Education for all? (PDF)

This eBook draws from papers presented at the 2013 Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society conference, with the broad theme of 'Education for all? Access, equity and exclusivity in the history of education'. Papers include an investigation into the implementation of the Victorian State government's assimilation policy in its schools using text and pictures from the School Paper between 1945 and 1968. The author explains that the monthly paper, utilised as a reader in schools, failed to portray Aboriginal children in modern school settings, starkly contrasting with the depiction of non-Indigenous Australians. The following papers discuss the conditions of employment for historians of education, the mismatch of white middle class teachers and their black and minority group students in the United States in order examine the relationship between South Australian teachers and their working class students, the social theory and historiography of the Australian middle class and its relationship with schooling, the methodology of research and writing in the history of education based on the authors' experience of investigating the educational work of Catholic Religious sisters in Australia, and the impact of the curriculum and the ethos of privileged schooling for the life of an Australian literary identity, using Arthur Wesley Wheen, the translator of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, as a focus. Being the centenary of Australia's involvement in the Great War, this paper is a timely contribution as the author interweaves Wheen's World War I experiences with the development of his scholarly interests. The next paper is an examination of the restructuring of the Victorian Education Department towards the end of the twentieth century, including a focus on the abolition of the dual system of secondary schooling and an argument that the closure of technical schools limited access and equity to children best suited to receiving such an education. This is succeeded by the final paper, which studies the workings of progressive education in the Enmore Activity School in the 1930s. Among the objectives of this progressive school was the prevention of boys from the poorer industrial inner western Sydney suburbs from becoming 'educational misfits'. These eight papers are all interesting discussions of various aspects of access, equity and exclusivity in the history of education, including both an Australasian and international focus.