Entries Tagged: Differentiated schooling

An archive of entries with keywords: "Differentiated schooling"

Home Economics incl. Domestic Science, Domestic Arts and Home Science

Australia, 1888-2010

Home economics is a curriculum domain that has been highly responsive to social pressures concerning gender, especially the expected roles that girls and women should occupy in families, the labour market and society more broadly. It is a curriculum domain that came into being towards the end of the nineteenth century as an educational response to several interdependent crises and social movements that included the following:

Fig 1: Slums of Melbourne, 1930s.

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The Wyndham Scheme

New South Wales, 1957-1965

The problem of how best to deliver universal secondary education to youth exercised many national systems of education through the twentieth century. Among the democracies, the United States and Scandinavian countries were pioneers of a particular approach: comprehensive secondary schooling. Pressures towards the comprehensive school increased after World War II.… Continue Reading »

Technical secondary schools

Victoria, Australia, 1910-2015

The establishment of post-elementary technical schools in Australian states in the early twentieth century was one of several responses to the growing pressure to provide some form of universal secondary education for all adolescents. The Australian state, Victoria, constructed a long-lasting system of such schools that distinguished public education in that state from elsewhere.… Continue Reading »

Knibbs and Turner Commission and Reports

New South Wales, 1900-1914

The Commission on Primary, Secondary, Technical, and Other Branches of Education was appointed in New South Wales in early 1902. Commissioners George Handley Knibbs, University lecturer, and John William Turner, Headmaster of Fort Street Model School, travelled widely in Europe and America enquiring into education for the purpose of reforming education in New South Wales.… Continue Reading »

Adolescence and the school

Australia, 1880-2014

The words, adolescent and adolescence came into scientific and popular use at the beginning of the twentieth century. They were assisted by the publication in 1904 of G. Stanley Hall’s remarkable study, Adolescence: Its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education. This book, though American, was noticed in Australia.… Continue Reading »

Differentiated schooling

Australia and New Zealand, 1840-2000

Different schools and different courses of instruction for different groups of students have existed throughout the history of schooling. It is only in relatively recent times, mainly from the mid-nineteenth century that common schools with a common curriculum developed, usually in public school systems.

In this entry, recent approaches to ‘differentiated teaching’ are not considered to any great degree.… Continue Reading »

Making the Difference (1982)

Australia, 1970-2010

This book was co-written by R. W. Connell (Bob/Robert/Raewyn), D. J. Ashenden (Dean), S. Kessler (Sandra) and G. W. Dowsett (Gary). It was almost certainly the most influential social study of schooling that was written in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century. It had an impact on educational policy, the sociology of education, teacher education, teacher union policy and teachers.… Continue Reading »

Comprehensive government high school

Australia, 1950-2010

The idea that a secondary school could include all youth in a community or neighbourhood, regardless of their social circumstances, belongs to the twentieth century. By the 1970s such comprehensive schools educated a majority of Australian 12-17 year-old youth, but the size of the majority has been in a steady, though slow decline, from the 1980s.… Continue Reading »

Eugenics and the ‘backward child’

New Zealand, 1877-1910

By the early twentieth century, eugenics, or the science of heredity as it was called, was gaining momentum through much of the industrialising world. New Zealand was no exception. Encapsulating a social movement, as well as doctrines and practices, eugenics provided a convenient and ‘scientifically’ convincing argument that the source of social problems and the statistically demonstrated decline and degeneration of the national population lay in genetic weaknesses.… Continue Reading »