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In 1936, Prof A. P. Elkin attended a seminar in Hawaii lasting several weeks, on the topic of 'native education'. In his various papers presented to a range of experts from the region and beyond during the formal conference held in Honolulu as part of the residency, Elkin set out his views on the future of the Indigenous people of Australia. Education would be pivotal to this new approach on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds. Elkin concurred with the findings of the residency: local forms of adapted education were considered appropriate for most Aboriginal Australians, only a minority continuing into further education; communities as well as children should be better prepared for their integration into the nation as the Indigenous people. This paper sets out to interrogate the proximity of anthropology and education in these claims, and the elision of Aboriginal people's agency including their contemporaneous campaigns for equal education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Australian receptions of C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), and of the controversy over the literary critic F. R. Leavis's combative 1962 response to it. Taking a lead from conceptual insights in global histories of science and the history of knowledge, the paper considers the ways knowledge claims iterate differently in different geographic and cultural contexts. Elements of the Snow–Leavis dispute resonated among Australian scientists, cultural critics, journalists and poets, while others did not. Snow's diagnosis of a disciplinary antagonism between the humanities and the sciences was central to Australian receptions of the controversy, but wider political issues, emphasised in much of the more sophisticated historiography of the 'two cultures' as a British-American controversy, were largely ignored. This reception reflected the post-war expansion of Australian higher education, and the shifting relations within it between the humanities and the sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Australian curricula require teachers to promote reconciliation through the teaching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and languages. Engaging with First Nations knowledges and histories in education comes with a very complex and historically layered legacy. This paper examines the role of education in the ongoing process of colonisation by critically analysing historical and contemporary documents prescribing what Victorian students should learn about First Nations peoples, histories and cultures. These documents are discussed in the context of relevant events and policies, from the Terra Nullius ideologies that dominated curricula until the 1960s, through the growing agenda of self-determination in the 1970–1980s, and into the current swinging pendulum of political agendas. It is argued that contemporary curricula and policies promote reconciliation without embracing the necessary social justice and decolonising ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how two Britons, working in Western Australia and Natal, respectively, engaged with ideas about the civilisation and education of Indigenous people. It is argued that concepts of civilisation were debated by missionaries, researchers and members of the public. Using the correspondence, publications and private journals of two educators, Dr Henry Callaway, Church of England missionary in Natal, and Ann Camfield, teacher in Western Australia, the paper draws attention to their respective approaches to education. Each contributed to broader imperial debates concerning the meaning of race in relation to educability. Education in both places, while connected to these global ideas, was also profoundly influenced by local context. 'Civilisation' and the 'civilising mission' may have been unifying goals for missionaries in different sites of Empire, but understandings of what civilisation should inculcate, or do, varied according to particular circumstances. These histories are best understood in transnational and comparative perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1936, Prof A. P. Elkin attended a seminar in Hawaii lasting several weeks, on the topic of 'native education.' In his various papers presented to a range of experts from the region and beyond during the formal conference held in Honolulu as part of the residency, Elkin set out his views on the future of the Indigenous people of Australia. Education would be pivotal to this new approach on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds. Elkin concurred with the findings of the residency: local forms of adapted education were considered appropriate for most Aboriginal Australians, only a minority continuing into further education; communities as well as children should be better prepared for their integration into the nation as the Indigenous people. This paper sets out to interrogate the proximity of anthropology and education in these claims, and the elision of Aboriginal people's agency including their contemporaneous campaigns for equal education.

Up until the 1960s, Catholic schools throughout most of the English-speaking world were dominated by members of religious teaching orders, including female religious. For over a century following their establishment in 1866, one of the most prominent female religious teaching orders in Australia was that of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The first part of this paper contextualises the emergence of this particular religious order in terms of the development of Catholic education internationally and in Australia, and the associated 'religious formation' of nuns as teachers. Part two is centered on the most significant text used to guide the 'religious formation' of members of this order both as religious and as teachers, namely, that of their 'rules and customs'. Drawing on an analytic approach based on a theory of social semiotics, it analyses both the sets of practices and the textual mechanisms through which the identity of members of the order as teachers was constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines, through one school's location in Australia, the international reach and nature of the networks associated with New Education; the aims and ideals of Clive and Janet Nield, the main protagonists behind the venture of Koornong School; what transformations they brought to progressive education; and the deliberate assembling of a specially selected teaching staff, governance structure and broad-based curriculum that was enhanced by an unusual educational setting, the site specifically chosen and buildings specially designed by architects whose ideals aligned with those of their clients and facilitated the pursuit of progressive education. The community of residential and school buildings and a series of designed outdoor spaces in combination with a virtually untouched landscape wilderness played a pivotal role in complementing an educational experience that had been shaped by beliefs in the importance of psychoanalysis to the nurturing of a child's body and mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1954, Hugh Stretton took charge of a threadbare history department at the University of Adelaide. By the end of his tenure as department chair in 1966, staff numbers had increased fivefold and the department was recognised as one of the best of its kind in Australia. Stretton wanted his department to 'teach history interestingly', which was his overriding criterion in making new appointments. He also ran a democratic department that went against prevailing notions of 'God-Professor' departmental governance. As well as highlighting the singular features of the Adelaide department, the present paper places the growth and the character of 'The House that Hugh Built' within wider Australian and global contexts. The 'Stretton era' straddled a period of rapid expansion of the university sector both locally and internationally, which entailed a move from a generalist to a more specialised curriculum, with a greater emphasis on research and publication, and a less male-dominated faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the reasons why, in the first half of the twentieth century, Australian librarians were encouraged to adopt professional work practices and educational standards based on US models of 'democratic' librarianship. The promotion of US models of library education and association occurred both directly through government agencies such as the United States Office of War Information (OWI), and indirectly through the philanthropic agencies and professional associations such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) and the ALA, and was to have a lasting impact on the work of Australian librarians and on their education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the way in which narratives, including stories and poetry, have been used in school texts relating to moral instruction. The paper will draw on texts used in Queensland classrooms in the early part of the twentieth century to demonstrate the ways in which description of sights and the experiences of the senses, and of exaggerated consequences, are used in narratives and poems with the intention of imparting moral lessons. The texts analysed include both those used in "Civics and Morals" lessons and the Queensland School Readers, a long-running series of classroom readers designed to suit the unique needs of the state's children.

Small specialist higher education institutions often face challenges when negotiating with larger partners. In 1988, John Dawkins, Australia's federal Minister for Education, introduced sweeping reforms to create a Unified National System of higher education. Dawkins' criteria for funding necessitated mergers for many smaller providers. The Victorian College of Pharmacy in Melbourne, Victoria, presents a case study of how one institution negotiated this policy and asserted its interests to achieve an optimal outcome. It rejected amalgamation with the University of Melbourne, reaching a superior arrangement with Monash University despite state and federal opposition. This article combines archival research from Melbourne and Monash Universities and the state government with interviews of key players. It examines the importance of institutional identity and how small institutions can navigate government policies of consolidation. It also focuses on the deleterious effects of inflexible government policy and how the College successfully overcame these challenges to complete its desired merger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Australian receptions of C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" (1959), and of the controversy over the literary critic F. R. Leavis's combative 1962 response to it. Taking a lead from conceptual insights in global histories of science and the history of knowledge, the paper considers the ways knowledge claims iterate differently in different geographic and cultural contexts. Elements of the Snow-Leavis dispute resonated among Australian scientists, cultural critics, journalists and poets, while others did not. Snow's diagnosis of a disciplinary antagonism between the humanities and the sciences was central to Australian receptions of the controversy, but wider political issues, emphasised in much of the more sophisticated historiography of the 'two cultures' as a British-American controversy, were largely ignored. This reception reflected the post-war expansion of Australian higher education, and the shifting relations within it between the humanities and the sciences.

This paper examines how government approaches to education were contested by Aboriginal communities in the late 1930s, through organised political actions designed in part to ensure access to the same standard of education and schooling available to non-Aboriginal people. It explores some of the ways that Aboriginal campaigns for education were enacted, focusing on the Cummeragunja Aboriginal reserve in New South Wales, when, in 1939, hundreds of residents walked off to protest to the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board over the repressive conditions, the reserve manager, and the teacher and curriculum of the Cummeragunja school. The strike aimed to generate several changes at Cummeragunja, including the appointment of a new teacher, and the delivery of curriculum that was at the same standard as that delivered in other government schools in NSW. These demands were not unique to the Cummeragunja community as, throughout south-eastern Australia, Aboriginal communities were fighting for access to education alongside campaigns for land and greater civil rights.

This paper argues that Aboriginal children's engagement with education in the central Australian region of the Northern Territory in the mid-twentieth century can be understood as strategic engagements with formal western education systems and assimilation policies. It addresses a methodological problem stemming from a project that focuses on the work of the Finke River Mission (FRM) and its head missionary Friedrich Wilhelm Albrecht who, during the 1950s and 1960s, initiated an education scheme that targeted 'half-caste' Indigenous girls living on pastoral stations in central Australia. The scheme demonstrates the key concern of this special issue in that it is an example of the entanglements of transnational forces with local expressions of Indigenous education in Australia.

Embroidery is traditionally regarded as women's work and the teaching of embroidery as a means of preparing young women for domesticity, a view which has been reinforced by historians studying changes in the high school art curriculum that occurred with the introduction of the Wyndham Scheme in New South Wales in the early 1960s. This paper argues that those involved in promoting and teaching embroidery in NSW high schools at that time had a different agenda. They wanted embroidery to be seen as a legitimate form of creative work. The paper considers the relationship that developed in the 1960s between the Embroiderers' Guild of NSW and the NSW Department of Education. This relationship resulted in a series of ventures intended to promote embroidery as creative, artistic expression rather than as domestic work. The paper argues that, in this context, embroidery was a vehicle for women's agency and self-determination. (Contains 48 footnotes.)

This article explores teacher educator Lillian de Lissa's working life in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1944 the McNair report criticised residential colleges and their female staff as isolated and intellectually impoverished. However, in Australia and then as the foundation Principal of Gipsy Hill Training College, de Lissa was not only committed to teaching and administration, but also to presenting and publishing her scholarly work nationally and internationally. Furthermore, she chaired the Nursery School Association for nine years, gave evidence at several government inquiries and lectured in the United States in 1943. This article focuses on the elements of de Lissa's career that might be included in an academic curriculum vitae in order to challenge the McNair report and highlight her contributions to early childhood education and teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses representations of women teachers' work in early twentieth-century state schools, especially well-qualified and experienced women who taught in the city of Adelaide, South Australia. While there is a range of discourses that could be applied to these members of the profession, the paper focuses on three discourses in particular--vocation, character and career--that are registered in many texts of the era. The paper begins with an exploration of these discourses, pointing to ways in which they have shifted across time and demonstrating that they interweave to form a matrix within which the teacher-self can be constituted. Then it shows how each of the discourses was manifested in the recruitment and training of teachers, their daily work, particularly in the classrooms of city schools, and in the rewards, material and otherwise, that were said to attend the profession. (Contains 113 footnotes.)

Focusing on the transnational circulation of ideas about suffrage and education, this article explores the work of suffragist Muriel Matters (1877–1969), and teacher educator Lillian de Lissa (1885–1967). It begins with Matters' and de Lissa's childhoods and education in post-suffrage Australia, and their initial work as an actress and kindergarten teacher respectively. The second section focuses on the development of their politics when Matters migrated to England in 1905 and joined the Women's Freedom League, and de Lissa became the foundation principal of the Adelaide Kindergarten Training College in 1907. The third section discusses their engagement with Maria Montessori's educational approach, which Matters incorporated into her socialist feminist activism during the First World War, and which led to de Lissa's recruitment to England as a liberal feminist teacher educator in 1917. The final section highlights their advocacy for Montessori education in the United Kingdom during the interwar years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes a feminist research agenda on the history of women teachers' experiences in the latter stages of their career and life. Drawing on extant histories of white women elementary and secondary teachers in the largely Anglo, western world (centred on the United States, Canada, England, Australia and Ireland), the essay explores the concept of age as a category of analysis, particularly for historians of women, by identifying three ways in which the ageing of women teachers is historically significant: the persistence of cultural stereotypes against older women teachers over time; the historical pattern of older women teachers' political activism; and historical aspects of ageing women teachers' sense of professional and subjective experience of their work. By noting the invisibility of age in the current historiography of women teachers, the essay proposes that historians of education begin to see age as a category of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of education are well placed to engage in applied historical approaches providing authoritative evidence of the past to inform policy and practice. This article is based on the presidential keynote delivered at the History of Education Society (UK) annual conference in 2019. As such it reflects on possible future directions for the history of education and considers the role of informal educational activity that takes place outside the classroom, including that of children's reading for pleasure. Stories in the interwar British, Canadian and Australian "Girl's" and "Boy's" annuals provide an example of how appropriate gender roles were presented to their young readers at a time of intense social and political change for Britain. With Brexit heralding a similar significant moment of change and the pandemic lockdowns resulting in children spending more time at home, it is concluded that the significance of 'informal' education, both historically and today, requires our attention.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the special issue on topics concerning the Australian and New Zealand history of education including range of educational, textual sources such as autobiography, the paperwork of school administration, as well as oral history interviews.

Education in Victoria, Australia not only underwent significant change in the 1970s, but was witness to a widespread educational reform project. Whilst exploration of the more widespread alternatives has been of some interest, the smaller progressive traditions that emerged in some ways ‘alongside’ the broader reforms have rarely been examined in any detail. This article explores the founding of the Melbourne Rudolf Steiner School (MRSS) in the 1970s, the first of its kind in Victoria, and the third such school nationally. Analysis is based primarily on interviews with educators directly involved. L.A. Reid’s notion of education as an ‘aesthetic’ object is drawn on to examine the collective experiences of the founders of the MRSS, and the particular expression they gave to Steiner’s educational ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building on the author’s previous work on Australian national cinema and schooling, this article explores the representation of the female primary school teacher in the television mini-series entitledMarion(Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1974). Using narrative analysis, it argues that this representation is disruptive of patriarchal gender relations, demonstrating ‘hyper-linear history’ where an exemplary relationship is created between the disrupted gender relations in school leadership in Australia caused by the Second World War and the ongoing disruption of gender relations occasioned by the second-wave women’s movement in the 1970s. This mini-series shows how history, gender and representation are mobilised to create a unique cinematic historical argument about the gendered nature of Australian primary school teaching. Finally, the article reflects briefly on the situatedness of this reading out of the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A three-year-old boy, born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1892, lived the final months of his life in an abusive foster home. His death barely made a ripple in the press, and the system proved unable or unwilling to deal with much of the most disturbing evidence about the perpetrators of abuse. This article argues that cases like this one are more than just historical curiosities. They expose abuse that so often lay hidden from the public gaze, and reveal important information about how and why it was allowed to occur. Such cases demand the historian’s attention, not because they are scandalous stories, but because they are sites of historical injustice. They also provide opportunities to understand why systems intended to protect children can fail them so badly, a question that remains pertinent today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines an experimental kindergarten programme Work in the Kindergarten: An Australian Programme based on the Life and Customs of the Australian Black developed by Martha Simpson in early twentieth-century Australia. Here Simpson adapted international Revisionist Froebelian approaches to cultural epoch theory and nature study in an Australian context. Accepting that human development recapitulates, Simpson posited that Aboriginal culture could serve as stimulus for age-appropriate and improving child-centred activities. Local contingencies, including histories of violent cross-racial encounter, complicated an attempt by kindergartener Helen Beaumont to apply the programme in the Sydney slum suburb of Leichhardt. These contingencies are documented and analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in many countries, such as Germany, Turkey, the United States and Japan the history/culture wars of the past two decades have increased public interest in what is taught in schools. This has resulted in rigorous debates in the general community, encouraged and sustained through regular media coverage. Partly as a response to this, History has been designated as a separate subject in the first wave of planning and implementation of the Australian National Curriculum. Two of the reasons for this include first, to recognise the importance of teaching historical skills as a distinct subject; and second there is an ongoing bipartisan political interest in privileging history disciplinary knowledge and content to ensure that national history narratives are taught to students. To contribute meaningfully towards the development and implementation of a National Curriculum, it is important to understand past curriculum constructions, so that the disciplinary knowledge and content of history remains independent, and not subsumed within current (or future) political trends. Based on examples of national history from the Queensland Social Studies syllabus and government endorsed sourcebooks in the lead-up to the 1988 Bicentennial of British colonisation of the Australian continent, this article examines the influence and role of multiculturalism in History teaching in primary schools. Particular attention is paid to Indigenous representations and British heritages, as an example of two groups that have often been represented as binaries to each other throughout Australian history. An analysis of the curriculum materials illuminates the differences between multiculturalism and history—highlighting how the two are merged at the expense of accurate historical knowledge and concepts, particularly in the area of national history. This study will demonstrate that as a result of the infiltration of multiculturalism into history content within the Social Studies curriculum, historical knowledge becomes silenced in the school curriculum – resulting in vague and sometimes historically inaccurate information being presented to students; and the privileging of certain types of multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of postwar child migration has received considerable attention in recent years, culminating in a governmental inquiry in 1998 into the welfare of former child migrants sent to Australia. This inquiry was partly in response to increasing public awareness of the migration schemes stimulated by sensational coverage in the national press and media, which focused on the distressing personal stories of child migrants, rather than the political considerations surrounding the schemes. This article seeks to set child migration within a political framework, highlighting the influence of voluntary-statutory relationships in child welfare provision and the effect this had on policy formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details the case of Julia Flynn concerning the subject of women, leadership and gender politics in the interwar years. Dedication of Flynn as chief inspector of secondary schools in Australia; Biographical and academic background; Criticisms of her educational leadership.

Describes the relationship between middle-class masculinity and professional identity through an analysis of William Anderson Cawthorne's life and teaching career in colonial South Australia. Brief biography on Cawthorne; Conceptualization of a professional teacher; Conclusion.

Examines the "accomplishments curriculum" which emerged as the dominant mode of education for middle-class girls in Britain and its colonies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Discusses the expanded educational opportunities for women, describing their social effects, such as the early emergence of middle-class aspirations. (GEA)