A History of Australian Schooling Free

There are few books about which one can confidently say that they are both necessary and timely – A History of Australian Schooling by Craig Campbell and Helen Proctor is such a book. The last great synthesis on this topic, A History of Australian Education, was written by Alan Barcan for Oxford University Press and first published in 1980. Thirty-four years later, following various “turns” in historiographical theory and method, the re-casting of educational history for a different Australia that had not only moved into a new century, but also into a strangely amnesiac educational universe, was, as the authors themselves note, well overdue (p. xv). Campbell and Proctor's multivalent treatment in A History of Australian Schooling gathers up all of these trends and synthesises historical research on Australian schooling for the new age. In doing so, the book also makes for fascinating and compelling reading.

In eight chronologically arranged chapters, the authors chart how schools, as agents in the “making” of society, grew to become “universal, powerful and highly intrusive” in Australian lives (p. x). The straightforward nature of the book's chronological structure however belies the complexity of the task that Campbell and Proctor set out to, and did, achieve in its 270 pages. In a vast tapestry, they nevertheless economically interweave thematic elements such as the histories of childhood and adolescence, the development of classroom practice, pedagogical thinking from abroad and in Australia, the schooling histories of colonies then states, the various levels of schooling from early childhood, primary, and secondary through to the university, the growing interventions of the Commonwealth after Second World War until today, as well as covering the most significant of events and individuals shaping schooling in Australia over time.

The authors’ welcome insistence on also threading the Indigenous story throughout the text is an undoubted strength of this work. In the “making” of Australian society, Campbell and Proctor show that right from the start (pp. 2-6), the colonists’ schools, both through inclusion and exclusion, played their part in racially segregating and oppressing the original inhabitants. The authors explore the pre-colonial, essentially pedagogic Indigenous culture, steeped in spiritual and environmental educational practices for over 50,000 years, then proceed to give an overview of the roles of missionaries and schooling in aiding and abetting the colonisation process. They also show how schooling has become one of the important vehicles for Indigenous self-determination up to the present day.

The first three chapters of A History of Australian Schooling span the years until the end of the nineteenth century. Chapter 1, entitled “Precarious endeavours: to 1820”, shows how, in setting up a range of schools to educate the children of the free, the unfree and the colonised, the colonists unleashed issues that were to dog Australian schooling in the next century and half and beyond, including the confused public-private divide; religious sectarianism, especially between the (Protestant) state and the Catholic church; schooling for the reproduction of gender, class and race relations; the focus on elementary education; and the social control of potentially unruly populations of “natives” and orphans. The authors comment that the people who established schooling in this period “believed that the different ranks in society required different kinds of schooling” (p. 27). Chapter 2 “School entrepreneurs: 1821-1860”, goes on to discuss the developing market for schools in the young colonies. There is an interesting case study of this development in Goulburn, and the first of the colony by colony (later state by state) analyses given in the book. The chapter concludes that schooling for upward social mobility through the “right kind of schooling” became a “common pursuit” in the colonies. By the end of these chapters it's not a long stretch to understand the historical power of the “school choice” mantra in our own time (which is addressed later in Chapters 7 and 8).

Chapter 3 covers the “invention” of the colonial public school systems from 1861 until 1900. It skilfully exposes the variable realities behind the “free, compulsory and secular” education acts (in a model of condensation, the table given on page 74 summarises the various colonial histories in this regard). It also discusses the professionalisation of the teaching profession, the growth of the colonial bureaucracies and the schooling for infants and other “special populations”. An interesting sidelight in this chapter, reminiscent of Graeme Davison's The Unforgiving Minute, was the role of schooling in smoothing the way for the shift away from older rural forms of timekeeping to more modern industrialised forms whereby “The clock in the classroom became more significant than the position of the sun” (p. 102).

The complex story of the twentieth century is taken up in Chapters 4-7. As one of the major themes, Chapters 4-6 chart the rise and rise of the public school systems until the “apotheosis” was achieved in 1975 (p. 209). The story begins in Chapter 4, “Towards universal provision: 1901-1925”, when the optimism around schooling at the birth of the nation, left to the states as a residual power at Federation, led to the growth of the various centralised state education systems. These were presided over by several key men, for example, Frank Tate in Victoria and Peter Board in New South Wales, who mobilised “school power” (p. 108) to the need for national fitness and efficiency. Here too is the story of the early high schools to improve the “adolescent”, especially after the anxieties generated by First World War. Chapter 5 explores the years 1926-1950, and the various manifestations of “the socially useful school” as it arose not only from the deprivations brought on by Depression and War, but also from the excitement of new ideas generated by the New Education Fellowship, as well as new curricular movements in social studies and Physical Education. Despite shortages of teachers and materials, run down schools and uncertainty, Campbell and Proctor relate the optimism and demand for educational reform in the years after the end of Second World War, marked also by the entry of a new player in the Commonwealth Government.

In the next period, 1951-1975, analysed in Chapter 6 as a “perhaps more confident and less troubled” quarter of the twentieth century (p. 178), the authors show how the mantra of equality of opportunity comes to guide educational provision by the states and leads to the brief spectacular appearance of the neighbourhood comprehensive high school in all states. With the “revolution of rising expectations” in full swing (p. 179), for Baby Boomer children, mainly public schooling was the road to personal improvement and a better life (pp. 185-186). The peculiarly Australian State Aid issue (p. 180) is finally put to rest at this time with the advent of the Whitlam reforms. The Disadvantaged Schools Program addresses the severe problems experienced in the non government Catholic School System so long outside of public funding provision.

Throughout the work Campbell and Proctor also explore the history of non government schools. This topic strengthens in the penultimate chapter, entitled “Towards a market of schools: 1976-2000”, when they observe that “the commitment to equality dropped away” (p. 212). Over this period private schools proliferate and diversify, encouraged by public funding, neoliberal affirmation of the market for schools, the discourse of “choice” and the perceived failure of the state school systems to provide discipline, values and certainty in an uncertain and rapidly changing world. At the same time the authors show the concomitant decline of the government schools and for some of them, residualisation. The innovative provision of six school vignettes serves to underscore the changes outlined in this tumultuous period. Rounding out the analysis in the final chapter, “The present and future school”, the authors underscore both their approach and the significance of their topic when they wrote:

The physical characteristics of the book deserve praise. The presentation is clean, crisp and attractive. The text has been carefully edited and the generous font size makes for a relaxed reading experience. Each chapter has a useful list of further readings and there is a comprehensive index. Of particular merit is the conscious use of images (unfortunately though they are all black and white) to convey the experiential aspects of schooling not able to be accommodated in the text. For example, on page 70, poorly clad Aboriginal children in the second row of the rudimentary mission school at Yarrabah in 1893 return the reader's gaze in a powerful photographic reproach of their treatment. The visual similarities of the two images of South Australian children sitting for an external examination – one the University of Adelaide's junior public examination in 1907 (p. 116) and the other Year 9 students undertaking NAPLAN testing in 2008 (p. 255) – eloquently underscores how durable and industrial some bodily arrangements have been in Australian schooling.

A History of Australian Schooling is a fine book and an important addition to our understanding of the Australian story in general and the history of Australian schooling in particular. It deserves to be widely read as an invaluable guide to the role of schooling in the type of society we have become. We should be grateful to two such accomplished historians of Australian education for not only taking on the task but also for excelling in its execution.