M.M. Laming

Culture and Class

He’s the son of a doctor, lawyer or someone else with a house in St Ives or Kew. Because his parents wanted him to have the best education money could buy they sent him to a private school, to study academic subjects and learn the importance of not getting his hands dirty.

Career change teachers: Pragmatic choice or a vocation postponed?

For the last decade, international bodies have warned of a teacher shortage and sought to find ways of attracting more applicants to the profession. This article reports on a pilot study undertaken at one Australian university which asked why some applicants to preservice teaching courses had given up existing careers in order to become teachers. It then asked if their career change had been successful. Using open-ended questions and interviews, this paper recorded the view of 35 teachers who had been in teaching for 2–5 years. The findings suggest that reasons for selecting teaching as a second career are more complex and nuanced than existing research suggests, combining pragmatic, deeply personal and spiritual elements. It also found a significant connection between career change teachers’ satisfaction with their new occupation and the status of their occupation, indicating that further study of career change teachers’ experiences and personal beliefs is warranted.

Stories of Difference: Metropolitan and Rural Students’ Attitudes to University

This chapter draws on a study of 437 secondary students attending school in the Australian state of Victoria: five of the schools were located in different parts of the state capital, Melbourne and were located in the regional centres of Victoria. It is concerned with exploring the sources of their differing views of education, in general, and university education, in particular. The chapter examines why young people want to go to university. The chapter details four very different narratives told by groups of students whose lives and experiences of secondary education are so different that it sometimes is difficult to remember that they are all living in the same country.

Education as a Method of Re-Orienting Values

Economic rationalism entered the Australian political domain in the midto late1980s as the Hawke government gradually introduced a range of policies across all areas that were intended to transform the Australian economy into a modern, globally competitive entity. In seeking to refashion the role of higher education as a part of the national economy, it set about changing public attitudes about the purpose of education and responsibility for the costs involved. Education has long been recognised as a powerful tool for shaping and reinforcing social values. Throughout history, various governments around the world have used their education systems to promote a particular version of national identity and as a means of inculcating a particular set of values. Heathorn (2000) describes how the elementary school curriculum, in particular reading materials, and organisational structures were used to construct a sense of national identity that privileged Englishness in the late nineteenth century. In a similar fashion, Zhao (1998) has described the Chinese government’s initiation of a patriotic education campaign intended to boost loyalty among a population that was becoming disenchanted with Communist ideology began to grow restive. Recent events in the history of higher education in Australia provide another example of this process with the introduction of curriculum materials identifying a set of nine Australian values that were to be taught in all schools (DEST, 2003) and the history syllabus proposed by the Howard government in 2007. Less common, are attempts to reshape public attitudes to education itself. Yet that is precisely what the Labor government achieved during the 1980s with consequences that were more profound and far reaching than it could have imagined.

Global Teacher Rec ruitment as a Challenge to the Goal of Universal Primary Education

The second of the Millennium Goals agreed to by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000 was universal, high-quality primary education for all children. The inclusion of universal primary education is a recognition that education plays a crucial role in the alleviation of poverty and the promotion of peace and security; however, the UN Millennium Project team estimates that there are more than 100 million primary age children not attending school for a variety of reasons (UN Millennium Project 2005). In most cases their families are too poor to afford the costs involved, in many cases their labour or their income is needed at home, in others there is no school available, but increasingly children are prevented from attaining full primary education because there are insufficient teachers to staff schools adequately (see also Zajda et al. 2008). The implications of the projected shortage are very serious as an inability to provide appropriate education will prevent many of the poorest nations from implementing poverty reduction strategies and exacerbate the gap between the developed and less-developed nations (Zajda 2005). Moreover, as poverty increases social and political instabilities are likely to increase as the most vulnerable citizens of the poorest nations see any hope of a solution to their distress receding.

A Revolution in Policy

Where the frontier between the state and the market is to be drawn has never been a matter that could be settled, once and for all, at some grand peace conference. Instead, it has been the subject, over the course of this century, of massive intellectual and political battles as well as constant skirmishes. In its entirety, the struggle constitutes one of the great defining dramas of the twentieth century. Today the clash is so far-reaching and so encompassing that it is remaking our world – and preparing the canvas for the twenty-first century (Yergin & Stanislaw, 1998, p. 11).

Changing Assumptions and Expectations

This is the first stone of the University of Melbourne, instituted in the honour of God for establishing young men in philosophy, literature and piety; cultivating the talent of youth, fostering the arts, extending the bounds of science. Inscription on the foundation stone, University of Melbourne, 3 July, 1854.

Knowledge and Higher Education

The expansion of the college-going population fills the high schools with college preparatory students… but this development also affects the character of the terminal students, and of the terminal education in high school, as well. When a few students went on to college, there was no disgrace in not doing so; moreover, except for the professions, it was not so clear that occupational success was closely linked to academic success (Trow, 1961, pp. 144–165).

Access and Payment

Let us imagine that a university is a bus … into the bus are crowded into rows and rows, each row representing a course, are rows and rows of crammed-in students, … they‘re packed into luggage racks, and the students are hanging onto the straps in the aisle, … and the rows of mechanics are sitting there with their toolboxes, and what‘s happened, … is the Government has come along, … said: “Right. What we will do is we will now buy you a brand new bus. It’s going to be a longer bus, there’s going to be a lot more seats on this bus, every person is going to be sitting down on the bus, and they’re going to have a quality journey as they go through their education experience” (The Hon. Brendan Nelson, Minister for Education 2003).

Going to univerity will

In studies of social stratification in Australia the term ‘upper class’ is simply not used, largely because of the absence of an hereditary aristocracy. The result is that we have a middle class that is not middle at all, but rather the top of the social pyramid … in the absence of a utopian change of values, there is likely to be ever increasing differentiation between various types of professional and managerial occupations in terms of prestige, privilege and economic rewards. What we will be left with, in other words, is a society which is middle class from top to bottom (Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983, p. 148).