Even though Australian secondary schooling in the twentieth century has had considerable research effort devoted to it – unlike primary schooling, for example – there has been no study quite like this.
Richard Teese’s scholarly output has been distinctive. Resisting the neoliberal influenced agenda in education, he has continued to place issues to do with fair access to high-quality schools and education at the heart of his research and publishing agenda. He has also elaborated an argument for an historically based sociology of knowledge approach that causally connects curriculum content, processes and hierarchies to social inequality.
To call Teese’s historical work a flow-on from 1970s “revisionism” does not do it justice. It is true that then there was an intense effort to apply sociological theory to the exposure of the historical processes that produced social inequalities. Important revisionist subjects of investigation included the social impacts of the ways that schools operated, their internal and external hierarchies and the ways in which they were used by families and social classes. In the process the “proper” focus of research in educational history began to be change – away from the study of the founding fathers of schools and school systems and the usually admired powerful institutions and systems of schooling that emerged as a result.
In the process an historical sociology with sometimes neo-Marxist, and later, critical feminist theoretical characteristics began to contribute new works of substance. They subjected taken-for-granted populations, whose lives were more or less affected by schooling, to close focus. Other than conventional methodologies of research were required if the populations that did not routinely leave documents in archives were to be heard. Some of these methods, such as the oral history interview, were considered suspect. Perhaps receiving marginally more respect were quantitative methods associated with the analysis of large data sets illuminating schooling lives and their consequent social and economic trajectories.
It was not just research methods that had to change. A new respect had to be found for the role of social theory in the research and writing of history – histories that enabled advances in explaining social differences. “Theory” had ever been the enemy of the old Anglo-empirical common sense (i.e. hegemonic) approach to the writing of history.
Teese’s For the Common Weal is a late and brilliant addition to those studies that emerged in Australia and elsewhere from that late twentieth century revisionist and historical sociology effort.
The book shows how over the hundred years, 1910-2010, public high schools supported the growth of educational, economic and social opportunity among youth of one Australian state, Victoria. But there was no linear, ever upward progress. The ability of the public high school to provide opportunity was challenged at every turn, not only by its traditional enemies, the “private schools”, but sometimes from within the public systems of education themselves.
Teese shows how a particular educational discourse, that centred on merit, and academic excellence, operated in the development of public and private schools and school systems. Superficially they appeared unrelated to the social characteristics of the populations that sought economic security through access to the increasingly valuable educational credentials that secondary schools provided. In fact, the discourse of merit and excellence was a force for containing the ambitions and achievements of populations dependent on the public high schools for their secondary education.
The evidence marshalled by Teese is impressive in its range and depth. The 138 tables and charts in the book tell some of the story. A crucial part of the argument is the linking of histories of school subjects such as Latin, Chemistry or Australian History, for example – such subjects’ content, perhaps political economy – to the history of broader credentials, and the history of the attempts to reform such credentials. In turn these histories connect with the history of new and old institutions and systems providing education – and then to historical changes in the labour market and the demographic changes that influenced the ways families operated.
Though For the Common Weal looks at one Australian state, what we have is a work of international significance. The depth of historical and sociological understanding that Teese brings to explaining the ways that curriculum and schooling operate as both register and driver of practices that create social and institutional hierarchies is remarkable. The book is in a sense a study of historically evolving structures of opportunity, wealth and power as they are influenced by schooling.
A bright light is shone on many historical phenomena. They include the turning of the old church grammar schools into modern businesses, the paradox of reformed credentials designed to include, being used to exclude, and the role of the prestigious academic curriculum in secondary schools being used to save universities the trouble of teaching well. On religious schools: “Dissemination of the faith does not equal the social diffusion of knowledge […]”.
The power of schools to change lives is central to the argument. In the 1950s and 1960s: “Without public schooling, the economic strategies of working class and lower middle class families to profit from economic growth would have come to naught”, and “Mass secondary education altered the basis on which families reproduced”.
The passages on the role of the University of Melbourne as the great beneficiary of academically selective schooling with socially excluding curricula and strenuous examination practices, challenge the reader. Teese argues for the damage caused not only to the population of school students beyond the University’s immediate interest, but public schools more generally, and indeed, other universities. The University of Melbourne got what it wanted: “a social elite with academic training”. Elsewhere Teese turns his attention to private schools: “an institutionalised method of pooling resources, both economic and cultural, combining the motive power of many like-minded families, and converting this into academic excellence through bureaucratic organisation”.
This book requires close reading not only by those who are students of the history of schooling and education, but more importantly those charged with reforming public and private schooling into the future.
