Charlie Kirk assassination: The case for civic education in an age of political violence
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while addressing students at Utah Valley University. He was 31 years old. Authorities have described the incident as a targeted attack, and a 22-year-old suspect has been apprehended.
Utah’s governor described it as a political assassination. Whatever one thinks of Kirk’s views, it’s difficult to deny that a killing such as this is an attack on democratic life itself. No argument justifies it, no grievance excuses it.
Charlie Kirk was, by almost any measure, polarising. Equally loved and loathed, he embodied contradiction.
He was praised for his faith, family life and organisational drive, and condemned for being a conflict entrepreneur, relying on rhetoric many called racist, misogynistic and antisemitic. He mobilised a sizeable youth movement on the American right while inflaming opponents. That is the tension at the centre of how he is remembered.
Crucially, however, we can be honest about the harms of demagoguery, and still recognise a basic human fact: Taking a life in response to speech, even provocative or incendiary speech, is a line that can never be crossed. Lose sight of that, and politics becomes war by other means.
Australians might be tempted to file this away as an American tragedy. We should resist that impulse.
Our information ecosystem is not sealed at the border. Young people here consume the same feeds, the same clips, the same outrage cycles.
Rhetoric that strips opponents of their humanity, making them enemies unworthy of life, requires no visa. When contempt becomes a habit, violence becomes thinkable. That’s how a free and open society tears itself apart.
The questions we must wrestle with in Australian universities are not only about how to police events on campus or moderate online platforms. The deeper task is cultural and educational – fostering a civic culture that values empathy and pluralism, and providing people with the tools to navigate disagreement without slipping into hostility.
How do we equip students with skills to sit with discomfort, listen for the strongest version of a view they may dislike, and find language for disagreement that doesn’t collapse into shaming or points-scoring? These are teachable capacities, not personality traits.
Read more: Brave Conversations: Teaching the art of disagreement in an age of discomfort
Think of these as moves you can reach for, not a sequence to march through:
- Teach disagreement as a skill. Slow the tempo, assign roles. One student speaks for two minutes. The other mirrors what they heard, names one point of agreement and one precise point of difference, then responds. This is about accuracy first, critique second.
- Make steelmanning a rule of play. In writing and tutorials, mark students on their ability to state the opposing view in terms its supporters would recognise as fair. If we assess only arguments, we reward speed and certainty. If we assess representation, we reward care.
- Build a habit of reflective pause. After heat, ask for a moment of reflection: What did I learn, what did I misread, what feeling drove my response. Reflection lowers the temperature and grows metacognition. Feelings are part of learning, not an embarrassment to hide.
- Put lived experience in conversation with analysis. Invite contrasting guests into the same room, not separate lectures. Set rules of engagement up front. Pair readings across traditions. Ideas can be challenged; people cannot be attacked.
- Teach the civic frame beside the moral frame. Many disputes are about balancing values, not just facts, such as freedom and equality, care and fairness, tradition and reform. Help students name the values in play, then the trade-offs they’re willing to live with. That turns heat into light.
- Model the stance. Do not perform certainty you do not have. Say “I could be wrong” when you could be. Name your commitments and show how you make room for those who don’t share them. Authority is most persuasive when it’s accountable.
None of these is a guarantee against violence, but education cannot hide from the conditions that make violence more likely.
Idaho must recommit to civic education as we mark #America250. Charlie Kirk’s tragic assassination reminds us: civics must teach students to reject violence & see dissent not as a threat, but as democracy’s pulse.
— ID State Board of Ed (@IdSBOE) September 12, 2025
Op-Ed by Board President Kurt Liebich ➡️https://t.co/jCaKNNyQpQ
When we collapse identity into ideology, and ideology into totalising good and evil, politics becomes a zero-sum contest for survival. We need to teach a different grammar for public life. Not bland centrism, not false balance, and not a silence that calls itself civility.
Rather, a courageous honesty that can hold two things at once: Harmful speech can do real damage, but people who use it remain people, and you don’t remove a person to remove an idea.
What happened in Utah will be read through many lenses, and the facts will continue to settle. What is not in doubt is the cost of a public culture that treats opponents as enemies.
Australia still has time to choose another path. We can invest in the everyday practices of disagreement, in schools and universities, until they become normal again.
At Monash University, we’re building a practical, evidence-informed contribution to that effort through the Brave Conversations Project. In classrooms, we offer a simple toolkit of structured listening, good-faith summarising, and reflective pause, and we support educators with workshops, seminars, and ready-to-use materials.
Beyond the campus, we convene community dialogues with schools and local organisations, train facilitators, and create resources that help people talk across deep differences in everyday settings.
Our research team studies what improves learning, civic attitudes and classroom climate, and we use those findings to refine the work and share what holds up in practice. This whole initiative is our commitment to model the civic habits a healthy democracy needs, especially when it’s under strain.
In the end, a political assassination is not only a matter of security, media coverage, or law – it’s a test of a community’s ethical strength and civic resilience.
Like any form of strength, ethical and civic resilience cannot be assumed; they must be cultivated through practice in the everyday life of a community. We strengthen them by using them. We start where we are. We start with each other.
