Helen Proctor

Visible pedagogic work: parenting, private tutoring and educational advantage in Australia

This article explores parents’ use of private tutoring services for their primary school children in Sydney, Australias largest city. Using Bernsteins theories of invisible and visible pedagogies, we look, through the eyes of a small group of middle-class Chinese-background interviewees, at the tensions between certain pedagogic forms associated with private tutoring and schooling in contemporary contexts of educational competition. We show how some parents are openly seeking more explicit, visible forms of instruction through using private tutoring, to compensate for the perceived ‘invisible’, pedagogically progressive approach of Australian primary schooling. We argue that these parents’ enlistment of supplementary tutoring is a considered approach to their identification of a mismatch between (apparently) relaxed, child-centred classroom practices, and the demands of the more traditional examinations that regulate entry points to desired educational sites such as academically selective high schools and prestigious universities. Our findings show how paid tutoring is a contemporary pedagogic strategy for securing educational advantage, not just a ‘cultural’ practice prevalent among certain migrant communities, as it is often characterised. We suggest that an analytic focus on pedagogy can help connect issues of class, culture and competition in research on home–school relationships, offering a productive way for the field to respond to the tensions these issues engender.

Masculinity and social class, tradition and change: the production of ‘young Christian gentlemen’ at an elite Australian boys’ school

High fee-charging non-government schools for boys comprise a small but significant sector of the Australian schooling market. In different ways in different historical periods these schools have represented themselves as being concerned with more than just an instrumental or utilitarian education, making both explicit and implicit claims about the kinds of values they work to instil in their students and the kinds of men they aim to produce. This article looks closely at one such school in order to gain an understanding of how it sought to shape a particularly classed, leadership-oriented masculinity, during a period of institutional change. The historical context for the study is the final decade of the twentieth century, a period that saw the approximate beginning of a ‘boys’ crisis’ in Australian education, which for schools like the one in this study meant a degree of reconceptualisation of practices and ideologies of masculinity. The article draws on a set of oral history interviews with former students and executive staff of the school.

Gender and Merit: Coeducation and the Construction of a Meritocratic Educational Ladder in New South Wales, 1880-1912.

Central to the assembling of the New South Wales public education system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the setting of borders and boundaries between different categories of students. These boundaries were particularly decisive in the institution of the public high school, where entry and progress were regulated by tests and examinations. Students were ostensibly grouped according to intelligence, application and age rather than older forms of categorization such as family and social class. Gender as a category was mediated by merit. Although it was known that the spread of public high schools in the United States and Canada had been facilitated by the early adoption of coeducation, the New South Wales government was initially reluctant to establish mixed‐sex high schools. Its first public high schools, founded under the Public Instruction Act of 1880, were all single‐sex institutions. By the early twentieth century, however, the Department of Public Instruction’s policy had changed and coeducation was a significant feature of the expansion of secondary schooling in New South Wales in 1911–1912 and the establishment of a meritocratic ladder of educational opportunity. While the Department’s preference continued to be for single‐sex schooling until the middle of the twentieth century, its willingness to establish mixed high schools in sparsely populated places opened the way for the successful expansion of a public high school network into regional and rural areas, a movement that had been frustrated in the 1880s. There was little public debate about coeducation in late nineteenth or early twentieth‐century New South Wales—unlike in England or the United States for the same period. For the most part New South Wales Education Department attitudes to and policies on coeducation—and gender—need to be inferred by reading more general kinds of discussions concerning the role of the state in higher education and the aims and purposes of secondary schooling. Nevertheless it is possible to assemble a picture of the ideas and beliefs regarding gender and high schools that informed the Department of Public Instruction’s policy first to proscribe, on idealistic grounds, and then tolerate, on pragmatic grounds, its adoption in regional high schools. This article examines this policy transition by reading representative or indicative discussions from key moments in New South Wales public education history. These are: the New South Wales Legislative Council debates over the clauses to establish high schools in the Public Instruction Bill of 1880, public statements demanding educational reform at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the policies establishing the major public education settlement of 1911–1912. 1 The author has been awarded the ISCHE prize 2005 for this article.

Race and legitimacy: historical formations of academically selective schooling in Australia

ABSTRACT A growing body of research has examined the academic success of ‘Asian’ diaspora students in North America, the UK, and Australia, much of it positioning ‘culture’ as a central analytic concern. Taking the category ‘Asian’ as a concept formed through the imagination and reduction of geopolitical and cultural histories, this article addresses the phenomenon of Asian educational success as it is constituted historically and politically rather than culturally. The article examines a series of twenty-first-century newspaper debates about the apparently disproportionate success of Asian students in qualifying for entry to a prestigious academically selective public high school in Sydney, Australia, locating these debates in a longer historical struggle over elite forms of secondary schooling. We find that race and racism were made hyper-visible in media representations of Asian success as a ‘problem’, stirring up and reframing historically longstanding anxieties about masculinity, whiteness, entitlement, and Australia’s complex postcolonial relations with Britain and Asia. The debates are considered as a case study of a racialised struggle over social and educational legitimacy, and the analysis is used to reflect on the contributions of a grounded, historical approach to research on recent and contemporary migrant educational participation and experience, both in Australia and internationally.

Being special: memories of the Australian public high school, 1920s‐1950s

Purpose – The first state high schools in New South Wales (NSW) were restricted to children with high academic ability. The purpose of this paper is to explore the lived experience of over 70 former students from three such schools, one coeducational, the other two single‐sex, with special attention to academic and social curricula.Design/methodology/approach – The study investigates memories of a particular moment in the history of secondary schooling in NSW before the establishment of mass secondary education. The authors utilise theoretical concepts from recent oral history studies regarding memory communities and intersectionality.Findings – In bringing ex‐students’ memories of both single‐sex and coeducational academically‐selective high schooling together, the study reports on the homogeneity of the memories of this type of schooling despite the different sexual structures of the schools. The respondents, it is argued, constitute a “memory community” in that they recalled their selection for high sc...

An aristocracy of talent? Describing self and other at an early twentieth‐century high school

This paper is a reading of early twentieth‐century government high school culture as it was expressed through a twenty‐year run of one Australian high school’s student‐authored magazines. From its first issue the editors of The Parramatta High School Magazine were keen to promote its role in the making of a community. The idea that high school people belonged to a special and exclusive group was reiterated in a number of ways. Writing in the magazines described the features of a shared culture – whiteness, literacy, good taste, rational behaviour – and implicitly defined high school students as different from other categories of people, including non‐English speaking foreigners and ‘the uneducated’. Central to the process of classification and identification were statements of ‘who we are’ and ‘who we are not’ which were grounded in the language of meritocracy, and encompassed particular contemporary understandings of social class, race and gender.

Bureaucratic governance, family economies and the 1930s NSW teachers’ marriage bar, Australia

ABSTRACT This paper reports the findings of an analysis of a collection of Statutory Declaration forms completed by teachers seeking exemption from dismissal under the NSW Married Women (Lecturers and Teachers) Act (1932–1947). Most sought exemption on hardship grounds, recording details of their husbands’ inability or unwillingness to provide them with ‘adequate’ support. The collection offers insight into the gendered finances of a particular group during the 1930s Depression, revealing some complex interdependencies—such as the need to support extended kin—and offering insights into the role of the state in the making of the family as a social and economic unit. The bureaucratic apparatus of regulation and standardised paperwork operated materially and discursively to distinguish the exceptional (salaried married women) from the more desirable or legitimate order of gendered responsibilities (financially dependent wives). Finally, the forms are strikingly silent about the professional teaching work of the women.

School Teacher Parents and the Retreat From Public Secondary Schooling: A View from the Australian Census, 1976-2001

This article uses data from the Australian Censuses of 1976 and 2001 to measure the extent to which the children of school teachers participated in the middle class shift from public to non-government secondary schooling of the closing decades of the last century. It builds on recent work by Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington on the history of the New South Wales Public comprehensive high school, as well as recent analyses of the relationships between the middle classes and public institutions by sociologists such as Michael Pusey (for Australia) and Stephen Ball (for the United Kingdom). School teachers are of particular interest for a number of reasons including their historically uneasy status relative to other professional occupations and their complex roles as both providers and consumers of school education. The article finds that while school teachers collectively moved their children out of government high schools in common with other middle class parents over the period, there were differences within the category according to parent’s gender and sector of employment.

Creating an educational home:: mothering for schooling in the Australian Women’s Weekly, 1943–1960

Abstract This article examines cultural representations of the mid-twentieth century mother of schoolchildren in a mass-circulation Australian women’s magazine, arguing that schools and schooling have been under-acknowledged in the historiography of mothering, despite their importance in shaping modern childhood and family life. Framing the Australian Women’s Weekly as a medium of public instruction, we identify and analyse its advice about schooling, both direct and implied, across a variety of the magazine’s sections: in illustrations, news, feature articles, advertising, letters and advice columns. This advice was informed by the popular dissemination of medical, psychological and educational expertise, by managed exchanges amongst the magazine’s readers and by the availability of a variety of consumer products. Much of the guidance offered to mothers was aspirational, aimed at educating and thereby modernising the readership. The interconnectedness of advertising and editorial produced visual and textual images of an “educational home” in which children had their learning supported or enriched, just as their bodies were capably fed and clothed. By the 1950s there was an increasing emphasis on interpersonal relations and therapeutic psychology and the Weekly had embarked on a project of encouraging mothers to learn more about schooling, to do more to support their children’s learning and to take an interest in education as a social project. Despite her strong and growing connection to the school through her children, however, the school mother was almost always represented as working outside its physical boundaries during this period.

Introduction: Heresy and Orthodoxy in Contemporary Schooling: Australian Educational Policy and Global Neoliberal Reform

This book grew out of a colloquium series, hosted by the University of Sydney, in which leading scholars and researchers were invited to name what they took to be the deep, potentially lethal flaws at the heart of contemporary schooling practice and policy. They were invited to identify and challenge prevailing orthodoxies and to voice their potentially ‘heretical’ views about education in the twenty-first century. The chapters in this volume arise from an Australian schooling and policy context that has international resonance. Australia provides, we argue, a good case study of the kinds of globally popular reform strategies that have been described by the celebrity Finnish educator, Pasi Sahlberg as ‘GERM’—the Global Education Reform Movement: standardisation; a focus on core curriculum subjects at the expense of areas such as creative arts; risk-avoidance; corporate management models, and test-based accountancy policies. In this chapter we introduce key elements of our authors’ critiques of contemporary education policy and practice and consider the purpose of critique (or ‘heresy’), and the practical impact, or otherwise, of this kind of academic work at a time of uncertainty and change for university research and teaching in the field of education.