Entries Tagged: Primary education

An archive of entries with keywords: "Primary education"

Mackillop, Mary: Common school teacher

Victoria, 1863-1866

Mary Mackillop is the only Australian to be deemed a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. She has been widely recognised for her involvement in education; particularly her work with schools conducted  by a religious order she co-founded with the Rev. Julian Woods in 1866: the Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart.… Continue Reading »

Irish National Readers and literacy education

Australia, 1840-1870

The best way of teaching reading and writing has been a contentious question for at least two centuries. Phonics first approaches, building reading skills from the progressive recognition of letters, syllables, words, phrases and sounds has a long history, as do meaning-centred approaches that attempt to contextualise words, phrases and sentences within accessible stories and other contexts.… Continue Reading »

National schools

Eastern Australia, 1840-1870

The idea that colonial governments might foster and fund schools detached from church governance belongs to the 1830s. By then, with the religious diversity of the colonies, it was beginning to seem impossible that the Church of England could by itself provide a dominant ‘public’ school system. There were too many Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Wesleyans, Congregationalists and more for easy acceptance of such a position.… Continue Reading »

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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School assessment and testing; public examinations and credentials

Australia, 1780-2020

Teachers no matter what forms of pedagogy they engage have usually been concerned to evaluate the learning of their students. The historical tendency, especially in the last two hundred years has been to formalise the process. Written tests and examinations have mainly displaced oral displays of achievement. Concentration on the testing of individual mastery has tended to displace interest in collective achievement, though the latter was resurgent from the late twentieth century as nation states collected data especially on the literacy and numeracy of cohorts of young people at different stages of their school education.… Continue Reading »

Teaching orders in New Zealand

New Zealand, 1850-1900

Catholic schools, faith and a basic education

The purpose of Catholic schooling in nineteenth century New Zealand was to provide an education for the whole of life and to enable the correct development of a child’s whole character of mind and heart. The Church stressed the importance of the educative roles of parents, but they believed that Catholic parents lacked the education and expertise necessary to fulfill these responsibilities.… Continue Reading »

Payment by results: Teachers’ work, remuneration, and student assessment

Victoria, 1863-1906

The performance-based system, known colloquially as ‘payment-by-results’, whereby teachers’ remuneration was partly determined by the success of their pupils at prescribed examinations, was introduced into Victorian government-aided schools in early1864. Although criticised by many throughout its 40-year existence, the system was not finally abolished until 1906, following the recommendation of a Royal Commission on Education (Fink).… Continue Reading »

Catholic schools: Creating a system

New Zealand, 1850-1900

The character of the Catholic education system in New Zealand was formed by direct Irish immigration and by French, English and Australian influences – the last partly a result of the large numbers of Irish who arrived in the country via Australia. However from the 1880s, the association between Irishness and Catholicism had strengthened as a result of the arrival of large numbers of Irish clergy, and teaching religious.  … Continue Reading »

Church and Schools Corporation

New South Wales, 1820-1835

The impulse to systematise schooling in the colony of New South Wales occurred early. In the relative absence of wealthy churches, philanthropists and well-established communities, the colonial government needed to play a role in educating young people. The idea that criminality (the convict ‘stain’) could be prevented from passing down the generations through interventions such as chaplain-supervised and a little later church-subsidised schooling was accepted by most of the early governors.… Continue Reading »

Half-time and travelling schools

Eastern Australia, 1860s-1930s

In an effort to cater for the rapidly increasing rural population in the eastern Australian colonies following the gold rushes in the 1850s, the introduction of the Robertson Land Act in New South Wales (NSW) in the 1860s and the spread of settlement, most government departments of public instruction instituted what became known as Half-time Schools  (NSW) or Part-time Schools (Victoria) during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.… Continue Reading »