is deemed offensive today,’’ he told The Australian.“ But if you read it, you can explain to a child, ‘Now you understand how this group of people was marginalised, how they were treated and how this led to the civil rights movement.’
“If we wipe away the stories, if we don’t talk about it, it will happen again.
“We have to know about the horrors of the Holocaust, we have to know about the horrors of slavery.
In the United States, there was a period just a couple of years ago where they were taking down statues and trying to rewrite things from the collective memory.
“But a nation’s greatness is in the fact that it has sins in its past it has overcome and recovered from, and you cannot just whitewash that away and make it as if it never existed.’’
Mr Heitzenrater said schools needed to let children fail, so they could learn from their mistakes.
“We live in a society which is terrified of failure,’’ he said.
“We tend to coddle and to want to overly protect our children.
“I think it has the opposite consequence … you have children who can’t really engage with anything; they just want to sit on their phones and be left alone.’’
Objective standards of truth and beauty are taught in classical schools, yet children are encouraged to question their teachers.
“I don’t create an environment in my school where I want a bunch of robots to just repeat what I say,’’ Mr Heitzenrater said.
“I want them to think through a topic and come to their own conclusions.’’
Mr Heitzenrater despairs that too many young people have lost the art of intelligent argument.
“There is a way to have a civil discussion, and a civil way to disagree with somebody, without attacks or calling the person names,’’ he said. “It’s like a shouting match now – that’s not debate. There’s no pursuit of knowledge or truth or beauty in that – it’s just somebody wants to be right and they’re not going to take no for an answer.
“We have to teach our children: state your argument, state your reasons for it and then listen to the other side.
“If you can find commonality, great, but if you are still very much opposed to what the other person thinks, agree to disagree, shake hands and move on.’’
In a keynote address to Queensland’s first Classical Education Conference last weekend, hosted by St John Chrysostom Academy’s sister school the St John of Kronstadt Academy, Mr Heitzenrater warned against the rise of artificial intelligence and digital devices in schools.
Split-second answers online had displaced the “pain and suffering that many of us experienced learning how to use books and do research, thereby giving us the tools not only to read well but also to think critically’’, he said.
“In just a few short years, our awareness and ability to wrestle with difficult topics has declined, and our ability to contemplate and reason through situations and ideas has stagnated.”
Mr Heitzenrater also railed against the “assembly-line approach to learning’’ in many mainstream schools.
“We place a textbook in front of a child, have them read that textbook, ask them questions about what they read, and then move on to the next glob of information,’’ he said.
“The love and joy of learning is lost. All children should learn phonics, numeracy, and read good literature. Specialisation can occur later, once foundational knowledge and experience is firmly rooted in the child.’’
Ancient virtues have been displaced by modern “platitudes and motivational posters’’, Mr Heitzenrater told the conference.
“Words like achieve, greatness, happiness, effort and winners, have replaced actual virtues like fortitude, charity, integrity and wisdom,’’ he said.
“Yet there is a fear on the part of teachers to stress virtue, because it may contradict someone else’s values.’’
Classical start-up schools in Australia include the Catholic Hartford College in Sydney, where 25 boys study a liberal arts curriculum, and the Catholic St Benedict School, which teaches “low-tech, high content’’ lessons to 31 primary students in the Adelaide Hills.
Aesop’s fables, Brothers Grimm fairytales, the ancient abacus and singsong repetition feature in fun lessons at the St John of Kronstadt Academy in Brisbane, established last year with 22 students from prep to year 4.
Its founder, lawyer and Orthodox priest Father Stephen David, set up the school because he wanted his own two children to “learn how to think, not what to think’’.
Parents pay $5000 a year in tuition fees, the federal government contributes $22,000 per student and the Queensland government chips in more than $2000 per student to cover the salaries of two teachers, a teacher aide and rent in a disused teaching college at the back of a shopping centre in Mount Gravatt.
Students are taught cursive handwriting – which is no longer mandatory in Queensland schools – and technology is shunned in the primary years.
“Instead of surrounding them with screens, we surround them with books and artwork,” Father David said.
“Repetition is the mother of all memory, and the students enjoy singing, chanting and reciting poetry – once you put something to music, they will learn five times faster.
“I want children to grow in wisdom, virtue and eloquence – that’s the objective of a classical education.’”
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