Entries Tagged: Eugenics

An archive of entries with keywords: "Eugenics"

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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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schooling (2)

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 »

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 »