The article below is an extract from a larger talk given at an International Boys School Coalition regional conference held at Hale School earlier this year.
At the first chapel service this year, I showed the boys a picture of the beautiful bronze statue of Bishop Matthew Blagden Hale on St George’s Terrace in the city. The statue stands on the threshold of the cloisters building; Bishop Hale is looking back over his shoulder with his right arm extended and his palm up as if beckoning others to join him. It’s a wonderful image. I showed it to the boys because I wanted them to consider why Bishop Hale invited those first students to join him. What was his ultimate purpose for opening a school for boys in the freshly minted colony of Perth? I suggested, provocatively, that he didn’t beckon those first boys into the school because he wanted them to learn. As an Anglican Bishop, he would have been aware of the words in 2 Peter 1:4 that suggest the telos of human flourishing is to be ‘partakers in the divine nature’. Put simply, he would have been deeply invested in the kind of human beings these boys were going to become.
The Italian theologian and educator Luigi Guissani wrote, ‘All education is moral formation.’[1] In other words, everything we do at school has the potential to shape our students for good or for ill. The idea that some forms of education are neutral and others biased (i.e, faith v secular) is a chimera. All our curriculums, syllabuses, programs, and pedagogy necessarily reflect the values and visions of the designers. As Robert Dissaix once said: ‘You can’t have a vision for education without having a vision for life’. The key question for educators then is this: What is our vision for life? Everything flows from that.
A good place to start when formulating a vision for life and education is to consider what we believe human beings truly are. After all, it is human beings who come to our schools to be educated. Sadly, as a society, we have unwittingly embraced a rather bleak anthropology that views humans as little more than ‘thinking things’[2] or ‘brains on a stick’ who, to be educated, only need the necessary knowledge, beliefs, skills, and ideas encoded into the computers in their heads. Some have referred to this as the ‘banking’ model of education. A model that ultimately views students and parents as machine-like consumers who know what they need in advance and merely come to school to collect. Thus, teachers are no longer mentors passing on wisdom, knowledge, and a passion for their subject, but rather resemble shop assistants guiding students to the right part of the shop to find what they seek. In this picture, teachers are deemed effective to the extent that they can give parents and students what they ask for, which is always the correct answers to exam questions. How depressing!
Aside from the huge levels of anxiety this causes everyone—parents, teachers, students—it also creates a rather thin view of education. Students cannot help but see their schooling as just a means to an end, and teachers’ freedom to actually teach and make professional judgments in the classroom is curtailed as they are forced to become experts in coaching students to pass tests. It’s no surprise that with the explosion of AI in education, some argue that it’s only a matter of time before traditional teachers become obsolete. And they are right if education is simply about filling kids’ heads with knowledge and skills. If that’s the case, why bother with expensive schools? Surely, sending our kids straight into the workforce or using online learning platforms would be a much cheaper and ultimately more effective way to achieve this goal. Recently, a cheeky but thoughtful Year 11 student said to me in passing: “I guess with AI, you guys aren’t going to be needed much longer!”
But human beings need more than mere transaction to be educated. Education, at its best, is not transactional but transformational. It is about becoming. In the future, the pressing issues we are facing today around peace, justice, the environment, inequality, and care will not have gone away. Consequently, those of us in education must endeavor to cultivate our students’ moral imagination and give them a vision for the world that takes values seriously. Educating students within a moral order helps them develop a sense of their place in the world and a sense of meaning. With the rise of social media and the decline of community groups and churches, schools will need to collaborate with families to assist with this task. The author of the Anxious Generation, Jonathon Haidt (who is a secular Jew), expressed this recently:
When you say all that matters is what feels good or all that matters is rights or all that matters is some measure of material success, basically what you have is what Émile Durkheim called anomie, or normlessness………kids need moral formation. They need a structure, a shared moral framework. Morality works like language. You can’t have your own language, and you can’t have your own morality. It only works as a shared system and order. And once kids move on to social media, it’s just a million little fragments of nonsense. There’s no moral order.[3]
Of course, all schools talk about values and the kind of people they want their students to become. The tricky part, however, is moving this talk beyond the tokenistic to the golden thread that runs through the entire school. A broad liberal curriculum, weekly assemblies, community events, daily rituals, service opportunities, creative traditions, camps, regular chapel services, and ‘good’ teachers help to embed this golden thread deeper into the school. It needs to be connected to everything the school does. Invariably, the challenge for those in school leadership is that taking this purpose seriously means time given to it will have to come from somewhere (i.e. the curriculum). This is difficult with the growing pressures schools face to ensure their students get the results they need. But what if the well-worn dichotomies between moral formation and academic learning, the real curriculum and hidden curriculum, are false? Here’s a fascinating quote from a recent discussion paper by Dr Chris Duncan for the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia:
Seven years of research involving 50 academic researchers, hundreds of schools, thousands of teachers, and tens of thousands of students concluded that values education enhances academic focus and academic diligence, raising the thorny question that academic success may best happen for students when it is not the primary focus of their learning.[4]
Later in the article, Duncan argues that ‘good practice pedagogy must be directed to the whole person and relies upon the brain being stimulated in a ‘morally ambient environment.’[5] I would argue that a ‘morally ambient environment’ is always one where the students feel like they belong and where their educational experience is about more than their learning and their results. It must also include the profound realisation that they are a valued part of something much bigger than themselves.
For education, we should recast the Cartesian axiom from ‘I think therefore I am’ to ‘I relate therefore I am’ or better still ‘we relate therefore we are.’ Are humans just brains on a stick that require the correct information to succeed in life, or are they something different? The social psychologist Erich Fromm once wrote: ‘Understanding and loving are inseparable; if they are kept separate, the door to essential understanding remains closed.’[6] Perhaps before humans are beings that think, we are beings that yearn, we are beings that love. Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world and our children enough to pass on what we love and value, and what those before us have loved and valued. The time we give them to discover their loves, values, habits of mind, and friendships, which will nourish and sustain them in their lives. Especially when their lives get difficult.
Schools need to focus on academic rigour. Undoubtedly, the world needs highly skilled doctors, scientists, economists, politicians, farmers, and teachers. But, even more than that, the world needs imaginative, compassionate, empathetic, open, generous, loving, moral… doctors, scientists, economists, politicians, farmers, and teachers. In the years to come, I hope that schools will be brave; brave enough to trust their instincts about what education should be. Brave with curriculums, assessment policies, classroom configurations, teacher formation, service, traditions, and rituals. Einstein was spot on when he said, ‘Education is what remains when we have forgotten what we learnt in school.’[7] What remains, of course, is the people we have become.
References
Duncan, C. (2025). A new narrative for Australian schooling: a prompt for public debate about purpose and approach. Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia (AHISA).
Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. Translated by Sonja Bargmann. New York: Crown Publishers, 1954.
Giussani, Luigi. The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny. Translated by Mariangela Sullivan, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.
Klein, Ezra. “Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of.” The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, 1 Apr. 2025,
McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Volume II: What Then Is True? London: Perspectiva Press, 2021.
[1] Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny, trans. Mariangela Sullivan (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), preface, xxvii
[2] It was the French philosopher René Descartes who first coined the term ‘thinking things’ (res cogitans) when considering the essence of the human person. Building on this conception, we are now at the point where, according to Iain McGilchrist, humans are viewed as ‘nothing more than a bundle of senseless, mindless, purposeless particles helplessly colliding in a predictable fashion. In other words, nothing but machines.’ McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Volume I, p. 5
[3] Haidt, J, on the Ezra Klein Show – ‘Our Kids are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’.
[4] Ducan, C. A new narrative for Australian schooling, p.5
[5] Duncan, p.6
[6] Quoted in McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Volume II, p. 1130.
[7] Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954), p. 60.
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