John Murrie

I went to Adelaide Technical High School (ATHS) in the years 1945-6-7. In 1944 I was in the first year of primary school to do the internal Progress Certificate which replaced, in that year, the state-wide Qualifying Certificate. I attended Nailsworth Primary School or, as it was then, probably, Nailsworth Central School, a kind of forerunner to the R-12 school. In those days there was an entrance exam to get into ATHS which was a semi-private school attached to the School of Mines and Industries. Also, in those days, ATHS was still doing the Intermediate Certificate examination in two years and the Leaving in three, the only school in South Australia still turning out students for tertiary entrance in three years. I passed seven subjects for the Intermediate and six for the Leaving.

During my primary school years I had no difficulty with study and usually vied in the ubiquitous Friday tests to be the top of the class in order to gain the free Ozone Theatre pass for the Saturday matinee. (I usually had to be content with third place – the top two positions went to students who both became medical specialists, after secondary education at Adelaide High School.)

I do not recall that my grade 7 teacher made any recommendations to my parents about which secondary school I should attend, although he may have written some note in my report. The decision to send me to ATHS was made by my parents.

In 1944, students in our area (Nailsworth) went to Adelaide High School (AHS) to pursue the academic stream. Most of my friends were going there and I desperately wanted to go there too. But my mother had the perception that boys at AHS smoked and played billiards: billiard saloons, to my mother, were dens of sin. My father’s financial position had improved after the war and my twin sister had already been sent to Wilderness School the previous year. My parents wanted me to go to Prince Alfred College but I rebelled. After seven years of state school education we referred to private school boys as ‘poons’.

My older brother had gone to ATHS five years earlier. He did the commercial course because my parents regarded him as not being useful with his hands and, as my father was establishing his own business, my brother was being prepared to join it in the longer term.

I was put into the technical course because I was ‘good with my hands’, that is, I loved drawing and making things.

Neither of my parents had any orientation towards academic life. My mother left school (Nailsworth) from primary school to help her mother with domestic chores till she ‘escaped’ (her term) into marriage. My father’s antecedents were all small, self-made shopkeepers. My father, however, attended AHS in its infancy (somewhere around 1911 or 1912) when his family came to live in the city from the mid-north town of Georgetown. He used to say he learned more in a year at AHS that he learned in seven years in rural Georgetown where, he claimed, most of the instruction in the school was done by his older sister because of the infirmity and incompetence of the teacher. Luckily, his teacher at AHS was Phoebe Watson, who recognised his potential and encouraged him. Her name later became a revered one in South Australian educational circles.

Until he was nearly 90 my father still attended the AHS Old Scholars Annual Dinner where, for some years, he was the most senior member in attendance. Yet in the secondary school placement for me, he must have deferred to my mother.

So ATHS was seen as a compromise between the evil AHS and Prince Alfred’s. My attitude towards ATHS may have been partly influenced by my resentment at not being able to join my primary school friends at AHS. Looking back I think I was better suited by temperament to study arts than do a technical course and my subsequent degree was in English literature and history.

Later, I became a school teacher and school principal myself so I could look back on my school years with some knowledge of how schools operate. Overall, I did not enjoy my high school life as much as I feel I could have.

It was a cram school. Comparing at the time with boys who went to Adelaide High School, and thinking back later, I believe too much emphasis was placed on external examination results. For example, English lessons consisted, even from early in the year, in copying prepared answers to possible examination questions. We compiled a file of these to memorise prior to the external exams. Shakespeare consisted of reading through line by line and underlining hard words with meanings written in the margin.

As a school principal in later life I well understood the value of discipline for its own sake. But the discipline at ATHS went beyond that, I feel. It was repressive and stultifying. The principal in my day was Mr Sidney Moyle. We were frightened of him. I suspect even the teachers were, though that may have been but a child’s perception.

There was a minority of girls doing the commercial course and some boys also did the commercial course. Liaison between boys and girls, even those sharing the same commercial classes, was discouraged. On wet days the boys would be required to sit on the upper balcony of Brookman Hall and watch while the girls in the hall below were taught ballroom dancing. For a shy boy like myself it seemed a missed opportunity to learn some of the social skills I had to acquire by myself in dance halls after leaving school.

As a technical student, we had the great advantage of having at our disposal all the excellent facilities of the School of Mines. In the Leaving, besides the usual woodwork, mechanical drawing and sheetmetal work, we did fitting and turning on lathes which, I doubt, was available in any other academically-oriented school.

I left school a year ahead of some of my primary school contemporaries because of the three year graduation. Yet I had no idea what I wanted to do. My father and I thumbed through a School of Mines’ prospectus and decided on Industrial Chemistry which was a kind of hybrid course. I wanted to be financially independent so I obtained employment straight away with J Brooker and Sons, food factory, on Port Road and studied part-time while working as a laboratory assistant. Today it would be called quality control work. But it was four years later, after a variety of jobs, that I went to Teachers College.

Although I passed all subjects I sat for in the Leaving and Intermediate examinations, with one Leaving credit in drawing, I feel I did not do justice to myself as a student in high school. I think the restricted time and the school climate were inhibiting, at least for a relatively shy and unsophisticated lad as I was.

Looking back, too, I can see in ATHS the major problem of all private schools where there is no regular turnover of teachers. Even the most conscientious teacher tends, in an environment that is set in immovable tracks, to go along the set track rather than try to bring about change. Most of the teachers at ATHS in my time had been there teaching the same thing in the same way for years. It was more a processing plant than an exciting learning place. Notwithstanding that, some teachers I liked. Dougal Slee I always regarded highly and, after leaving school, I knew him in a social context as his daughter and my sister were friends. But though we made bad jokes about our teachers at the time, none of them passed into my private folk-lore. After leaving high school I did not keep up acquaintance with my high school friends and did not look back on my high school years with any nostalgia.

In 1952 I went to Teachers College – a two year ‘B’ course – but, having already a half-baked tertiary course behind me, I soon had the qualifications for promotion and, in the expanding ’60s, I was soon a school principal and remained so till I retired at age 55 in 1987. In those years the great god was Equity, in whose name I saw IQ tests ridiculed, examinations debunked, expectations continually eased back to accommodate weaker students, technical schools wiped out to eliminate alleged discrimination and main-streaming of intellectually retarded students, all done in the name of equity.

Many of these changes have turned out to be detrimental to the welfare of students, I believe, and have come about because bureaucrats have not sufficiently thought through the meaning of equity.

Equal opportunity is a concept with which few would disagree but equity is a much broader idea. The premise seems to be that people are equal or, if they aren’t, they ought to be and education should be designed to bring this about. These concepts are questionable and have brought about, if anything, the opposite result. No education system can achieve satisfactory outcomes if it is based on false premises, and that I fear is the problem with state schools, and why parents are opting for the private school system.

Of course, changes in society have been vast and it is too simplistic to see the old technical schools as the answer to today’s problems, but the old style technical schools provided an educational environment which was appropriate to the social, vocational and intellectual needs of its clients. It is doubtful if the present high schools, which try however valiantly to be all things to all people, succeed in achieving the same degree of success for its students as the system which was displaced.

As always, the difficulty is to find the balance between a school system that is repressive and unimaginative and today’s schools which seem to lack direction. Although I’ve been retired for nine and a half years, I have nine grandchildren entering on their schooling years and I still worry for them.

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