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| ISBN-13: | 9781743436738 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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A History of Australian Schooling
By Craig Campbell, Helen Proctor
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2014 Craig Campbell Helen ProctorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-673-8
CHAPTER 1
Precarious endeavours to 1820
For several decades from 1788, the year of the first British settlement in Australia, schools were of remarkably little consequence for the education of most young people. This was true for both the Aboriginal and British populations. By starting the story in 1788 with the first rude British schools, an injustice is done to the educational work that had proceeded among the peoples of Australia for thousands of years previously.
Even for the children of British settlers, at the end of the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century, 'schools' with four walls and persons whose profession was that of 'teacher' were usually marginal to their lives. For those who were to be schooled, there was no agreed age for starting and finishing. The education of most young people in the 'real business of living' usually took place elsewhere. Nevertheless, attempts were made to establish schools — usually with government assistance — in the first colony, New South Wales, and then the later settlements in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and on Norfolk Island.
By attending first to the common ways of educating young people, we can then show how organised schooling became more important over time. The significance of schools increased during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the rates at which schooling became important for different populations varied. Social class, ethnic, religious and 'racial' identities, as well as gender helped govern the take-up of schooling. Consequently, the institution of the school remained alien to many for a long time. The growing coincidence of 'education' and the 'work of the school' is mainly a story of the mid-nineteenth century onwards.
To understand developments in schooling, it is also necessary to note new ideas about human development that increasingly saw childhood as a distinctive life-stage requiring special attention. During the first half of the nineteenth century, most children did not experience the kind of prolonged and protected childhood that was common a century later. Making the modern child was an historical project. New laws were part of the process. Early in the period, the registration of births was haphazard. Childhood finished at the age of 7 years for some — that was the age at which children could be sent to prison. There were no child labour laws. A girl could marry with her parents' consent at 14, a boy at 16; child prostitution was common, according to the documents of the Molesworth Committee on convict transportation (1837). No law required children to attend school.
In this chapter we look at four main topics. The first concerns the education of young Indigenous children before settler contact. Second, we provide a brief survey of the ideas and practices of schooling that the British settlers brought with them. Third, we present a survey of the early schools of Australia. Finally, we look at curricula and teaching methods before 1820.
Educating the young before European contact
Our understanding of education for Aboriginal children and youth before British settlement is usually dependent upon the efforts of Aboriginal people to communicate with missionaries and other Europeans who took an interest. Their understanding of what they heard and saw was limited. For example, the term 'traditional education' is often used, but it suggests a lack of dynamism in Indigenous educational practice. Trade, travel and cultural exchange occurred between different groups from the beginnings of Indigenous occupation, some 50 000 to 60 000 years earlier. Indigenous communities in northern Australia and the Torres Strait interacted with traders from Sulawesi from the eighteenth century. The Dutch and other Europeans visited western and northern Australia for close to two centuries before 1788. There were plenty of reasons for 'traditional education' to adapt as external contact, trade and local circumstances changed and developed.
The education of Aboriginal children varied across Australia. We know there were close to three hundred major language groups. We also know that the histories, cultures and economies of these peoples varied, responsive as they were to local conditions — as well as their understandings of how they came to live in particular places. Each group of people had its ways of organising in order to survive and prosper in its own 'country'. Yet, if there were differences among Aboriginal peoples, there were similarities as well.
A child first needed to survive both birth and the dangerous period immediately following. Deliberate instruction of children necessarily occurred, usually in informal settings. It was more obvious for boys as they approached initiation, the crucial passage towards adulthood. Ronald and Catherine Berndt (1977, p. 167) tell us that had a boy not been wild, and instead had 'listened to his elders, shown willingness and ability to remember what he is told, and if his spear is straight and his skill as a hunter is developing, he may not have to wait long for the first rite'.
In some places, there is evidence of sex-specific songs and dances for young people. Pre-initiation instruction for boys came close to being formal. Other learning associated with language acquisition, food collecting, hunting, constructing shelters, and much ceremonial and sacred life, and the skills associated with making tools, weapons and clothing, were learned through opportunistic instruction. It is likely that girls remained closer to their mothers for longer than boys, and through assisting with tasks learned their duties early. There was also the complex business of learning about relationships, among kin and others: the persons who were safe to associate with, and those not; the question of whose authority was decisive and whose was not.
Puberty, menstruation, 'marriage' — each of these potentially involved the preparation and instruction of young people. Nor was such instruction always cerebral. Bodies could be scarred, groups of young people isolated from their usual social groups and teeth ceremonially knocked out as part of the process.
The learning associated with daily life was integrated with the broader cultural understanding that derived from Aboriginal 'dreamings'. These stories differed from country to country. They could inspire song, music and dance of great mythic and poetic statement. There were also great and long-lasting visual arts traditions. The topography of country itself, the form and activity of living creatures — these were all evidence of the mythic work of ancestral beings. The expression of dreamtime traditions changed over time, but their learning was an integral part of the lives of young Aboriginal people.
Access to different parts of the tradition was differentiated. In making the distinctions, as important as gender and age were family and 'totemic' or 'skin' associations. There were different kinds of 'custodianship' of the sacred and secret, of the different elements of the tradition.
We can draw some tentative conclusions about the educational experiences of Aboriginal children and youth, and speculate on the reasons for their resistance to early attempts to 'school' them. It is likely that most Aboriginal education was for immediate use in daily life. There was less of the disjunction between the 'learn this now' and 'it might be useful later on'. There was likely a stronger element of cooperative learning. Education was more closely integrated with the demands of the local environment, and the immediate pressure to secure food and shelter — though this was hardly absent from the education, if not schooling, of colonial children either.
It is likely that the moral and social education of Aboriginal children was performed with less stress than in the colonial society. 'Law' — and responses to its breaking — could be punitive in both societies, but there was likely less disjunction between 'authority' and 'people'. It was difficult to negotiate the distinctions of rank, caste and class in British-colonial society, and the privileges and oppressions that were intensified in its convict society form. This could lead to rather more alienation and resistance among those who felt hard done by than in Aboriginal societies.
The differences between Aboriginal and European society, including approaches to children and their education, were great. T.G. Strehlow (1947) reported the words of a 'ceremonial chief' of the Aranda people in central Australia. There is a sense of a different approach to the land and the lives of its people:
Our fathers taught us to love our own country, and not to lust after the lands belonging to other men. They told us that Ilbalintja was the greatest bandicoot (gurra) totemic centre amongst the Aranda people, and that, in the beginning, bandicoot ancestors had come from every part of the tribe to Ilbalintja alone and had stayed there forever: so pleasing was our home to them.
The great traditions of the group (tjuruna) were to be learned slowly: 'An overpowering interest in the sacred traditions must be stimulated, but not satisfied.' If members of the group showed themselves worthy, then their curiosity could be satisfied later.
The educational traditions of Aboriginal peoples across Australia differed according to their language, spiritual and material cultures. The means of managing the land affected education. There might be the learning of tidal fish-trapping in the south, and the management of hunting on open plains through the burning of scrub elsewhere. The mining and use of minerals such as different ochres used for ceremonial purposes, and their trade, as well as the making and exchange of specialised tools, woven bags and ritual objects — all these were to be learned.
In the countries of each Aboriginal people were places for meeting, residing and the harvesting of certain foods — usually on a seasonal basis. There were also places of spiritual power, perhaps dangerous or forbidden to different persons within the group. These geographies of association and spirit were linked to the totemic and spiritual significance of certain animals and other beings — all of this was to be learned. Without such knowledge, Aboriginal peoples were unlikely to prosper. Education was essential for life. The schooling brought by the British to late eighteenth-century Australia must have appeared a mean affair. The literacies essential to social life were to be replaced by the mean literacies of the slate and book, and initially to Aboriginal people at least, were characterised by a powerful irrelevance to the conditions of daily life.
Ideas about children and schooling brought to New South Wales
Early in the eighteenth century in England, the Church of England had victories over Congregationalists, Baptists and other dissenters and non-conformists, and Roman Catholics in religion. Laws excluded dissenters from the universities, and in some cases the right to teach in schools. By the end of the century, as the French Revolution proceeded and Napoleonic aggression followed, an association was often made between dissent in religion, disloyalty to the nation and social unrest.
The exclusions directed against Protestant dissenters and Roman Catholics led to the establishment of schools other than those of the Church of England. Many of the dissenting academies for boys were interested in curricula that went beyond the classics-based grammar school subjects. There was often an interest in applied science and mathematical studies that supported engineering and navigation, and 'English' subjects such as bookkeeping that supported commerce. Such academies were almost always middle-class schools. The education of 'gentlemen' through the Church of England-endowed grammar schools was concentrated on the classics and supported entrance to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
There was often resistance to any kind of school education being provided for the labouring classes — especially late in the eighteenth century, when a literate labouring class was seen as potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century, agencies associated with the Church of England founded charity schools for girls and boys. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was the most active of these. With the King James Bible and the catechism at the heart of the curriculum, many hundreds of schools were founded or reorganised during the century. Curricula of charity schools often included practical subjects along with the elementary reading, writing and religion. The schools were funded haphazardly. The funding of schools in New South Wales would be similarly haphazard. Early governors contributed direct grants, subsidies and redirections of fines and duties alongside private donations.
By the early nineteenth century, there was a Church of England 'National Society' that promoted national schools in England, though the establishment of such schools usually depended on local initiatives. There were problems for these schools, as the rise of child labour associated with the mines and factories of the Industrial Revolution meant less time for schooling. It was the rare industrialist who imagined a schooling regime during the working week for his child labourers — Robert Owen was exceptional in this regard. In part, the Sunday school was invented to compensate. Sunday schools were often associated with dissenters, and were therefore deemed suspect by the established Church of England and its supporters. For example, the Wesleyans — the 'Methodists' — advocated an approach to lived religion that included intensive Bible study. Reading and writing were central to the Wesleyan vision of self and social discipline, and spiritual and worldly improvement.
The two most influential chaplains appointed by the British government to New South Wales were influenced by such approaches. Their church was Anglican, but they were moved by the idea of personally lived religion. Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden both organised schooling for convict and emancipist children in the early years of the colony. As it happened, they were often forced to appoint Wesleyans and other dissenters as schoolmasters — they had little choice.
Conservative approaches to education travelled with governors and chaplains to the colony. The context was the difficulty of survival so far from Britain and the overwhelming fact of the penal colony. Many convicts were reluctant to work, and maintenance of law and order was often a brutal process. It followed that officially supported schools would resemble the charity and national schools of England. They were typified by a narrow curriculum and an approach to the child that insisted on order and 'control'. Dissenter schoolmasters — usually convict or emancipist — were often in agreement. John Wesley himself had argued that the salvation of the child was dependent on the breaking of the child's will. No parent, no person in authority, could responsibly countenance a lax approach to the raising of children in a society such as New South Wales.
This approach contrasted with new ideas about the child and education that had appeared in Europe by the late eighteenth century. In France, Rousseau's Emile had advocated an education arising from the natural curiosity of children, unforced by the discipline of the schoolroom. The Swiss reformer Pestalozzi had also begun his projects, which became central to progressive schooling in the next century. In England, there were educators responsive to 'continental' ideas such as these, but in Australia there would be few glimpses of such influences for several decades. Government-sponsored schools would concentrate on the control and reform of the 'criminal' classes brought to the new colony. They would also support old and new hierarchies of social rank and class.
Through the eighteenth century in Britain, a great variety of schools existed. Few of them attracted the direct interest of government, and none had enrolments compelled by law. Britain stood apart from developments in Prussia, Sweden and Massachusetts for example, that pioneered the compulsory schooling of children.
Private schools, endowed grammar schools, dissenting and other academies, Church of England charity and national schools, among others, constituted the schooling landscape of Britain. There were also vocational and industrial schools. Dame schools flourished in villages and the poorer parts of cities and towns. These were the schools favoured by the labouring classes. They were likely run by a neighbour — maybe a woman who had lost her husband. There was flexibility over attendance and fees. Infants could attend in the care of older brothers and sisters, and children were easily withdrawn when parents required their labour. Such schools would also be formed in the Australian colonies. They constitute the kind of school we know least about — they rarely show up in surviving records.
Schools were responsive to social class and rank in Britain. Private schools, academies and grammar schools, greater and lesser, existed separately for boys and sometimes girls of the aristocracy, landed gentry, the rising bourgeoisie and lesser middle classes, poorer farmers and the great numbers of the labouring classes. This understanding of schools and schooling divided by rank and class arrived in New South Wales. Religion also divided education.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A History of Australian Schooling by Craig Campbell, Helen Proctor. Copyright © 2014 Craig Campbell Helen Proctor. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of tables,Acknowledgements,
The authors,
Introduction,
1 Precarious endeavours: to 1820,
2 School entrepreneurs: 1821 — 1860,
3 Inventing public school systems: 1861 — 1900,
4 Towards universal provision: 1901 — 1925,
5 The socially useful school: 1926 — 1950,
6 Equality of opportunity: 1951 — 1975,
7 Towards a market of schools: 1976 — 2000,
8 The present and future school,
Select bibliography including references,