Speaking for and about the ‘Christian’ view in public debates about Australian schooling in the 1970s and 1980s
Workshop: Religion and Education workshop, Australian National University, Canberra
Helen Proctor, Susan Goodwin, Jessica Gerrard
In this paper we identify and map a collection of groups and individuals who – in different ways – characterised themselves as speaking for or about the ‘Christian’ view of education and schooling during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on the analysis of books, pamphlets, newsletters and policy submissions collected for our current ARC Discovery Project “Community organising in Australian education policy, 1970s-1980s”, we propose that the 1970s-1980s saw a significant shift in the terms of public debate about schooling and religion in Australia. The key educational religious divide in public discourse prior to the 1970s was British-heritage sectarian, materialised through the denial by a ‘Protestant’ state of public funding to Catholic schooling systems. During the 1970s and 1980s, we argue, this divide shifted to one between ‘Christians’ on one hand and non-Christians, multiculturalists and/or ‘secular humanists’ on the other. Many of the Christian organisers and spokespeople we have researched were avowedly conservative or ‘reactionary’, influenced by new international calls for evangelicals to be active in the political world, beyond the church or chapel doors. We focus particularly on how different people and groups promoted what they represented as a definitive ‘Christian’ perspective on educational matters, whether in terms of national identity, belief, sexual morality and/or ‘western’ canonical knowledge traditions. Understanding the complexity and detail of this history is, we argue, useful in understanding the power and influence of Christian conservative in the 21st century, and the relative public invisibility of Christian progressives as a contemporary political category.
