In July 1995, in a paper titled Liberal Education and the Purpose of Schooling, I argued instead of focusing on what is practical, utilitarian, and politically expedient the curriculum should focus on ‘the forms of knowledge and understanding that have existed for some time’.
I go on to note:
‘Throughout the history of Western Civilisation, particular areas of knowledge and understanding like science, mathematics, history, and art have gradually become objectified and codified into separate disciplines.’
Fast forward to 2025 and Australia’s education establishment finally appears to have come to its senses when arguing any revision of the Australian curriculum must embrace, in the jargon much loved by educrats, a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum.
Under the heading Summitt calls for a knowledge-rich curriculum as part of Labor’s education reform (October 29, 2025) The Australian’s reporter Thomas Henry writes a proposed national education summit ‘will focus on “knowledge-rich curricula” as a means to drive improved education standards demanded by the federal Labor government’.
In addition to the education summit, organised by the think tank Knowledge Society, a paper titled A knowledge-rich curriculum approach to curriculum design and published by the Australian Education Research Organisation also signals a significant change in curriculum focus.
After generations of teachers being told content is secondary to student-centred learning, enquiry-based and process learning, teaching 21st Century generic skills and competencies and enforcing a woke curriculum schools are now expected to teach, according to the AERO paper, a ‘knowledge-rich curriculum’.
Of interest is that at the same time Australia’s education establishment is prioritising a knowledge-rich curriculum a recent review of the British national curriculum also argues for a curriculum that is ‘knowledge-rich’ where ‘subject-specific knowledge is the best investment’.
While it’s good, after generations of students have suffered a dumbed down and substandard education causing them to leave school culturally impoverished, that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel there is still cause for concern.
Based on the assumption, in order to teach a knowledge-rich curriculum, teachers need to be masters of their subject the parlous state of undergraduate degrees and teacher training will be a stumbling black.
Since the rise of cultural-Marxist inspired critical theory and postmodernism, deconstructionism, radical feminist ideology and LGBTIQA+ and postcolonial theories universities have stopped giving students a rigorous, balanced and substantial initiation into the various subject disciplines.
As argued by Jennifer Oriel in her chapter in Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March, ‘The highest purpose of the university, to cultivate the flourishing of high culture and bequeath its bounty to future generations, is all but lost.’
Such is the parlous state of the academy Oriel goes on the argue since the late 1960s ‘politics has replaced the pursuit of truth, beauty, and harmony as the raison d’être of higher education. Today the university is a hollow man stripped of purpose and devoid of substance’.
The Australian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans in his 1996 ABC Boyer Lecture reaches the same conclusion when he states, ‘The university as Western Civilisation knew it, is now virtually dead.’ As the result of denying truth and objectivity Ryckmans concludes universities are ‘doomed to founder in the shallows of farce and incoherence’. A second stumbling block is the danger any attempt to design a knowledge-based curriculum will most certainly involve those educrats and professional bodies responsible for the last 30 years of educational failure.
It’s rare those responsible for failure are capable of admitting their faults or have the ability, expertise, and willingness to produce a different outcome to what has previously been the case. Since the late 1960s those responsible have promoted a curriculum model that is antithetical to what is required.
Professional bodies like the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, the Australian Education Union, the Australian Association for the Teachers of English and sympathetic teacher training academics have long opposed a curriculum that is academically rigorous and based on what the American academic Neil Postman describes as ‘an honorable humanistic tradition’.
To be educated Postman argues is ‘to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which that best that has been thought and said has been produced’.
This a view of education is also championed by the Victorian Blackburn Report where the authors argue any curriculum design must include civilisation’s ‘best validated knowledge and artistic achievements’.
The track record of educational innovation over the last 30 to 40 years has been dismal and counterproductive. One hopes the latest trend involving a knowledge-rich curriculum will prove an exception to the rule.
Dr Kevin Donnelly co-chaired the 2014 Review of the Australian Curriculum and he was a secondary school teacher for 18 years.
