Schools do not exist for the sole purpose of educating young people in the knowledge and skills that are mainly agreed as essential for employment, citizenship and social life in general. They are also about inculcating belief systems that may be more or less explicit, closed or open to critical challenge.… Continue Reading »
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.… Continue Reading »
Note: Photographs of Indigenous persons who have passed away appear in this entry.
In 1903, the Russian scientist, Aleksandr Leonidovich Yashchenko visited Australia, two years after federation. Yashchenko was an accomplished scholar whose education and graduate training included zoology, anthropology and geography. He taught at prestigious colleges in St Petersburg. His visit to Australia was a research commission on behalf of the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences. … Continue Reading »
Subtitled “a dramatic tale of neoliberal reform in an Australian high school”, Martin Forsey’s analysis of Como Senior High School in Western Australia provides a case study of radical public education reform in the 1990s. It stands as a parallel study to that of Mount Druitt High School in New South Wales.
It was mainly from the 1850s, and especially from the 1870s, that a new kind of teacher in the elementary schools emerged. They were increasingly likely to have had some training, certainly to a greater degree as apprentices, that is pupil and then junior teachers, but also with some time in normal or model schools and eventually teachers colleges.… Continue Reading »
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Carole Hooper, TITC BA BEd PhD, Independent scholar. Posted .
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 »
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:
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Dorothy Kass, Ph. D., Macquarie University. Posted .
The Educational Workers League (EWL) was formed in Sydney in June and July 1931 by a group of teachers in the context of the Great Depression and frustration with the New South Wales Teachers Federation. Its existence spanned five years of crippling economic crisis, political upheaval and social distress. Although membership remained small, the League, its formation, its members, its activities and policies were significant in the immediate and long-term history of the Teachers Federation; in movements for change and reform in teachers’ employment and working conditions; and in the reform of the education provided for the children of the state.… Continue Reading »
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Craig Campbell, PhD DipEd, University of Sydney. Posted .
The Education Act of 1875 in South Australia provided for the foundation of a system of public, mainly elementary schools. It also allowed “infant schools, evening schools, schools for the teaching of any branch of science or art, and advanced schools for continuing the education of scholars who shall have obtained prizes at public schools, or otherwise proved themselves qualified for admission: Provided that the course of training in all such schools shall be secular” (clause 12).… Continue Reading »
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Dorothy Kass, Ph.D., Macquarie University. Posted .
Over the course of its second fifty years, the Teachers Federation remained explicitly aware of its dual roles, industrial and professional, and the interconnection of the two when applied to education and educators. Also remaining important was its role in what the 1968 celebrations called “community activities” and later decades would stress as “social justice”.… Continue Reading »