Against “Progressivism”: Schooling and the Cohering of Conservative Interests in Australia, 1970s–1980s

ABSTRACT

This article charts how a disdain for progressivism in schooling was central to the development of conservative interests across the 1970s and 1980s. It does so by examining the Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES) Review (1973–1987). This under-examined newsletter offers important insight into the cultivation of cultural conservatism, having links with the influential Australian conservative think tank the Centre for Independent Studies and the literary journal Quadrant, as well as comparable international outlets. First, this article identifies the diverse conservative interests and actors—including prominent conservative Australian figures—who set an agenda to intervene into educational practice via the newsletter. Second, I demonstrate how ACES Review writers depict progressivism as dangerous social engineering in contrast to their defence of traditional disciplines and educational standards. Third, I examine how ACES Review writers position themselves as speaking on the outside of power, as providing a voice of dissent against progressivism in government bureaucracies, and taking a leading role in conservative challenges to union leadership.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservatism
• educational standards
• progressivism
• schooling
• conservative networks
• anti-unionism

Introduction: Conservatism, Schooling and the ACES Review

The 1970s and 1980s was a critical time in the making of a new iteration of Australian conservatism. Rallying against contemporaneous feminist, multicultural, gay, Indigenous and equal rights agendas, this diverse set of actors sought to conserve—in their view—the social and moral fabric of Australia.¹ Many of these cultural conservatives were enlivened by a concern for children and the institution of the family (often through the politics of anti-feminism) as sites on which the future of the nation rested.² As Barrett Meyering puts it, “the figure of the child loomed large in the discourse of social conservatives”.³ This article brings historical focus to a key social institution that has received less scholarly attention, but through which many of these concerns were waged: schools. To do so, I analyse the newsletter the Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES) Review (1973–1988). ACES Review provided an important platform for diverse Australian cultural conservative interests to converge and develop. Its origin story recounted in its own pages positions the Review as a response to “the crisis of intellectual depreciation” in schools wrought by educational progressivism and was inspired by similar organisations and outlets internationally (e.g. the Black Papers in England).⁴

By analysing this outlet, this article contributes to existing accounts of Australian conservatism in two key ways. First, it aims to generate greater understanding about how cultural conservative interests are connected to, and generated by, the political contestations surrounding education and schooling in Australia. It is interesting, for instance, that apart from some notable exceptions (mostly in the field of educational research), education and schooling does not tend to feature in broader political or cultural analyses of conservatism.⁵ Second, through analysing the case of ACES Review, this article aims to shed specific light on the diverse coalition of conservatives who endeavoured to present a commonsense version of conservatism, distinguished from contemporaneous stridently religious conservatism, to appeal to parents and teachers in the struggle against progressivism.

Conservatism in any period is, of course, a highly diverse, diffuse and complex set of ideas and networks of people. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of the New Right encompassed a range of economic libertarians and moral conservatives who were galvanised by their concern about communism and the growing impact of equal rights, feminist, Indigenous and multicultural agendas.⁶ Across this diversity rested a focus on “the reasoned defence of tradition”, as put by Robert Manne in his 1982 edited collection, The New Conservatism in Australia, which included contributions from some of those involved in ACES Review.⁷ The overall politics of ACES Review reflected a kind of liberal conservatism, which fused social morality with liberal democratic sensibilities to produce a broad base for conservative intellectual politics.⁸ While existing scholarship has charted conservatism in relation to Australian political parties and key issues or dilemmas—such as feminism, sex education, sexuality and land rights—what remains less understood is the production of a broad-base conservatism anchored in an organisation and its print culture. Right-wing print culture is an important source through which to understand how conservative networks publicly presented their ideas to galvanise political interest and influence public opinion and policy.⁹ They produce a kind of conservative “public”, as Michael Warner would put it: a means to develop and confirm their own convictions while also conjuring and addressing a broader (known and unknown) network.¹⁰

In this way, by analysing the writings within, and networks surrounding, the ACES Review I aim to provide insight into how Australian conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s involved diverse coalitions that developed their politics through a response to progressivism in education. This article therefore analyses the portrayal of progressivism by ACES Review writers as they understood it, demonstrating how this diverse coalition cohered around a commitment to educational standards and a staunch position “against the excesses of progressive education”.¹¹

First, I examine the networks that sustained ACES Review, demonstrating how this newsletter brought together key conservative intellectual figures and was a part of a broader anti-progressive cultural strategy. Second, I turn to charting the ways in which progressivism was discursively represented as a scourge on education, and in contrast the appeals to the commonsense character of conservatism. As I explore below, ACES Review was self-conscious in its attempts to present itself as a moderate outlet, and to temper (to some extent) more extreme New Christian Right politics in its pages. Last, I outline how conservative interests around ACES Review developed a range of political strategies to obstruct what they viewed as a progressive takeover of education bureaucracies, schools and teacher unions. Across the analysis, this article reveals the ways in which conservative interests in education were articulated around the need to wrestle control of schooling from (left-wing) experts, union officials and bureaucrats. This impulse was expressed through a defensive rhetoric whereby culturally conservative interests were positioned as outside of government—and in some instances professional—loci of control.

Cohering Conservative Cultural Networks and Interests: ACES Review

First published in 1973, the Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES) Review emerged from, and was an expression of, contemporaneous conservative political and intellectual interests. It ran from 1973 to 1988, after which it became an official outlet of the conservative think tank Institute for Public Affairs (IPA), with the name Educational Monitor. This transition was short-lived, with the publication folding by the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, the shift in publication is notable, indicating its links with conservative political networks surrounding the IPA. ACES Review itself started perhaps how most self-published agitational newsletters do: with significant energy and aspiration. Early on, it attempted ten issues a year, but it quickly lacked capacity for this output, and by the late 1970s production petered to four issues per year. It was published by its namesake organisation, the Australian Council for Educational Standards, of which the Review was its main activity and output alongside speaking events and media appearances.

Although Australian in focus, the Review understood its purpose in an international context, inspired in large part by the British Black Papers (first published in 1969, with periodical issues published across the 1970s) and the associated National Council for Educational Standards (est. 1972), as well as the US Council for Basic Education (est. 1956) and the New Zealand Educational Standards Association.¹² Shared among these like-minded outlets and organisations was a concern to counter pedagogical and curricula progressivism in schools and to advocate for the basics and the Western canon.¹³ Writing to congratulate ACES on its 10th anniversary, Brian Cox, chairman of the British National Council for Educational Standards and Black Papers co-editor, reflected, “We all admire its [ACES Review’s] good sense and the considerable insight shown into our educational problems. As you will know, the problems you face are international.”¹⁴

The discursive politics of ACES Review were defined by rejection of progressivism (both in regard to curriculum and pedagogy), alarm at the so-called denigration of educational quality, and commitment to a traditionally conservative understanding of knowledge, schools, society, the family and the nation-state. The publication was guided by its Statement of Principles, first formulated in 1973, which purported to align ACES Review with the interests of “a great many teachers” who “share the anxiety of other members of the community” about “the quality and content of education in Australia at all levels”.¹⁵ The statement asserts the need for a “basic education” based on the disciplines and rejects the idea that schools might (or should) play a role in social change. It also identifies four matters requiring urgent attention: educational experimentation and radical changes in curricula; examination systems; professional ethics; and the need for educational decisions to include community and parental representation rather than remain the sole domain of “educational experts”.

These aims brought together a diverse alliance of conservatives, including many of the nation’s leading conservative intellectuals. Indeed, ACES Review explicitly positioned itself as representative of a “coalition of different groups having a common concern about the quality in education in Australia”.¹⁶ From the outset, this coalition included one of the most significant conservative figures in Australian contemporary history: B. A. (Bob) Santamaria. According to Gerard Henderson, Santamaria worked on the idea of ACES Review with James McAuley, poet and founder of the conservative cultural journal Quadrant along with Ray Evans and Frank Just (the first editor and secretary of ACES respectively).¹⁷ It is important to note that Santamaria’s interests in ACES Review represented just one arm of his interventions into education, a subject that has yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention. For instance, led by Santamaria, the conservative Christian lobby organisation called the National Civic Council (NCC) funded the establishment of a conservative teachers’ union to challenge the stronghold of progressivism within other such unions.¹⁸ It also financially supported right-wing candidates within existing teacher unions that had links with ACES Review, as I explore below.¹⁹ A 1983 report in the Sydney Tribune, for example, recounts Santamaria’s celebrating the success of “the team which we supported” in one round of the NSW Teachers’ Federation elections.²⁰

Beyond Santamaria, the work of founding and producing ACES Review fell to a highly networked group of Australian conservatives. For instance, Ray Evans is described by Dominic Kelly as “the heart of the right-wing revival of the 1980s” and was an active member of the Democratic Labour Party at the time of the formation of ACES Review, sitting as candidate in the seat of Bellarine in Victoria.²¹ Similarly, Ronald Conway, ACES Review sponsor and contributor, was heavily enmeshed within the NCC and close to Santamaria up until a rift between the two in the late 1980s.²² A leading academic, Professor Leonie Kramer, was also a founding member and president, and was listed as ACES Review editor from 1975 to 1977. Kramer was a formidable force more broadly in Australian conservative culture: a Professor of English, she was made a dame in 1982 and sat on the board of the ABC from 1977, for which she was its chair between 1982 and 1983. She also remained involved in the production of Education Monitor as Senior Fellow in the IPA Education Policy Unit.²³ A Professor of Philosophy and founder of the Centre for Independent Studies (est. 1976), Lachlan Chipman, was also an ACES sponsor, briefly the Review’s editor (1978–1979), and a collaborator involved alongside Kramer in the Santamaria-founded Council for the National Interest in the mid-1980s.²⁴

Importantly, however, these links to broader conservative networks and organisations were not highlighted in the pages of ACES Review. The NCC, for instance, is never substantively mentioned, and many of the by-lines of contributors overlook their roles in broader conservative organisations and parties. Ray Evans, for example, is listed as Senior Lecturer of Electrical Engineering at the Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong, and Ronald Conway as a clinical psychologist, author and former secondary school teacher and lecturer. This performative politics of representation reflects the fact that foundation members understood their intervention into education debates, and their networks, as potentially controversial. It is notable that the ACES Statement of Principles does not mention Christianity or the family as the moral basis for its claims, unlike, for instance the NCC. Writing McAuley’s obituary in 1975, Kramer reflected, “[McAuley] anticipated that our defence of a liberal education of systematic learning, of the traditional subject areas, and of quality in the content of courses would attract criticism, and that we would be labelled as a ‘bunch of reactionaries’ (to use his own phrase) no matter how reasonably we presented our case. He was right; and by his own willingness, in spite of his many other commitments, to add his voice to the debate he made a contribution of incalculable value to the work of ACES.”²⁵

Importantly, Santamaria’s involvement was sensitive and was not mentioned within the newsletter’s pages. According to Conway, Santamaria himself insisted that he not be listed as ACES Review sponsor because it would be “the kiss of death” for the organisation and its outlet.²⁶ Nonetheless, the links between ACES Review, Santamaria and the NCC persisted—and apparently caused friction. For instance, ACES worked out of NCC’s Melbourne offices at the end of 1974, and Evans recounts that although Kramer was listed as ACES Review editor, the editorial functions were essentially carried out by Paul De Stoli, who worked for Santamaria and whose name does not appear in the publication.²⁷ Reportedly, early on Ronald Conway resigned as sponsor of ACES Review because he thought it tactically flawed to comprehensively attack progressive education.²⁸ Later, Evans was “eased out of his job” as editor over concerns about his reactionism by Kramer and others.²⁹ He later resigned as sponsor of the Review, citing concerns over its links with the NCC, though he removed mention of the NCC in his report to other sponsors at Kramer’s insistence.³⁰

Into the 1980s, it is worth noting that both Geoffrey Partington and Alan Barcan were heavily involved in ACES. Both former communists, Partington and Barcan were central in shaping educational historical scholarship and conservative intellectual thought and were also regular contributors to Quadrant. Barcan became crucial to ACES Review, taking over editorship in 1979 and seeing its transition to the Education Monitor at the IPA. Reflecting on the two publications, Barcan suggests ACES Review “was a response to the 1967–74 cultural collapse and to the inroads into traditional education made by neo-progressive and neo-Marxist ideologies”, whereas Education Monitor was a response to “the neo-liberal instrumentalist revolution of circa 1989–93”.³¹ In charting these networks, it is important to note the diversity within this coalition and within the pages of the Review itself, which included, for instance, contributions from former school inspectors (e.g. Max Badcock); reprints from other outlets (e.g. National Jesuit News, Black Papers); reprinted speeches from headteachers; excerpts from international conservative thinkers (e.g. Michael Levin); schoolteachers; university lecturers; and reverends. Nevertheless, across this diversity, as I now examine, the ACES Review network was collectively galvanised by the need to define, understand and counter progressivism and the need to protect and conserve knowledge traditions and the basics in education.

Utopian Perfectibilists: The Problem with Progressivism

Writing about Black Paper 1977, regular ACES Review book reviewer John W. Doyle reflected on debates surrounding the purpose of schooling, noting that “the debate is not primarily about old versus new. It is about how contemporary schools can best prepare children for our world—not the utopian paradise envisaged by the perfectibilists”.³² The problem with progressivism was a common refrain in the pages of ACES Review. For many, progressivism and associated movements (e.g. feminism) were understood as underpinned by a failure to understand the true nature of human society and thus drawing schools into a dangerous project of social engineering.³³ As put in the ACES Statement of Principles, “ACES therefore is opposed to the notion that the school is primarily an agent of ‘life adjustment’ or ‘social adaption … but rather it thinks the primary function of a school is basic education in essential subjects.”³⁴

Labelling the link between progressivism and the hope of social change as “progressive indoctrination”, J. M. Akhurst put it this way: “The progressives see themselves as liberators when in actuality, from the traditionalists’ viewpoint, they are only conditioners and proselytizers.” He goes on to quote Frank Just, ACES Review founding member: “The ideology behind the New Education is that the imparting of knowledge, the cultivation of scholarship, of the intellect must take second place to the transforming, the regenerating of society … of adapting society through the children … All have some Utopia in mind, some a Marxist millennium, some a Garden of Eden, some an anarchist paradise, where all are equal, all are deprived of nothing and all are to do as they please.”³⁵ Progressivism, therefore, is portrayed as an idealistic utopia and a tool for social indoctrination. ACES Review writers regularly argue the need for schools to acknowledge the limits of their reach, and that addressing social differences and/or rectifying inequalities lie outside its scope. Alan Barcan, for instance, deploys racialised deficit understandings of family life to explain differential school achievement. “I am impressed,” he writes, “by the argument that an important source of the poor performance of West Indians in Britain (as compared, for instance, to Asians) is the relative weakness of their family life. This may also contribute to the difficulties faced by Aboriginal children in Australian schools.”³⁶

It is unsurprising, then, that the pages of ACES Review are for the most part highly critical of feminism, multiculturalism, lesbian and gay rights, and other movements for equality and recognition. Indeed, in 1983 ACES Review reprinted a speech by American New Right intellectual Michael Levin, who spent much of his career as philosopher at City College, New York, arguing against feminism and for the greater intelligence of white people.³⁷ In this reprint, “Feminism and Textbooks”, Levin derides feminism as censoring books on the basis that they are “instruments of patriarchal brainwashing”. “For a feminist,” he says, “a book about trucks written in 1940 is as much an instrument of social control, a tool for fixing a child’s sexual perceptions, as her own minutely calibrated counter-primer.”³⁸ Thus, for the writers and editors of ACES Review, the danger of progressivism lay in its utopian spirit and its turn away from the traditions of curriculum towards what Alan Barcan describes as “special interest groups”. In his editorials, Barcan regularly laments the presence of “too many” special interest groups—“Aboriginal studies, sexism in education, multicultural education, mass media in education, statements educational aim, school discipline policies”—arguing that they crowded the curriculum and “cancelled each other out”.³⁹

The issue for many ACES Review writers was that these curriculum “additions” watered down and withered the importance of the canon and the disciplines. In other words, the defence of the traditions put forward by ACES Review was cultivated through the reaction to progressivism and more specifically to a perceived encroachment on schooling knowledge by identity- and rights-based curricular and pedagogical innovation. As Kramer claims, if schools “are deflected from their proper course in order to bring about so-called social equality, and if they are not required to meet a particular standard, then it must be obvious that the children who will enter this system in the near future will not be gaining the kind of systematic, orderly education”.⁴⁰ In this way, ACES Review argued against the inclusion of social (and other) studies in school curricula, which were represented as a degradation of education quality. In a lengthy diatribe on the fate of educational standards in the ACT, Don Moore suggests that “the distinguishing feature of ‘progressive’ educators is their intolerance of any curriculum which embodies cultural traditions and any attempt to standardise them”.⁴¹ Arguing against the collapsing of history, geography and commerce into the “cocktail” of humanities, Moore warned that “to meld them together along with something called ‘decision making’ and anything else considered ‘relevant to current student needs’ is just another example of the ongoing ‘treason of reason’”.⁴²

Unlike traditional disciplines, these new areas of study were understood to be politically charged and dangerous. In June 1986, for instance, ACES Review published a statement of opinion on peace education adopted by ACES sponsors. The topic of peace education preoccupied many of the pages of ACES Review in the issues prior, and the statement reflects the general ACES objection to these kinds of curriculum initiatives. Peace education is understood to contribute “to the curriculum’s disintegration”, and concern is raised that some of its proponents “see peace education as a critique of capitalist society, directed against competition, nationalism and the power structure”.⁴³ In their statement of opinion, ACES Review sponsors argue that peace education is best studied “at the post-graduate level” through the existing disciplines of the “liberal humanist/realist tradition”. “In our schools,” the sponsors continue, “our pupils should be sheltered from political propaganda and emotional manipulation.”⁴⁴

Importantly, the challenge wrought in the traditional disciplines by the emergence of a range of studies (e.g. peace, culture, gender, and so on) was not just about the nature of knowledge. The rising place of “special interest groups and programmes”, as Barcan put it, was also understood to be fundamentally upending the logics of merit and excellence. For example, Barcan asserted he has “long opposed bias against persons on the basis of sex, race or marital status”, but that targeted initiatives, such as multicultural, non-sexist and Aboriginal education, cultivated an “atmosphere of guilt” leading to the “real form of discrimination” through quota systems and other forms of “positive discrimination”.⁴⁵ This sentiment was echoed by Partington in his concern over promotions of women in universities, describing those concerned with equal opportunity as “special pleaders”.⁴⁶ Similarly, reviewing the “feminist ideology” of the Beazley Report,⁴⁷ Moore argued that anti-sexist education was a form of “social engineering” based on a feminism that was “assertively intolerant of the inherent male role” and in favour of “fundamental change”.⁴⁸

In putting forward its response to progressivism, ACES Review attempted to position their intervention as transcending left–right political boundaries. In a 1986 editorial entitled “Left, Right and the Curriculum”, Barcan quotes emerging figures of the left such as Rowan Cahill and Scott Poynting as also defending “intellectual rigour and a general non-vocational cultural curriculum” for all students.⁴⁹ Partington also criticises the Australian left for not understanding the importance of educational rigour and standards as defended by giants in their own intellectual tradition (i.e. Gramsci and Lenin).⁵⁰ Barcan describes at some length a debate between Rowan Cahill and Simon Marginson (then research officer for the Australian Teachers Federation) on whether it is “conservative” to support the teaching of the disciplines and traditional texts. In making his point, Barcan also points out that there were representatives from the Labor Party, the Social Democratic Party and the Conservative Party at the 1985 English National Council for Educational Standards conference.⁵¹ Closer to home, Barcan quotes Barry Jones, then federal Labor Minister for Science and Technology, as saying: “As Dame Leonie Kramer has commented, how can a democratic electorate be expected to make sophisticated political judgements if its citizens are not able to understand the words used to frame the concepts?”⁵² Jones is reported to have voiced his support “for a curriculum proposed by Raymond Williams twenty years ago in The Long Revolution”, which includes the “disciplines”.⁵³

A central pillar of this expression of their politics as transcending—or muddying—traditional left–right politics was an attempt to align their politics with the interests of the disadvantaged and working class, in similar step with arguments advanced within the English Black Papers. Appearing on the popular ABC television show Monday Conference, Kramer, for instance, suggested that it is “groups in the community who haven’t got a tradition of education in their own families” who are disadvantaged by the progressive rejection of standards and exams.⁵⁴ Similarly, in an article called “Educational Leftists Who Betray the Working Class”, Raymond Watson (described in the by-line as “not a teacher, but interested in current affairs”) argues progressivism denies working-class students “access to the cultural enrichment provided by the study of history and classical literature”.⁵⁵ He goes on: “For all their talk of fighting ‘elitism’, these people adopt an incredibly arrogant kind of elitism themselves. After having had the benefit of a quality education and access to a rich tradition of literature, they now prepare to ensure that no future generation will enjoy the same.”⁵⁶

Despite the attempt to distance its intellectual contribution from stridently conservative cultural politics, it is inevitable that some ACES Review writers positioned their work as conservative, and that those meanings are a part of the debates within its pages. At times, writers rejected the parameters of a progressive-versus-conservative debate, arguing instead for “dynamic traditionalism”, such as in Peter Hunt’s argument for the centrality of literature in teaching English.⁵⁷ Other times, contributors such as John A. Barrie developed accounts of conservatism that aimed to distinguish themselves from “somewhat negative, defensive prognostications of a critically unreflective kind”.⁵⁸ In his article “Towards a Neo-Conservative Approach to Education”, Barrie urges: “For too long educational theory and practice has been dominated by progressivist reconstructionist presuppositions and values … The time is right, I think, to give further serious consideration to articulating a reflective, informed and philosophically competent neoconservative approach to educational theory and practice.”⁵⁹ Drawing on Oxford philosopher Anthony Quinton, Barrie puts forward a definitional basis for neoconservatism based on the principles of traditionalism, organicism and scepticism, and places this in direct contrast to fundamentalist Marxism and Christianity alike. ACES Review, therefore, attempted to express a kind of middle-of-the-road liberal conservativism that distinguished itself from more forthright moral and religious expressions of the New Christian Right.⁶⁰ However, at the same time, ACES Review also gave space to—and republished from—outlets such as the Endeavour Forum (the newsletter of Women Who Want to Be Women), and ACES members regularly spoke at organisations of the New Christian Right and those associated with the NCC.⁶¹

Against the Authority of Bureaucracies, Unions and “Educational Bilge”

Underpinning the broad-base conservatism developed within the pages of ACES Review was an understanding that the problems of education lay in the overinflated power of educational bureaucrats and progressive educational academics and teachers. Ronald Conway, for example, wrote a scathing critique of the “new establishment in education” that “has sought to impose a minority world view on the media, politicians and bureaucracies”.⁶² “Educational planners leaning to the political Left,” he writes, “have gained considerable power over the teaching profession because of their control of several government teaching unions and of key positions in the educational hierarchy.” In this way, writers in the ACES Review positioned themselves as on the outside of power and struggling against a progressive takeover, most particularly within education bureaucracies, teacher unions and the teaching profession more broadly.

Such progressive forces were depicted as being highly undemocratic and focused on their own interests to the detriment of being genuinely deliberative or consultative. For instance, in describing how progressive “change-agents” work in “diluting the curriculum at any school”, Moore argues:

No opponents are tolerated. Specious rationales are given to teachers, parents and students alike. Let us consider the characteristic way in which it is done. First the decision is made at the Education Department, Schools Authority or Education Office level. Next parent members of the school board are “convinced”. Then parents (say 40 out of a possible 2,000) are told at a meeting (which is heavily attended by staff as well) that some changes are necessary (a) for sake of “relevance” in a changing world (b) because their children need “new knowledge” to be able to understand the world and (c) the falling numbers in enrolments are going to mean staff changes, necessitating a complete re-organisation of the curriculum.⁶³

This sentiment is echoed by Max Badcock, who depicts the dual movement towards Commonwealth involvement in schooling and a devolution to school-based curricular decision-making as profoundly anti-democratic and as falling prey to idiosyncrasies and differences in expertise and expectations across the profession, and variances across advantaged and disadvantaged schooling communities.⁶⁴

ACES writers both celebrated and feared teachers: they were at times victims at the whim of radical progressive forces and bureaucratic muddling, and at other times were themselves the agents of such forces. This latter representation often arose in relation to school–family relations and through the question of parental authority and control. Bryan Thwaites, for example, suggests, “I suspect, on evidence, that there are teachers who consciously subvert the concept of the family, encourage open rebellion against parental authority and foster the absurd notion that the opinions of a teenager are essentially as valid, in an absolute sense, as those of his parents or of other adults.”⁶⁵ This suspicion particularly came to the fore in the debates that surrounded the MACOS and SEMP curriculum materials.⁶⁶ These materials, banned in Queensland by Joh Bjelke-Petersen and debated across the country, were in many ways the epitome of what ACES Review stood against, as an interdisciplinary social studies approach to teaching and learning about society and culture. While Partington offered a relatively measured review levelling his critique mainly at its so-called extreme relativism,⁶⁷ Dan O’Donnell—a regular contributor—raises more strident concern, aligning his critique with Queensland morals campaigner Rona Joyner, about the ways in which the institution of the family, and the authority of parents, is challenged in the curriculum materials.⁶⁸

Writers in ACES Review regularly argued in favour of parental rights, and the degradation of parental forms of authority of education through progressive bureaucratic control. Education bureaucracies are described by Conway, for example, as being now beholden to “radical New Establishment forces” at “the zenith of their power—with even Ministers of the Crown, as ex-teachers, available to serve their ends”.⁶⁹ In response, ACES Review writers argued that the parental choice of independent schooling signifies that parents are “disillusioned by poor, or simply mystifying, academic standards in so many government schools”.⁷⁰ In a lengthy paper defending school choice and private schooling, Eugene Kamenka positions private schooling as the inevitable and just outcome for a public schooling system run by “pseudointellectuals”.⁷¹ Kamenka paints a portrait of parents as stalwart defenders of traditional education against the declining standards of a public schooling system overrun with those “who see themselves as teachers of a whole society”.⁷²

ACES Review also represented itself as the commonsense alternative to progressive academic scholarship, which was characterised as zany, impenetrable, trite and elitist. Alan Barcan, an academic (historian) himself, often took to his editorial column to poke fun at (and denigrate) other educational researchers and scholars. In 1983, for instance, Barcan reported on a list of writing in education in England—an annual collection of “educational bilge”—curated by Max Morris (former head teacher and former president of the National Union of Teachers).⁷³ Barcan notes the inclusion of leading educational sociologist and theorist Basil Bernstein on the list, as well as a syllabus for women’s studies and education, congratulating Morris “on his crusade against jargon” and “a formidable thicket of literary obscurity”.⁷⁴ In addition to a disdain towards the emergence of various studies (culture, gender, etc.) in academic teaching and research, Barcan held particular contempt for sociology and its rising influence. For example, Barcan describes at length an article by Roger Hannan in the UK Times Educational Supplement in which Hannan is reported as writing on the damage of “the stunted development of the sociology of education”.⁷⁵ Sociology, argues Barcan through Hannan, has a concentration of neo-Marxists who present themselves as critical but who are in actuality narrowing the field. Reflecting on this claim again two years later, Barcan argues there has been a “rapid expansion” in the discipline of sociology characterised by appointments of those who were unsuccessful in applying for other academic posts.

As I have noted above, for at least one of the key architects of ACES Review, Bob Santamaria, this political and policy context of education necessitated conservative intervention into teacher unions. Peppered throughout ACES Review are articles attempting to address the so-called progressive stronghold on teacher professionalism and unions. President of a conservative rival union, the Victorian Association of Teachers (VAT), Lucy Meo, for example, wrote several articles for ACES Review including reprints from the association’s own newsletter.⁷⁶ VAT was established in 1976, reportedly with support from the conservative Liberal government, and by 1983 Meo was then heading a conservative union contestation at the national level: the Teachers Association of Australia (TAA). The TAA was backed by the NCC and sought federal registration as a union in 1983.⁷⁷ Also a regular ACES Review contributor, retired teacher Don Moore created a splinter teacher union in the ACT in 1982, the Professional Association of Classroom Teachers (PACT). Described initially as a member-based organisation,⁷⁸ by 1988 it appears that PACT was renamed as the ACT Foundation for PACT (now standing for Publicly Accountable Classroom Teaching).⁷⁹ Reflecting the depth of the networks across ACES Review and these rival professional and union groups, Leonie Kramer is reported as chairing a debate hosted by PACT.⁸⁰

These interventions represented themselves as fighting the progressive takeover in education that threatened standards and the future of the nation. For Moore, as one example, the problems of education lay in a mass progressive takeover across all cultural, social, political and policy arenas. He laments: “The collapse of educational standards and the associated fads of zany teaching techniques can both be attributed to a widespread betrayal of education. The perpetrators of this betrayal occupy most of the positions of trust and responsibility in education, in politics, in religion, in business and even in the family. They include many Education Ministers and their bureaucrats and consultants, Bishops, Moderators, and Vice Chancellors, Heads of Teacher Education Colleges and their staffs, many principals and teachers, their unions and professional associations, parents associations and councils and even employers, individually and through their Chambers and Federations.”⁸¹

More generally, across ACES Review, unions are situated as being foundational threats to education. For example, Reverend Keith Brodie writes of the “sinister political influence” of the Teachers Federation in the Education Department.⁸² This sinister influence, Brodie suggests, means that schools are struggling with “brash, inexperienced, radical politically minded” teachers who are focused on their own “rights” to the detriment of their students’. Lucy Meo’s 1988 article, reprinted from her VAT newsletter, took clear aim at government bureaucracies as the sites where, and means by which, progressive control was ruining education. She writes: “State intervention to force people to be good, through affirmative action and equal employment opportunity legislation, has produced change, some desirable, some not. The bureaucracy which makes its living out of these problems has grown. A quiet, informal censorship seems to have developed over many facets of the permissive society.”⁸³

For Meo, the problem with the key areas of contemporaneous equality movements— homosexuality, sexism, multiculturalism and Aboriginals, as she names them—is in their public exhibition (homosexuals), “self-pitying wails” (women), “intercultural bandwagon” (migrants), and “people who are making a career of being sorry for [Aboriginal people]”. She positions the response to this as the commonsense conservative basics: a good education, jobs, hard work, and traditional Australian culture. In contrast to education bureaucracies, mired in their role of heralding and supporting equality agendas, Meo describes the role of teachers as straightforward, uncomplicated and politically neutral: establish trust with students and “do a good job of teaching them what is useful to know and what is stimulating to know about”.⁸⁴ For ACES Review writers such as Meo, questions about what it meant to be a good teacher were unnecessarily politicised by progressive educationalists, where the answer could be so clearly answered by a conservative common sense.

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to bring attention to how conservative interests and ideas are galvanised and cohered by a concern for the role of schooling in the future of the nation, in this case through the newsletter ACES Review. ACES Review was heavily networked into Australian conservative culture and was understood by several key figures of the time to be an essential focus of their work. Its links with anti-union challenges, conservative academic circles, the NCC, and other conservative initiatives over this period place it at the centre of the development of Australian conservatism over the 1970s and into the 1980s. As a newsletter, it provided an outlet for (mostly male, it should also be noted) organisers and supporters and a means to generate the discursive politics surrounding knowledge, education, schooling, and childhood and youth. This discursive politics was anchored in a disdain for progressivism and a defence of traditions in disciplinary knowledge and of the basics in education. In this agenda, ACES Review attempted to steer away from party politics, and from more strident and religious proclamations of conservatism. While heavily networked with the New Christian Right (e.g. the NCC), therefore, it mostly narrated a form of liberal conservative politics that used the premise of tradition and common sense as its goalposts, resting its judgements on the “reality” of social relations rather than “utopian” aspirations for social change put forward by progressives.

Despite the diversity in its scope and contributions, then, ACES Review generated a conservatism that aligned the emergence of equity movements for change (including feminism, Indigenous rights, anti-racism) as central to the demise of educational standards. Such movements were understood to be meddling and feverish special interest groups, which were usurping whatever quality was left in schooling. In other words, the development of an educational conservatism in the pages of the ACES Review, which argued for the need for traditional knowledge structures, pedagogical approaches and examination systems, occurred through a rejection of the need for educational reform based on interest or equity groups. Pitching this as a commonsense approach, ACES Review writers argued that their focus on the traditions and the basics better serviced the needs of the working class and disadvantaged. Importantly, this conservatism was also built from a claim of being on the outside of power in education. ACES Review understood itself as fighting against powerful education bureaucracies, academics and teacher unions—and, at times, the profession itself. By analysing the networks surrounding, and discursive politics within, the ACES Review, this article has demonstrated some of the ways in which Australian conservative networks of the 1970s and 1980s were mobilised by a concern surrounding schooling and cohered a conservative intervention through developing an understanding of, and response to, progressivism.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the insight and ongoing collaboration of Helen Proctor and Sue Goodwin, research collaborators on our ARC project on community organising and education reform in Australia (1970s–1980s).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, ARCDP [grant number DP200102378].

Notes

1 Michelle Arrow, The Seventies (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2019); Michelle Arrow, “‘How Much Longer Will We Allow this Country’s Affairs to be Run by Radical Feminists?’ Anti-Feminist Activism in Late 1970s Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 52, no. 3 (2021): 331–47; Jessica Gerrard and Helen Proctor, “Activist Women, Schooling and the Rise of Grassroots Christian Conservatism,” The Australian Educational Researcher 49 (2021): 1–17; Timothy Willem Jones, “Australian Secularism, the Sexual Revolution and the Making of the New Christian Right,” Australian Historical Studies 52, no. 3 (2021): 317–30; Geoffrey Robinson, “From Georges Sorel to Peter Costello: Peter Coleman and the Making of Australian Liberal Conservatism,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 68, no. 3 (2022): 447–66.

2 Arrow, “How Much Longer?”.

3 Isobelle Barrett Meyering, “Children’s Rights, the Family and ‘Sexual Permissiveness’: Conservative Mobilisations and the Australian Response to International Year of the Child,” Australian Historical Studies 52, no. 3 (2021): 349.

4 Alan Barcan, “Ten Years of ACES Review,” ACES Review 10, no. 5 (1983): 1–4.

5 See Michael Apple, “Between Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism: Education and Conservatism in a Global Context,” in Globalization and Education: Critical Perspectives, ed. Nicholas C. Burbles and Carlos Alberto Torres (New York: Routledge, 2000), 57–78; Michael W. Apple, Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God and Inequality, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006); Judith Bessant, “Conservatives, Politics and the Crisis of Modern Education in Australia,” Policy Studies 32, no. 6 (2011): 631–47; Kristen L. Buras and Michael W. Apple, “Radical Disenchantments: Neoconservatives and the Disciplining of Desire in an Anti-Utopian Era,” Comparative Education 44 no. 3 (2008): 291–304; Colin Symes and Kalervo N. Gulson, “Faith in Education: The Politics of State Funding in the ‘New’ Christian Schooling in Australia,” Educational Policy 22, no. 2 (2008): 231–49; Marion Maddox, Taking God to School (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014).

6 Arrow, The Seventies; Frank Bongiorno, The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2015).

7 Robert Manne, “Introduction,” in The New Conservatism in Australia, ed. Robert Manne (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), vii–viii.

8 See also Robinson, “From Georges Sorel to Peter Costello”.

9 Chip Berlet, “The Write Stuff: U.S. Serial Print Culture from Conservatives out to Neo-Nazis,” Library Trends 56, no. 3 (2008): 570–600.

10 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90.

11 Frank P. Just, “Preserving Present Standards—Education ’74—an Occasional Series,” Canberra Times, 1 July 1974, 2.

12 Barcan, “Ten Years of ACES Review,” 1–4; see C. Brian Cox and Rhodes Boyson, eds., Black Paper 1975: The Fight for Education (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1975); C. Brian Cox and Rhodes Boyson, eds., Black Paper 1977 (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1977); C. Brian Cox and Anthony Edward Dyson, eds., Fight for Education: A Black Paper (London: Critical Quarterly Society, 1969); Mortimer Brewster Smith, A Decade of Comment in Education, 1956–1966 (Washington, DC: Council for Basic Education, 1966).

13 See Paul Gordon, “UK Commentary: The New Right, Race and Education—or How the Black Papers Became a White Paper,” Race & Class 29, no. 3 (1988): 95–103.

14 Brian Cox, “Letter,” ACES Review 10, no. 5 (1983): 5.

15 Australian Council for Educational Standards, “Statement of Principles,” ACES Review 8, no. 4 (1981): 9–10.

16 Alan Barcan, “Reply to a Letter,” ACES Review 9, no. 5 (1982): 13.

17 Gerard Henderson, Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man (Carlton, VIC: The Miegunyah Press, 2015); Cassandra Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999).

18 See Adam Farrar, “Education Unions Fight NCC Backed Union over Federal Registration,” Tribune, 13 June 1984, 4. The ACT branch of the Australian Education Union also documents a range of NCC interventions into teacher union campaigns and activities. See “Out of Many, One,” Australian Education Union ACT Branch, https://www.aeuact.org.au/about/our-history/articles/out-many-one (accessed 14 June 2022).

19 “Editorial, Rightwing Offensive,” Tribune, 15 February 1984, 2.

20 Special Correspondent, “Exclusive: Santamaria’s Brisbane Xmas Party—Union Takeover Plans Outlined,” Tribune, 7 December 1983, 16.

21 Dominic Kelly, Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The Hard Right in Australia (Carlton, VIC: La Trobe University Press, in conjunction with Black Inc., 2019).

22 Ronald Conway, “Santamaria-and Goodbye to All That,” Quadrant 34, no. 12 (1990): 32–37.

23 See, for example, Kramer is listed as Senior Fellow and Conference Chairman within the Institute for Public Affairs: Education: Pathways to Reform, papers presented at the IPA Education Policy Unit Conference (Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs, Education Policy Unit, 1989).

24 Kelly, Political Troglodytes, 35.

25 Leonie Kramer, “James McAuley: Obituary,” ACES Review 3, no. 8 (1976): 2.

26 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, 237.

27 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, 241.

28 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, 241.

29 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley.

30 Pybus, The Devil and James McAuley, 242.

31 Alan Barcan, “Requiem for Defunct Magazines,” Quadrant 53, no. 11 (2009): 71.

32 John W. Doyle, “Black Paper 1977,” ACES Review 4, no. 3 (1977): 16. Doyle was also author of a pamphlet arguing in favour of school vouchers, New Schools for a New Society (1976). See Kathleen Abbott, “Education Vouchers,” Canberra Times, 15 September 1976, 24. He was personally mentioned by Liberal MP John Martyr when arguing in favour of school vouchers in parliamentary debate. See Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 5 October 1977, http://historichansard.net/hofreps/1977/19771005_reps_30_hor106/.

33 For example, D. K. Moore, “The Ideology of the Beazley Report,” ACES Review 13, no. 1 (1986): 14–17.

34 ACES, “Statement of Principles,” 10.

35 J. M. Ankhurst, “The Aims of Primary Education in NSW,” ACES Review 7, no. 1 (1980): 10.

36 Alan Barcan, “Editorial,” ACES Review 12, no. 2 (1985): 12.

37 ACES Review notes Levin’s upcoming tour in Australia in August–September 1983.

38 Michael Levin, “Feminism and Textbooks,” ACES Review 10, no. 3 (1983): 12–15.

39 Alan Barcan, “Editorial,” ACES Review 9, no. 5 (1982): 6.

40 Leonie Kramer, “Speculation on Education,” ACES Review 3, no. 1 (1975): 5.

41 Don Moore, “Why Have Educational Standards Fallen?,” ACES Review 13, no. 4 (1987): 5–10.

42 Moore, “Why Have Educational Standards Fallen?,” 7.

43 ACES Review Sponsors, “Statement of Opinion on Peace Education,” ACES Review 13, no. 3 (1986): 8.

44 ACES Review Sponsors, “Statement of Opinion on Peace Education,” 8.

45 Alan Barcan, “The Grievance Society,” ACES Review 11, no. 3 (1984): 6.

46 Geoffrey Partington, “Women in Australian Universities,” ACES Review 11, no. 1 (1984): 13–15.

47 The Beazley Report refers to the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Education in Western Australia—Education in Western Australia, March 1984, chaired by Kim Beazley, Sr.

48 Don K. Moore, “The Ideology of the Beazley Report,” ACES Review 13, no. 1 (1986): 16.

49 Alan Barcan, “Left, Right and the Curriculum,” ACES Review 13, no. 2 (1986): 12.

50 Geoffrey Partington, “Problems Afflicting State Schools,” ACES Review 11, no. 4 (1984): 1–4; Geoffrey Partington, “Technology in our Schools: Recent Thinking in South Australia,” ACES Review 13, no. 4 (1987): 12–14.

51 Barcan, “Left, Right and the Curriculum,” 12.

52 Alan Barcan, “A Decline in Literacy Standards,” ACES Review 10, no. 4 (1983): 6.

53 Barcan, “A Decline in Literacy Standards”.

54 Leonie Kramer, “Monday Conference—148,” broadcast transcript, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 16 June 1975, 5.

55 Raymond Watson, “Educational Leftists Who Betray the Working Class,” ACES Review 13, no. 2 (1986): 14.

56 Watson, “Educational Leftists,” 14.

57 Peter Hunt, “The Central Role of Literature in English Teaching,” ACES Review 5, no. 1 (1979): 7–10.

58 John A Barrie, “Towards a Neo-Conservative Approach to Education,” ACES Review 13, no. 2 (1986): 15–17.

59 Barrie, “Towards a Neo-Conservative Approach to Education,” 17.

60 See Jones, “Australian Secularism”; Arrow, “How Much Longer?”.

61 For example, Clare Howard, “The Future of Secondary Education in Tasmania,” ACES Review 13, no. 2 (1986): 9; In Geoffrey Partington’s autobiography, Party Days, he lists the many groups he and Dr Mageean had addressed through their work at ACES in South Australia, including (among schools and Liberal Party clubs) the Festival of Light and the Australian Family Association, an offshoot organisation of the NCC and the Christian Pro-family Forum in Melbourne.

62 Ronald Conway, “The New Establishment in Education,” ACES Review 12 no. 2 (1985): 1.

63 Moore, “Why Have Educational Standards Fallen?”.

64 Max Badcock, “Local Curriculum Control in Victorian High Schools,” ACES Review 6, no. 3 (1979): 1–4.

65 Bryan Thwaites, “Visions of Greatness,” ACES Review 9, no. 4 (1983): 4. Thwaites’s article is noted to be an edited version of a speech given at the National Council for Educational Standards Conference of 28 September 1980, first printed in the NCES Bulletin ("Repairing the Foundations"), Autumn 1981.

66 In early 1978, the Queensland state government banned two social studies curriculum packages, MACOS (Man: A Course of Study, an internationally distributed set of teaching materials written by a team led by the US psychologist Jerome Bruner, 17 January) and SEMP (Social Education Materials Project, developed by the Australian Government’s Curriculum Development Centre, 21 February); see Gerrard and Proctor, “Activist Women” for further discussion on the conservative campaigns against these curriculum materials.

67 Geoffrey Partington, “MACOS, SEMP and the Study of Society in Schools,” ACES Review 6, no. 2 (1979): 1–7.

68 For example, Dan O’Donnell, “The Churches and SEMP,” ACES Review 7, no. 4 (1980): 9–12. This is also a central argument of O’Connell’s self-published 100+ page pamphlet against SEMP: Dan O’Donnell, SEMP: One Page an Issue? (Stafford Heights: self-pub., 1980).

69 Conway, “The New Establishment,” 1.

70 Conway, “The New Establishment,” 1.

71 Eugene Kamenka, “Education and the Private School,” ACES Review 13, no. 4 (1987): 3.

72 Kamenka, “Education and the Private School”.

73 Alan Barcan, “Editorial,” ACES Review 9, no. 4 (1983): 16.

74 Barcan, “Editorial,” 16.

75 Alan Barcan, “Fashions in Teacher Training,” ACES Review 10, no. 2 (1983): 5.

76 See, for example, Lucy Meo, “The State of the Nation’s Schools,” ACES Review 7, no. 3 (1980): 14–15. Meo describes the association as a “non-party political non-sectarian body” in her complaint for not receiving airtime on the radio station 3CR, which, she argued, favoured guests who were “militant” and from the “extreme Left”: “Teachers Join 3CR Criticism,” Australian Jewish News, 14 December 1978, 3.

77 Martin Peers, “NCC-Backed Teachers Set Up National Union,” Tribune, 14 December 1983, 5.

78 Don Moore, “A Case for the Reform of A.C.T. Education,” ACES Review 10, no. 2 (1983): 4; Moore, “The Ideology of the Beazley Report,” 14.

79 Don Moore, “Letter to the Editor—Basics in Education,” Canberra Times, 29 April 1988, 2.

80 “Teachers Sponsor Education Debates,” Canberra Times, 6 March 1986, 9.

81 Moore, “Why Have Educational Standards Fallen?,” 5–10.

82 Keith Brodie, “The Education Fiasco,” ACES Review 12, no. 2 (1985): 17–20.

83 Lucy Meo, “Teachers and Pupils Need Mutual Good Faith, Not Slogans,” ACES Review 14, no. 4 (1988): 14–15.

84 Meo, “Teachers and Pupils,” 15.