Geoffrey Sherington

A Genealogy of an Australian System of Comprehensive High Schools: the Contribution of Educational Progressivism to the One Best Form of Universal Secondary Education (1900-1940)

In New South Wales as for other Australian colonies, the achievement of mainly free, compulsory and secular public education systems in the 1870s was a cause of self‐satisfaction and a belief that late nineteenth‐century Australian public schools were among the best in the world. In this paper, the process by which this self‐satisfaction was contested, and eventually turned to the reform of public education, is traced. The tendencies that led to the adoption of the comprehensive secondary school in New South Wales in the mid‐twentieth century form the focus of the paper. Issues and events of importance include the critique of public education in New South Wales in 1901 by a professor at the University of Sydney followed by a Royal Commission (Knibbs and Turner) and the progressivism of Peter Board, the Director of Public Education in early twentieth‐century New South Wales. His responsiveness to the New Education and the experience of his travels in Europe and North America combined in his efforts to open new free public high schools. The second part of the paper examines the proposals for the reform of secondary education in the context of the New Education Fellowship Conference of 1937. Proposals for progressive pedagogy and new and inclusive visions of secondary education were mainly ineffective as a result of the after‐effects of the Great Depression, and the declaration of war in 1939. The frustratingly slow production of ideas and plans for progressive reform in secondary education that characterized the 1920s–1940s was overtaken by the social democratic and postwar reconstruction movements of the 1950s. In New South Wales, as for the United Kingdom, the main difficulty standing in the way of reform was the apparent incompatibility of two versions of progressive reform. One insisted that youth with different abilities and intelligences required different schools for the fulfilling of their potentials. The other argued that a common school was the way forward. This paper shows that the eventual decision to establish comprehensive high schools was very dependent on the debates of the previous half‐century. The paper also discusses the character of the dominant form of progressivism as it was experienced in New South Wales. In the secondary area, ‘administrative’ progressivism was far more influential than pedagogic reform. The paper concludes with an assessment of the importance of local and international influences on secondary school reform.

'Suffer Little Children': British child migration as a study of journeyings between centre and periphery

Looking back, looking forward Of all the former Empires of settlement, the British Empire was unique in sending overseas children seen as being on the margins of society. Child migration to the Americas began in the seventeenth century but was at its height in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries when it was estimated that almost 80,000 children were sent to Canada. The scholarship of such historians as Joy Parr and Gillian Wagner in the early 1980s drew attention to the complex context of British child migration, involving voluntary organizations, the imperial state and the parents of many of the children. In Canada particularly, child migrants came to play an important part in rural economies. In the twentieth century child migration continued on a smaller scale until at least the late 1960s with most child migrants being sent to Australia. The survivors of these child migration schemes are now men and women in middle to late age. Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing media and government interest in the history of British child migration. Since the late 1980s the children sent to the former British Dominions of white settlement have been represented as The Lost Children of Empire separated from family and kin and exiled overseas to hardship. It has been suggested that in the years after 1945 alone up to 10,000 child migrants were sent

‘A better class of boy’ the big brother movement, youth migration and citizenship of empire

The Big Brother Movement was one of the best known schemes of British youth migration in the 1920s. This article examines the aims of the movement, the social origins of the young males brought to Australia and the general effects of the scheme. Represented as a way to provide opportunities for land settlement, the Big Brother Movement raised issues of Empire citizenship as well as those of age relations and middle‐class masculinity. The discussion thus contributes to an understanding of inter‐war migration as well as the role of early twentieth‐century youth movements and the making of men.

Extending the Educational Franchise: The Social Contract of Australia's Public Universities, 1850-1890.

This article introduces the notion of the “educational franchise” of Australia’s public universities established in the mid‐nineteenth century. In his recently published study of the public university and social access in the United States, John Aubrey Douglass suggests that from the mid‐nineteenth century a social contract was formed between American public universities and their social and political constituencies: institutions open to all who could qualify for admission, offering a relevant curriculum and related closely to public schools systems. The idea of the “public university” was not unique to North America. Across the Pacific, the settler societies of Australasia were creating public universities from 1850 – a decade before the Morrill Act which provided the land grants for many public universities in the USA. The Australasian universities also emerged almost simultaneously with the establishment of secondary schools in each of the colonies. This article explores questions of social stratification, meritocracy, social class and gender with a strong focus on the interaction between universities and schools. The social contract in Australia was developed as a form of educational franchise first granted to urban males principally of middle‐class background, but of diverse social and religious origins, and then increasingly extended to those in the emerging public school system, those of rural and regional background, and then to women. The main focus of the article is on the University of Sydney, Australia’s first public university established in 1850. Drawing on an extensive student biographical database we have compiled, the article examines how the “educational franchise” operated in the colony of New South Wales in the period 1850–1890.

Empire, state and public purpose in the founding of universities and colleges in the Antipodes

From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.

From Aries to globalisation in the history of childhood

Half a century ago, there appeared Phillipe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood. Based on a study of the iconography of royal and aristocratic childhood in seventeenth-century France, this soon became a foundation classic in the historiography of childhood even though the author himself said little else on the topic he had helped to create, turning instead to a major study of Western attitudes towards death. Aries argued that the period he was studying marked a new child-centred consciousness indicating that previously the “idea of childhood did not exist”, but he also went on to say “this is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised”, only that the modern idea of childhood corresponds with seeing children as a separate stage in the life cycle.1 As such Aries was arguing childhood was a social construct rather than a biological given. The significance of this new paradigm remained despite criticism of Aries’ methods and the views of other historians of the medieval and early modern periods who saw more continuity than discontinuity in adult–child relations.2 In the wake of the Aries influence a generation of historians of modern Europe and the Americas soon came to see that childhood was divided by class, gender, and race. Many new lenses were applied to the past, particularly as the new cultural history replaced the even earlier emphasis on the social history of children. The focus on the childhood of elites found in Aries’ work has long been supplanted by the discourses associated with understanding children on the margins of society. Thus a recent ISCHE conference had as its central theme “Children and Youth At Risk”.3 An

‘Money Made Us’: A Short History of Government Funds for Australian Schools

The recent Australian Federal Government Gonski review of school funding raises the question of how governments have financed schools in Australia. Drawing on various sources of revenue, the early colonial governors funded various schools. By the beginning of colonial self government in the mid-nineteenth century the funding of the schools of the major Church denominations had become regarded as a form of entitlement. The latter emergence of government funded and government provided schools led to the secular Acts of the late nineteenth century removing government funds from Church schools. By the twentieth century the provision of schools was a prime function of State Governments. But the Second World War emphasised the ‘fiscal imbalance’ in the Constitution with the Commonwealth now claiming primacy in the collection of income tax which had become the prime source of revenue for all government activity. Over the past half a century the idea of entitlement in the provision of government funds for non-government schools has re-emerged in various forms such as ‘state aid’ and ‘school choice’. The Gonski review is the latest development of this process which now involves both the Commonwealth and the States as well as between those who seek preferment in the allocation of funds and wider national concerns about educational disadvantage and school performance.

Contrasting narratives in the history of twentieth-century British child migration to Australia: An interpretive essay

A narrative of personal loss has now supplanted an earlier narrative of rescue and Empire settlement in the history of child migration to Australia in the twentieth century. This article outlines and seeks to understand how these narratives arose. The discussion then attempts to provide another way to explain child migration which embraces changing contexts while being based on a life cycle analysis of the experiences of child migrants both prior to and in the aftermath of migration. This article has been peer-reviewed

Middle-Class Formations and the Emergence of National Schooling: A Historiographical Review of the Australian Debate

In Education and State Formation Andy Green provided an account of the rise of national education systems in England, France, and the United States. Rejecting earlier views based on either a “Whig” view of progress or other more functional or economic explanations, Green has argued that the key issue in the timing and development of education systems is the nature of the state and state formation. Centralized states such as post–1789 France created centralized bureaucracies; decentralized states such as the United States created more decentralized public systems, often based on local communities. Allied to the forms and content of education was the nature of class relations in different national contexts. Green sees the case of England as representing the relative weakness of state or public forms of education. The English retained a “Liberal Tradition” that delayed and then limited state intervention.1 As a result, England retained a gentrified and antiquated system of secondary education dominated by the English public schools, while more genuine middle-class schools emerged in Europe and the United States.

British academics, liberalism, and the First World War

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the War on two prominent academic liberal historians. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on a narrative of their lives and careers before and during the War. Findings The findings include an analysis of how the War engaged these academic liberals in the pursuit of the War effort. Originality/value By the end of the War, both sought to reaffirm much of their earlier academic liberalism despite the political and social changes in the post-war world.