In the wake of the World War I, but more so, the second world war, United States governments began to assume a leadership role in world politics. Closely associated philanthropic agencies such as the Carnegie Corporation supported such a development. The colonies and dominions of the declining British Empire were of interest for a number of reasons, one of which was to bolster them as potential allies as Bolshevism and fascism threatened the “free” world. Capitalist enterprise and democratic political systems needed defending through the twentieth century.
Among the areas of interest were the education systems of the British Empire and then Commonwealth. They were occasionally seen as vital to the development of citizens committed to democracy and freedom, as well as the maintenance of science and technological progress important to the challenges faced by the democracies. Carnegie agencies funded educational programs and organisations. For example, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching encouraged and funded the further education (usually in the United States) of promising educational leaders from Australia and New Zealand. Leading educators in the United States were also sent on fact-finding missions to the colonies and British dominions such as Australia and New Zealand.
Isaac Kandel came to Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s; R. Freeman Butts and J. B. Conant in the 1950s. Each was associated with the Carnegie Foundation or Corporation, and each contributed analyses and advice on educational matters to the countries they visited. Initially funded by the Corporation, the Australian and New Zealand councils for educational research (ACER and NZCER) assisted in arranging of such visits. Kandel was not alone in being somewhat dismayed by the Australian public systems of education, characterised by strong centralisation and authoritarian governance. His understanding of why Australian public education systems had developed in this way was substantial, but he believed that the nineteenth century circumstances leading to these characteristics were of declining relevance, utility and legitimacy.
Photo of Kandel appearing in Cunningham ed., Education for complete living (1938).
Isaac Kandel
Kandel was a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University from 1923 to 1946. He was a founder of comparative education as an area of study, a precursor to the succeeding field of international education. His interests and travels were extensive as were his publications. He was in Australia for the period of the travelling conference of the New Education Fellowship (NEF),1937, and several months following. He wrote five chapters in the succeeding conference publication: Education for Complete Living (1938). He also wrote Types of Administration with particular reference to the Educational Systems of New Zealand and Australia (1938). According to Ken Cunningham (Director of the ACER) and Frank Tate (retired Director of Education in Victoria), Kandel’s writings were influential as public education administration and policy developed in Australia.
Kandel was not necessarily in agreement with many of his fellow NEF conference lecturers in Australia and New Zealand. By 1937 he had developed a strong critique of progressive education, believing that child-centredness, the dismantling of curriculum frameworks in favour of project and child-interest approaches were deeply flawed. He rejected the rising dominance of behavioural psychology as a source of reforming teaching practices, and the consequent de-professionalisation of teachers that he thought would follow. Teachers were not to be regarded as technicians; mere implementers of teaching approaches advocated by the psychologists. Nor were they to be mere guides for the supposed “natural” learning instincts of young people. Teachers were to be well educated (preferably in universities), directors of well-structured learning programs. The liberal arts were not to be abandoned in the education of teachers. All young people should experience a common curriculum that supported democratic societies. Vocational domination of school curricula at too early an age was inimical to his educational beliefs.
Kandel’s views on education in general are outlined in his five essays printed in the report of the 1937 conference in Australia. (See Cunningham ed., Education for Complete Living, 1938.) Along with this work, Kandel produced studies of education in Australia and New Zealand. This entry identifies his main arguments concerning these countries. (See Reference list below.)
Delegates and speakers at the NEF conference in Australia in 1937, the Canberra session. Third row up, from left, Kandel is flanked by wife and daughter. The grand old man of Victorian education, and pioneer of the New Education, Frank Tate, is in the bottom row, second from the left. Source: ACER Library.
Kandel on education for democracy
Kandel’s criticisms of progressivism in education, not that he found much of it in Australia and New Zealand, were made in the context of the seriousness of the challenges that Russian communism and European fascism posed for democracies, including Australia.
In 1935 Kandel had published a book exposing the Nazification of schooling in Germany. He believed that education ought to be a foundation upon which democracy could be sustained. It was an immediate challenge to him that Australian and New Zealand public education systems were marked by not dissimilar forms of authoritarian and centralised control that were developing in Germany and the Soviet Union. Kandel considered that these characteristics, common across the Australian and New Zealand education systems, impacted “the quality of school life, the attitude of the public to the schools, and the degree of flexibility which the system shows in meeting new conditions.” (Types of administration, vii.) [Note: these references are to the version of Kandel’s book published in Melbourne. See References below.]
Kandel believed that democracy depended on intelligent participation by its citizens, but Australian and New Zealand education systems were too often “hierarchical in form”, their “government is predominantly by regulations … [they] militate against the free activities of human personalities” (p. 4). Parents, teachers, voluntary associations—and the public ought to be involved far more than they were. Such a desirable state of affairs “does not yet prevail in New Zealand and Australia” (p. 4). Education of worth depended on the recognition of the rights of local groups and communities as cooperative, participating entities, to which the delegation of measures of responsibility and self determination were essential.
At the same time, Kandel was concerned that the kind of decentralised education common in the United States had proved seriously inefficient in terms of delivering
equality of educational opportunities as measured by the quality of school buildings and equipment, standards of teacher preparation and certification, salaries and tenure position for teachers, and the range and quality of instruction. (p. 48.)
So, getting the balance right was a challenge.
Origins of the problems in the Australian and New Zealand colonies
In Australia the inadequacy of school provision in the early and mid-nineteenth century stemmed both from the failures of local initiative and the unfortunate funding by governments of churches to provide schools. State funded and controlled public education from the 1870s was an overdue necessity.
Kandel argued that New Zealand had further problems arising from provinces being responsible through education boards distributing school grants. Too much power had been in the hands of boards and local school committees. George Hogben, “ably led” the move to centralisation in the early twentieth century. Kandel respected the subsequent achievement in the Australian colonies and New Zealand of “the provision of educational facilities which reach out to the remotest hamlets and homes of a widely dispersed population”. Improved teacher education was also a benefit of this process (p. 50).
One of the power-houses of centralised educational authority. The New South Wales Education Department in Sydney (c 1940). Source: State Library of New South Wales.
The problem with educational centralisation, hierarchies and authoritarian governance
According to Kandel, over-rigid and mechanized administration rapidly developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A little later some responsibility for this also belonged to the influence of the teacher unions as they “demanded regulations to protect and equalize the rights of their members” (p. 51).
Kandel argued that the “efficiency attained by centralized control may be purchased at too great a price” (p. 51). As education bureaucracies in Australia and New Zealand evolved, they became self-satisfied and complacent, regarding all criticism
as an attack on it corporately and individually, and, instead of inviting and stimulating the cooperation of all who can contribute to educational progress, tends to immure itself in its own petty routine. What comes to count for most is ‘the system’. (p. 52.)
The impact of system-wide school examinations exacerbated the problems. They loomed far too important in the minds of parents and employers. Kandel believed that the Atmore Report in New Zealand (1930) had correctly argued that the percentage of passes gained by schools and teachers was too often the sole criterion used for measuring educational success and teacher effectiveness. Kandel believed this held true for Australia as well.
It was not only a problem of centralized administration and examination dominance leading to public disinterest or misguided interest in educational questions, but the diversions and complications caused by the continuing strength of nongovernment, church administered schools. The latter failed to provide anything much in the way of innovative or experimental education despite their independence from the public education bureaucracies.
Kandel argued that the centralisation problem, and the paucity of independent voluntary organisations, including the want of powerful local governments, led to substantial mediocrity in public life as a whole, not just education. This occurred both in Australia and New Zealand.
Kandel’s further comments on New Zealand
Kandel wrote a short analysis of New Zealand education based on his six weeks there. He began by recognising the achievements of public education in New Zealand, but he felt that progress had stalled: there was an inertia, somewhat immune from more recent educational thinking and practices. He argued that centralised administration was designed, not necessarily deliberately, “to check freedom and initiative on the part of teachers”, and to “reduce all to a dead level of uniformity and consequently mediocrity”. (Impressions of education in New Zealand, p. 4.)
Class sizes were too large, resources (especially books) were scarce, libraries were inadequate as was modern educational equipment. The grading of teachers was a major problem, inimical to the development of a professional spirit. The teacher training colleges had to be brought within the purview of the University. Teachers needed to be raised to a professional level, as dignified as that of other professions, and must be organised to achieve the purposes for which they were charged without compromise (p. 6).
Achieving the professionalisation of teaching, according to Kandel, would not be enough. More effort had to go into matching students to the “right education” conducted by the “right teachers”. This was an argument for rationally organised educational differentiation. Kandel took pains to argue that differentiation was not about sorting the “sheep” from the “goats” but a method of educating individuals in terms of their abilities and aptitudes.
All this required a unified administration organised to overcome “that fatal distinction between the academic and the practical” (p. 7). At the same time, such a unified administration should not concentrate power in the hands of a single body. Education in a democracy demanded active school committees and boards, with educational officers charged with understanding and meeting the needs of local areas.
Failures of secondary education in New Zealand
As was the case for Australia, secondary education required significant reform. Schooling was detrimentally dominated by public examinations oriented both towards university, and until very recently in New Zealand, secondary school entrance.
Kandel went on to explain that “inverted snobbery” informed existing modes of secondary education. The completion of a full course of secondary education actually reduced employment possibilities for young people, especially with public service recruitment occurring well before such completion. At the same time, with failure rates so high at most levels of secondary school, Kandel argued that this was less about the inadequacies of students, but those of curricula bound to examination systems that were designed to reduce relevant and useful educational experiences and opportunity for most young people.
Kandel made an argument for a common junior secondary curriculum, oriented towards the general educational needs of young people, not the academic training of the few. The snobbery that distinguished most forms of secondary education in many more places than New Zealand and Australia arose from the over-valuing of a very narrow form of academic training.
Governing public education in Australia and New Zealand
Concerning the control and administration of public education, Kandel noted the good and bad effects of the system of ministerial responsibility combined with the power of usually entrenched directors of the education bureaucracies. The former could be responsible for irresponsible swings in policy, the latter, complacency.
Inspectors of schools
The way that inspectors of schools rose to their positions diminished their potential for insightful and useful educational leadership. They made their careers through conforming to a “routinized” and “mechanical” system. Their duties positioned them as enforcers of regulations rather than educational leaders. (Types of administration, p. 60.)
The effect of the inspectorial system was twofold: “a premium is placed upon conformity, and mediocrity, rather than excellence and initiative …” (p. 62).
Teaching and the production of mediocrity
Mediocrity, partially caused by the dominance of “equality” over a respect for individual excellence in the culture, worked to “discourage teachers and inspectors from further professional study, even if opportunities for such study were available” (p. 63). Along with this was a reluctance, according to Kandel, to learn from abroad. Whatever enthusiasm young teachers may have had for their work was soon undermined by their employment, promotion and transfer conditions.
He argued that even though payment by results had formally gone by the 1930s, over-detailed and prescriptive curricula, and the examination systems, allowed the ill-effects and spirit of payment by results to continue in Australian and New Zealand education.
Curriculum
Kandel wrote about the problems of vocational rather than general education dominating secondary education. Public examinations hindered “the progress of education”. They warped “the process of instruction”, confining the curriculum within narrow limits, fostering teacher mistrust of one another. Kandel’s recommended alternative, “standardized objective tests” had yet to be sufficiently influential in Australia.
Kandel thought that the best organised branches of public education in both Australia and New Zealand were the technical. Schools were often well equipped for technical subjects, but their work was often hindered by too little focus on general, liberally conceived common, rather than vocationally oriented education (p. 72). (Kandel held that the curriculum valuing literature, social studies, history and other elements of the modern humanist subjects should be the basis of the common curriculum.)
Innovative education: Experimentalism and its problems
Kandel did not wish to paint too negative a picture of Australian and New Zealand education. He pointed to isolated examples of innovative education within the public systems. At the same time, he thought that some outstanding initiatives of some schools and teachers, especially in rural communities, were unlikely to persist. Teacher transfer and promotion systems regularly removed key personnel. Too often sporadic “experimentation” took the place of thoroughgoing reform.
The Kowhai Intermediate school was opened in 1922 near Auckland. Its school logo. Source: School website.
For New Zealand he praised work in the Kowhai Intermediate School, the Feilding Agricultural High School, the Waitaki Boys’ High School and the Rangiora High School; and for Australia, the Marburg School (Queensland), the area schools, and the agricultural department of Scotsdale High in Tasmania. There were also the ‘freedom’ schools of South Australia, encouraged to engage in curriculum experiments. But these innovations did not “affect the fabric of the systems themselves” (p. 73).
In the nongovernment and private sector there were few examples of progressive approaches to curriculum and teaching. He noted the tendency of many such schools to become socially exclusive. He gave some praise to James Darling’s reforms at Geelong Grammar where there was an admirable incorporation of the “practical and fine arts” into the curriculum, though neither the dominance of Latin nor the pursuit of examination success was sufficiently displaced in the process (pp. 77-78).
Kandel’s conclusion that innovative and experimental curricula in Australian and New Zealand schools, often admirable, lacked the administrative supports that would ensure either persistence locally or beneficial influence on systems more broadly.
Australia and New Zealand councils for education research (ACER and NZCER)
Kandel referred to the significance of these two councils, created with grants from the Carnegie Corporation. They were both making “notable contributions”. Independent of official control (government education departments), they could survey objectively every aspect of education and bring critical judgement, both objective and subjective, to bear upon the various educational problems with which the two countries were confronted (p. 80).
Because the teachers colleges were instruments of the central bureaucracies, they were timid in criticising the official systems. The want of independent organisations, not only the teachers colleges, concerned with educational improvement, was unlike the situation in both the United States and England. It made the significance of the ACER and NZCER greater. Professional associations of educators and journals publishing educational research were virtually absent in both countries. The teacher unions and associations were responsible for what little occurred in this area.
Kandel’s argument and influence
It must be remembered that this critique of Australian and New Zealand education is closely bound to the contexts of the inter-war years, the 1920s and 1930s. Kandel recognised some potential virtue in educational centralisation, but in Australia and New Zealand, the problem was the spirit in which it occurred. The result: “Teachers, inspectors, and administrative officers present the spectacle of an army immobilized by its own defence works.” (Types of administration, p. 83.) He believed that sweeping reform of public education in both countries was required.
Kandel argued for a general, or a “common” curriculum, especially at the junior secondary level. It is difficult to apportion clear responsibility for the eventual movement towards comprehensive curricula and schools in Australia from the 1960s, though in New Zealand, the Thomas Report was a crucial step. Nevertheless, Kandel contributed to the argument. Powerful reforming advocates, directors of education in New South Wales and New Zealand, Harold Wyndham and Clarence Beeby had both benefitted from the Carnegie Corporation encouragement of their careers.
Kandel noted something else, which also led to the gradual detachment of both countries from the schooling structures of the United Kingdom. He considered the English influence (probably referring to the elitism associated with its grammar and so-called “public” schools) to have had a stultifying effect. He believed that there was an increasingly unwarranted and sentimental attachment to the educational traditions of England.
Nowhere does Kandel explicitly argue that the arrangements of the United States were superior. He was well aware of the many problems in his own adopted nation, but he thought that community engagement in the United States with its local schools was often admirable, a force for democracy, that appeared to be very much lacking in Australia and New Zealand.
As was the case with other foreign observers of Australian education, Kandel’s views must be interpreted with an understanding of his personal history and attachment to many of the schooling arrangements of his own country. Although in Kandel’s case, his familiarity with educational history in general, and his knowledge of educational systems internationally, make his views potentially more valuable than those of many others. It must also be noted that Kandel himself was aware of the limitations of his studies. He was in Australia for a few months, and in New Zealand, a few weeks. His studies are hardly comprehensive, and he often describes his observations as “impressions”. Nevertheless, these impressions assist an historical understanding of the educational systems of the Australian states, and New Zealand in the 1930s and perhaps for thirty years beyond.