Education takes centre stage at Royal Commission

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion heard a day of evidence last Thursday centred on education, with Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal revealing a new national centre to deliver antisemitism training and a UNESCO school program set to expand to 200 schools nationally.

Segal told the commission a standalone National Centre for Education Against Antisemitism had been incorporated with an independent board co-chaired by Jennifer Westacott and Catherine Fritz-Kalish to deliver training across government, business and law enforcement.

“How do we capture the hearts and minds of good people to understand what antisemitism is, and that there should be an independent organisation that does that,” Segal said.

She detailed the expansion of a UNESCO-developed antisemitism education pilot from 20 public secondary schools in New South Wales and Victoria to 200 schools nationally, backed by federal government funding.

The rollout begins in Western Australia from August, with Catholic, independent and Islamic schools also set to participate.

The program is teacher-focused, equipping educators with knowledge, confidence and classroom materials. Segal said teachers had told her the most difficult thing they faced was answering questions from students “that they didn’t have the knowledge and the wherewithal to appropriately deal with”.

She recounted incidents including a student who had his head pushed into an enclosed area and sprayed with deodorant “as if it was gas from the chambers”, and students returning from recess to find desks rearranged in the form of a swastika.

An education task force chaired by David Gonski meets monthly, and the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority has been tasked with a targeted review of the national curriculum. Five evaluation streams will assess the program, with initial results due in October.

University of Sydney professor emerita Suzanne Rutland warned the commission that Holocaust education delivered improperly could itself generate antisemitism. She said she strongly supported making Holocaust education compulsory but that teaching historical facts alone was not enough.

“Unless Holocaust education is done properly, it can actually create antisemitism,” Rutland said.

Rutland said effective Holocaust education must encompass Jewish life before and after the Holocaust, warning that focusing solely on 1939 to 1945 risked fuelling fascination rather than empathy among some adolescents.

“We have to enable school kids to understand Jews are people. There was a Jewish life before the Holocaust. There’s Jewish life now,” she said.

The education proposals were heard against a backdrop of lived experience testimony. NSW Board of Jewish Education chief executive John Hamey told the commission students at a Sydney public school had invented a points-scoring game called “Trip a Jew” targeting Jewish classmates. A mother giving evidence as Witness ACZ described 12 antisemitic incidents her son endured across 2023 and 2024.

B’nai B’rith Courage to Care Victoria chief executive Mike Zervos told of a flyer at a Victorian teachers’ conference falsely accusing the education charity of embedding anti-Palestinian racism in schools, while a South Australian witness known as Paul spoke of primary school children enduring “quite elaborate bullying” simply for being Jewish.