Writing school histories is notoriously difficult. They need to be written to inspire pride in the school community, yet should not hide significant crises and misfortunes. They need to highlight just how much can be achieved through unity of purpose, yet need to describe the costs and benefits – often unexpected and only dimly perceived at the time – of dissent. School histories need to balance triumphant accounts of famous old scholars and teachers with narratives that the majority of less visible members of the school community can identify with; success stories need to stand alongside those of failure and disappointment. I believe it is no hardship for school histories to be written in an easily accessible style. However, in order to do justice to the recollections of the diversity and number of participants, they need to include many more names, dates, details and incidents than can be comfortably accommodated in the prose more commonly used by social historians. Finally, school histories need to respect a diversity of views and ideological positions, often fiercely held. This refers not only to accounts of opinions and recollections held by different individuals and groups within the school community, but also to markedly different views on how school histories should be written in the first place.
Craig Campbell confronted all these issues – twice. He first wrote a history of Unley High School, one of the first secondary schools in South Australia, on the occasion of its 75th anniversary. He conducted the painstaking research while working as a history and maths teacher at the school, and serving as president of the local teachers’ union branch. The book was completed when he was 35, during his long service leave. Despite all the work that went into compiling the first version of the school history, the then school council decided not to publish the book. Campbell encumbered the book with meticulous documentation, and made a heroic effort to represent, respectfully, a wide range of political and educational views. The school council was annoyed that a young teacher would take it upon himself to interpret as well as record what happened, and was dismayed that he would not take direction in altering – or deleting – depictions of contentious events. Campbell insisted on his integrity as a historian and published the volume himself, later recouping the expenses from proceeds of book sales. In turn, in citing the book, other historians were at times criticised for relying on a “self-published” work. It was only after the book was finished that Campbell began taking postgraduate courses in history of education at Adelaide University, and eventually enrolled in a PhD.
The second rendition of the school history was commissioned and written in quite different circumstances. The school principal was a respected social historian, Campbell himself became an accomplished academic at the University of Sydney, and the school council and senior staff unreservedly supported the project. Perhaps most importantly, some of the profound crises which attended the reorientation of Unley from one to another model of high school have been successfully resolved. For most of its history, Unley High School was a highly successful state institution built around the competitive academic curriculum, streaming, hierarchical social relations and strict discipline. Catering to an increasingly middle-class student body, Unley in effect functioned as a state grammar school. In the mid-1980s, when its first history was written, the school was coming to an end of a period of profound and destabilising transformation. The common challenges of mass secondary schooling, anti-war and women's movements, student radicalism, the discrediting of old educational tools and approaches and the search for new ones, were made worse by frequent leadership and staff changes and at times chaotic administration. At the time, few could clearly envision the school as it is now – still catering to a mainly middle-class clientele, but as a highly successful comprehensive high school preparing a much broader student constituency for a much wider range of occupations, and utilising much less visible and authoritarian modes of motivating and disciplining students and making decisions.
The different circumstances of the making the two Unley High School histories are preserved in the new text. Although now stripped of painstaking referencing, the first four chapters are in the main taken from the 1985 text. The first two chapters document the establishment of the school in 1910, its rapid rise to success under a “larger than life” principal with a fondness for military drill, and its survival and consolidation under firm – and sexist – leadership during the crises of the Depression and Second World War. Chapters 3 and 4 document the most difficult parts of the school history: the period of baby boom (the school enrolment increased by 254 per cent between 1950 and 1960), mass schooling and shortage of qualified teachers, and the crisis ridden and at times chaotic shift from an academic to a comprehensive institution. These chapters are written with warmth and affection, even though the text is in parts clumsy. The flow of narrative is interrupted by too frequent changes of focus, and significant overarching themes glossed over. In contrast, the chapter dealing with the final 25 years of the school history is written with greater confidence and coherence, and disparate events are more clearly linked to overarching themes.
The concluding chapter is a tour de force, putting the events and themes covered in the book into a compelling national and international context, and giving new significance to many interesting but apparently unimportant stories. This chapter, indeed, should probably be read first and last. It is eminently suited for teaching, and makes a significant contribution to international literature on comprehensive high schools. Here, Campbell argues convincingly that the history of this particular school provides an exemplary national case study – and not simply because that is where a Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was educated. Rather, the book shows how the same pressures that confronted state secondary schools everywhere were experienced, understood and acted on in ways specific to a particular community. In the process, traditions were reviewed, changed and reinvented, their content and meaning changing over time.
The brief statistical profiles of students which are attached to the different chapters provide a broad context for the stories told, and underscore the transformation of state secondary schools from institutions catering for of a minority of particularly studious children from “middling” families to ones servicing particular segments of the whole youth population. Other tables show the effect, in terms of divergent school outcomes, of being placed in higher or lower academic streams, as well as the surprisingly wide distribution of students with different bands of measurable IQ between academic streams. Curiously, the book does not refer to the work of Richard Teese and his colleagues, who provide compelling theoretical explanation, supported by statistical analyses of examination results, of the significant compounding effect of more or less “academic” students from more or less privileged families on school success (equally curiously, Teese and his colleagues rarely refer to Campbell).
Campbell's centenary history of Unley High School is a good read. Considered in the context of its final chapter, the book makes a significant contribution to both historical and contemporary debates about secondary education.
