An archive of entries with keywords: "Eugenics"
Australia, 1880-1989
Anxiety concerning the fitness of youth for coming adulthood and its responsibilities has had a long history. Towards the end of the nineteenth century in Australia such anxiety rose to the level of a moral panic. Larrikinism was a problem for the respectable middle classes. The behaviour of too many unruly working class youths, larrikins, tended towards criminality, immorality, disorder and violence of various kinds.… Continue Reading »
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.
… Continue Reading »Australia, 1920s to 2020
Note: Photographs of Indigenous persons who may have passed away appear in this entry.
In the early twentieth century the main policies and practices organising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schooling had been set. There was little concern by state governments (in this period South Australia had responsibility for education in the Northern Territory), if many Indigenous children were not schooled at all.… Continue Reading »
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 »
