It was time for the voices from those ‘techs’ to be heard. Instead of others generalising about who should go where, the people who worked and studied in technically-oriented schools should speak out. The anecdotal approach, used in We Came to Marion, published in 1995, earned the approval of more than one lecturer in the Flinders University’s School of Education.¹

Ethnography is an accepted academic tool. Histories, presented through the stories of participants, bring to life the cultures of different periods. Such a collection would reveal just how the contributors felt about the vocational/technical educational culture of their time. In the historical material available there is little concentration on the felt life of these South Australian schools that provided post-primary education for so many people.

Dr Grundy was impressed by We Came to Marion. He found that this approach revealed unexpected insights into many facets of school life. In his review he wrote:

 

It is puzzling just how recollections of this kind, anecdotally exploring particular incidents that are remembered as typifying their authors’ sense of the significance of the school, produce in this reader strong intimations of the universal values at work in educational practices. In ordinary conversation we attest to these in our educational work when we value truth against error, the fine against the shoddy, excellence against the mundane, good against the banal, justice against prejudice, determination against complacency. The puzzle comes from our academic inclination to regard affective expressions of value that reside in ordinary thought and speech as ill-formed notions that require correct formulation in propositional statements for truth analysis.

His comment on the ‘academic inclination’ to reinterpret information in a theoretically detached, impersonal process and make abstract and bloodless what is full of blood, sweat, tears, laughter, joviality, accidents – happy and unhappy – reinforced my belief in the value of this anecdotal approach to histories of education.²

Academic historians of education may not come to terms with what life in school actually means for the felt lives of different people. Generalisations do not pick up the significance, for example, of ‘lunch hours’ for informal as well as formal education of students or what it can mean for teachers. Lavatories are likely to be more important than libraries in the lives of students. They might be places of refuge or fear. Family attitudes, the impact of their past on their present approaches, may be underestimated. Worse, too often students feel reduced to abstractions.

The past, we know, is never past. It is present in the minds and hearts of those who live through different eras and in their children who learn about the past first of all from their parents and grandparents. World War I had its impact on education. Mick Ryan, founding head of Strathmont Boys Technical High School, did not want boys regimented into obedient ‘conscripts’ for cannon fodder. The Great Depression affected the way parents thought about the educational choices for their children. Former students in central schools repeatedly refer to the financial situation of their parents and their need to go to work to help the family survive. The comfortable, full employment situation in post-1945 Australia allowed so many Anglo-Celtic Australian parents to envisage a society in which girls did not need the same level or kind of education given to boys. Australia’s geographical and cultural isolation wrapped white Australian society in fleecy Merino wool. Out of sight could be comfortably out of mind.

Newcomers to Australia from the United Kingdom or northern and southern Europe would not have been feeling as comfortable as second or third generation white Australians. Displaced persons seeking a new home faced distrust, derogatory names and the denigration of their qualifications. They were expected to assimilate, give up their mother tongue or keep it behind their front door. For both groups, particularly in metropolitan areas, the needs of part Aboriginal children, so often taken by force or deception from their mothers, would have had almost no place in the minds of most non-Indigenous people, except in the work of some South Australian artists such as Jacqueline Hick and Barbara Robertson.

Through their own words, not through the re-interpretation of academics, students, teachers, principals, administrators, two secretaries, one parent and one technical studies technician could provide their pictures of vocational school life across a century. That was the decision Dr Grundy and I reached. He wanted to compare the results of his academic research with the felt lives of participants expressed in their own words. We would complement each other. He would work in his traditional way. I would seek recollections from and work with contributors. With a beginning grant from the Australian College of Education, we intended to collect Voices from a Forgotten System. Very quickly we discovered such a title would not do justice to the contributors.

The dangers of over-simplification

Speaking in the Advertiser of his first term of office, the then Premier John Olsen listed the establishment of a ‘trade’ school in the north western suburbs as one of his significant achievements. His simplification was meant to appease voters, employers and people expressing frustrations about the lack of electricians and plumbers or skilled employees able to work from non-CAD-based blue prints, make the models and do the work required. His language reduced a vibrant, reconstructed school, with a multi-faceted focus as well as links to tertiary institutions, and a developing international network, to this oversimplification.

‘Trade’ schools are not and never have been technically-oriented post primary schools.³ Trade schools were set up by Dr Charles Fenner, for specific trades and their apprentices. Late in the 1960s the trade schools became technical colleges. The phrase ‘technical education’ ignores the significance of the humanities, science, the arts and music in the ‘technically-oriented’ schools. Max Bone, Deputy Director-General of Education in 1970, had a pivotal role in the transformation of specific ‘trade’ schools. He became the first Director-General of Further Education. The community colleges were later combined with the technical colleges within the Technical and Further Education institutions or TAFEs.

This on-going problem of oversimplification has affected the understanding of the roles of technically-oriented schools. For this reason this collection needs historical pointers as part of the introduction to place the contributions in their chronological, cultural and educational contexts.

At the same time the contributors themselves have made clear that this collection cannot be reduced to a simple, nostalgic journey into the past. People have values. Students become parents. Teachers are often parents. Unmarried teachers have values. All have family backgrounds affecting what they bring to a school and how they approach life in that school. So, it is not surprising that contributors have expressed opinions about what they valued then and remember as important now. They know what they value in education for their children. For example, Professor Neil Piller wants his daughter to have ‘that broad-based, hands-on, interactive education’ he experienced at Seaton Boys Technical High School. Parents may disagree about the value of education. A mother might be aware of the impact of impatience by academically-oriented or technically-oriented teachers on a student’s self esteem. A father’s bitterness about the destruction of his own educational hopes might bring him to believe that formal education for his daughters is a waste of time. Experience of a private school might encourage a parent to prefer a public school education for his children. Some men and women remind us of the significance of their teachers, initially dismissed, in their later lives.

Teacher contributors, living through many changes in their 30- or 40-year careers, reveal the effect of structural changes in education on their lives, and on the lives of their students. Some focus on their subjects. Others concentrate on students. Most engage with both. Many reveal their reactions to the transformation of the secondary binary system into the comprehensive secondary system established in the 1970s. The advantages and disadvantages of that change are revealed in different contributions. An art teacher rails against the stupidity of those who got rid of the technical high schools. The fury of some, like Bob Goldsmith for example, enraged by the Labor government’s closure of Goodwood High School, is understandable in educational terms. The anger and distress of those who knew the value of The Parks Community School, the school that grew out of the Angle Park Boys and Girls Technical High Schools, to its depressed area with high unemployment was justified. In this case it was a Liberal government that acted against the advice of an Education Review committee. In both cases the schools catered for students who needed to feel at home to develop positive attitudes towards education. Today the short-sightedness of both closures is evident in the demand, from employers and young people, for more vocationally-oriented courses in schools. What matters now is that we learn from the past. In that learning, we need to avoid further narrowing the focus and further polarising students.

As Mr Kneebone said in 1924:

 

there is a danger of starting too hurriedly in the child’s life to turn it into the direction of some particular vocations. It does not matter whether it is professional, ordinary commercial or artisan’s work, that citizen will be better able to enjoy the real things of life by having a good education to start with …⁴

Given the recognition that the nature and kinds of paid work will change rapidly for many people in the twenty-first century, Mr Kneebone’s thoughtful warning is even more valuable today when we face an uncertain future as knowledge explodes and avenues of earning change. A woman who first earns her living as a violinist, might decide to take up medicine. A mathematician might decide to become a fashion designer. A member of the police force might decide to become an advocate for children suffering from abuse. Everything will depend on the options available, personal convictions and people’s readiness to believe in another person’s capacity to change direction, earn a living and gain satisfaction in that occupation. In this collection the story of Ray Horne, who began life as a BHP apprentice at Whyalla and later took up a different career as a peripatetic teacher of percussion in schools, is instructive because it points to that future in which change, not certainty, will be a factor in vocational decision-making for everyone.

Renewed interest in alternative avenues of learning shows that the issue of vocational versus academic education is alive. For Dr Charles Fenner, Superintendent of Technical Education, back in 1929, tradition was the enemy. Tradition was not only the content in terms of subjects. Tradition involved the methods of teaching, the emphasis on content, rote learning, constant repetition, memorisation and cramming to ensure the successful performance of students at examinations.

The assumption that ‘traditional’ education should be the basis of ‘mainstream’ secondary education still needs to be challenged. In subject terms, ‘traditional’ meant English, maths, physics, chemistry, perhaps botany or biology, languages – Latin, French and German and now Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian – and those remnants of a liberal education, the humanities. In ‘traditional’ schools, art was for those considered incapable of studying Latin. Geography was an alternative to a modern language. Music, that key to so much learning, was either singing or, in private schools, a fee-paid optional extra, piano tuition. Physical education, however, had a most important place. Healthy parents would bear healthy children. Lip service might be paid to citizenship but civics declined in significance in history-based syllabi, the preferred avenue for many academic humanities teachers.

That belief dominated South Australian secondary education until the 1970s. The apparently, broadening changes in the comprehensive schools were undermined. The PEB, with all it stood for, remained at the peak of the hierarchy of subjects. With the past reinforced by the Keeves Report, the changing approach to groups of subjects took almost a decade to come into being. Since 1992 changes have been brought about by the range of subjects now included in stages I and II of the South Australian Certificate of Education which has replaced the PEB. They belong to four areas and the absolute distinction of each discipline, theoretically, is gone.⁵ Connections began to be made but the major fight to have drama, with its multi-media dimensions, included in the ‘language rich’ category is a reminder of the power of the past. The power of that past continued to exist in the higher education subjects (HES) still scaled to award credit to those who tackle the ‘hard’ subjects. Information technology is now an important tool for all study but it must not be the be-all-and-end-all. The thrill of the new should not limit the avenues for the imagination to explore. ‘Hands-on’ education needs to be more than the combination that mind and hands can achieve with this new linear tool – the computer. We are in danger of concentrating to such an extent on one tool that others are ignored. We could be forgetting that there is a range of ‘tools’ for living.

In 2001 we have moved forward in one way, recognising the vocational component for everyone in this latest technologically-driven approach to education. Yet we are still in danger of moving from one oversimplification to another. We need to ask where imagination lies in the plans for the future, what that abstract term ‘interdependence’ means in the minds of curriculum developers, whether citizenship has a place in their thinking and whether, as Lyn Wilkinson emphasised in her contribution, relationships still have a central felt place in learning.

Diversity – not just a biological necessity

In John S. Walker’s address to boys at Adelaide Boys High School in 1969, he described the boyhood, imaginative thrill that the world of Jules Verne gave him. That thrill made him want to study science. That thrill took him, and the students he later taught at Mt Gambier, into the study of radio and all kinds of the then new technologies. We are a long way from the attitudes that Dr Fenner castigated as ‘traditional’ but the adjective is still used to perpetuate the division between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ in the minds of academics, teachers, bureaucrats and opinion makers in society.

Just as John Walker’s boyhood world gave his imagination room to fly, our world is doing the same thing with all kinds of images, including exciting futuristic robotic planes flying over Mars. Women are involved now. Some are leading groups engaged in space exploration. Space is not the only world to excite the imagination of future students although so much money is being spent on its exploration. Some are excited by the treasures of the natural world, above and under the sea, and have a sense of vocation, wanting to give their lives to the cause of its conservation. Others see the Internet offering new worlds to conquer. There is a sense of adventure for those in schools that are able to provide the facilities and opportunities for exciting exploration.

At the same time many still want to undertake work that satisfies them. They, like Stan Kirk, enjoy making things. Others, like Beverly Bills, want to keep alive traditional crafts that could be lost as automation decreases the significance of traditional skills. Therefore our public schools need to be able to foster diversity while ensuring that all students do have much needed shared common understandings. Traditional skills and services will still be needed in local communities. To build an understanding of the significance of diversity, as well as shared knowledge of the humanities, we need to support different centres of learning in such a way that all programmes and all students feel valued. How to do that in a world where the amount a person earns is seen as a sign of his or her worth is a challenge for all thoughtful, informed opinion makers. How to do that, when there is increasing emphasis on individual survival and success with little consideration for the cost to others, will be a challenge for all involved in planning and financing a range of culturally appropriate learning options.

One commonly-used metaphor that denies diversity is ‘mainstream’. It assumes that ultimately all must move in the same down-ward direction to what could be the sand-blocked or introduced carp-blocked barrage denying access to seas of opportunity. Those further up-stream might have decided to narrow the channel, divert water to private, moneyed interests, and decrease the volume of water flowing seaward. Is it a sign of hope that educators now talk of pathways, chosen by students according to their interests, instead of ‘streams’ or ‘tracks’ into which students are dragooned? Certainly, it is often in the public schools, for example Hamilton Secondary College, that recognition of the inadequacy of ‘mainstream’ education occurs. Hamilton Secondary College’s Adaptive Vocational Education Course (AVEC), giving students a ‘headstart into the workforce’, is just such a within school initiative being taken up around South Australia and interstate.⁶

However more alternative programmes beginning where students are, needing staffing and support, get limited acknowledgement for their creativity. ‘Pathways’, as the educational metaphor, reinforces the linear emphasis in the educational process suggesting movement along a chosen path to a certain destination. While a path may meander, the quality of the environment through which that path takes one does matter. But learning does not necessarily take place on a path. One may need to leave it, to pause, to retrace one’s steps, enter the landscape around it to explore that world. Lateral movement may be, in fact will be, necessary. The pathways metaphor is still limited. Moreover there may be no certain, satisfying destination. There appears to be little place, for example, for immersion techniques. More innovative programmes operating on interdisciplinary principles, encouraging lateral thinking and social interaction may receive no publicity at all.⁷

Attitudes towards ‘alternative’ schools

Alternative public schools, too, must not be used by other schools as ‘dumping’ grounds. There was too much of that in the past. Then lecturers at Adelaide Teachers College might try to direct a young teacher they admired away from ‘a tech’! Today, how many lecturers training potential upper primary/middle/secondary teachers have had ‘hands-on’ experience of practically-oriented approaches to learning? How many have lived, worked and felt the needs and interests of young people in areas of serious disadvantage in our state? How many have that affective as well as the cognitive level of understanding? How many still have those preconceptions that influenced lecturers in the past? How many actually use their sabbaticals to teach in schools? How many of those lecturers have chosen former technical schools in western or northern suburbs of metropolitan Adelaide to revive their sense of the felt life in schools? How many have gone to the more disadvantaged country schools for that experience?

Perhaps one way to bring about the change is to speak and write of specialised schools, the phrase Sir Eric Neal uses to describe Thebarton Technical High School. However no phrase can enhance or denigrate a school as much as the physical impact of its environment. Members of a neighbourhood, and most certainly the students and parents of a school community, know the reality of the quality of departmental value of a particular school by the care taken with it. Kathleen Rumbold, principal of Strathmont Girls Technical High School for 13 years, speaks truth when she says that the physical environment is one factor influential in the way students see themselves. She writes of the felt reality of the structure. Action or inaction by departmental officers always speaks volumes. Not all the words of reassurance can hide the evidence before the eyes. In the stories of South Australia’s technical schools, Cliff Rooney’s foresight, in insisting that the new Norwood Boys Technical High School should be built of imposing red brick, on that valuable site, is to be applauded. Marryatville High School’s reputation today is enhanced by that school’s imposing facade and the majestic gum trees that Norm Dowdy once invited Norwood boys to treasure.

Ignorance perpetuates prejudice

Generalisations about ‘the techs’ ignore the very important early South Australian development of technically-oriented schools. The story of their evolution is a complex one. The early schools were certainly not set up for the less able, those assumed to be ‘good with their hands’ because some one with a pigeon-holed mentality assumed ‘they’ were not ‘good’ with their ‘heads’. Educational thinkers certainly did not follow the anti-imaginative, inhuman, literal-‘fact’-based Gradgrind approach to schooling that Dickens attacks in Hard Times. Adelaide Technical High School, ‘The Tech’ to many proud students and teachers, grew out of South Australia’s late nineteenth century need for a preparatory school for engineers for railways, roads, bridges, jetties, ports, as well as surveyors, geologists, experts in mineral exploration and mining as well as agricultural experts.

Connected with the Adelaide School of Mines, it became an institution for the primary school élite. Saved from closure by the School of Mines, when the penny-pinching Education Department decided that the equivalent of $800 was too much to pay to maintain it, ATHS provided South Australia with experts needed in many fields. Not all contributors approve its approach that pushed students through a three year Intermediate programme in two years, but many are proud of that speedy process, seeing it as indicative of the quality of the students enrolled at the school. Boys at ‘The Tech’ were often taught by men who lectured at the School of Mines. They studied geometrical drawing and dimensioned sketching at the School of Arts and Crafts. There were educational connections between the secondary and tertiary levels of learning, so the horizontal separations that often impede the educational process did not exist for the boys.

Girls were brought into Adelaide Technical High School in 1918 when able girls and boys were needed as South Australia’s economy began to diversify. Competent female typistes and stenographers were cheaper than men. Men could be the accountants, bank clerks and bank managers. The commercial pace of life increased. For many young women, office work offered a way out of traditional, female, lowly, poorly-paid domestic occupations.

Thebarton Technical High School⁸ was set up by Dr Charles Fenner, Superintendent of Technical Education. Brought to South Australia from the Ballarat School of Mines, ‘the Doc’ believed that ‘the central fact in every system of education is the child’.⁹ He established the first departmental preparatory secondary technical school as part of the Technical Education Branch. Founded in 1919, it did not open until 1924. Sir Eric Neal, in his contribution, refers to Thebarton as a ‘specialised’ school. Professor Frank Fenner, an outstanding Australian medical scientist and son of Charles Fenner, writes of the Dalton Plan, a student-oriented approach to learning put in place at Thebarton, the school to which he was sent by his father to gain the capacity for independent study that would stand him in good stead at university. Hand-picked students and later staff, like Harry Macklin-Shaw for example, were brought in to ensure that the boys were taught by the best people in their fields. Thebarton was so important that student teachers, in the 1930s, were taken there to observe this radical approach to learning. From the start Thebarton had a language option to enable boys to go to the School of Mines if they did not want to be apprenticed to a trade.

And then there was the Girls Central Art School, also established by Charles Fenner, a school unique in South Australia’s educational history. The GCAS was a school within a school. Girls had the advantages of teachers who worked across the secondary and tertiary levels in the fields of art and craft. They were taught by artists. Their inimitable head, Gladys Good, was determined not to allow money to get in the way of the education of her talented girls. The sense of freedom in this school comes through contributions of students like Kate O’Neill and those of Eleanor Christie, who wrote as a student at the GCAS, and later as an art teacher at Norwood Girls Technical School. The school was closed in 1953 by Gilbert McDonald, Superintendent of Technical Education when Colonel Evan Mander-Jones, a former student and teacher at the Sydney Church of England Grammar School and later involved in military intelligence, was Director of Education.

Mr McDonald believed that girls should have a more general education and opposed too early specialisation.¹⁰ That general education involved the humanities as well as general science. In his view girls no longer needed the GCAS: the vocational arts and crafts, as well as home economics and dressmaking, would be provided in the State’s girls’ junior technical schools as part of a broader, single-sex education for the majority of girls not thought to be bound for university. Once closed, the Exhibition Building, in which both schools were housed, could be demolished to make way for the Napier building extensions and underground car park for the University of Adelaide. The School of Arts and Crafts was moved to Stanley Street, North Adelaide.

In addition, there was the Thebarton Technical School established in George Street by Catholic Education. Its presence in this section came as the result of a contributor’s reference to a second technical school in Thebarton. Brian Maloney, a student there in the 1940s, offered to provide his experience to the collection. I accepted because it was rare for a non-government school to establish technical workshops. They are expensive to run with all the costs of power, raw materials, maintenance of tools and teachers skilled in their field of endeavour. Fewer students can be taught at the same time. It was, and is, much cheaper to concentrate on general subjects in large classrooms where many students could be martialled in rows by one teacher

All four schools had some things in common. They were either connected with the Technical Branch of the Department of Education or, in the case of ATHS until 1963 and the Marist Technical School at Thebarton until 1972, with an educational institution independent of the Education Department. None was administered by the High School Branch. Whether the Marist school maintained connections with tertiary education, I do not know but the other three recognised how valuable such links were in educational terms. Each school sought to provide education appropriate, as it saw it, for practically-oriented students whose talents were not catered for by the traditional, academic ‘high’ schools. Each school was meeting the changing occupational needs in the development of South Australia. All four schools were encouraged to enrol those with the appropriate talents and interests. In this way they encouraged engagement with the work and the contemporary problem of disenchantment with secondary education was less likely to occur.

The impact of World War I on post-primary education

South Australia was electrified in the late nineteenth century. That meant factories could operate safely on a 24-hour basis. At the beginning of the twentieth century Adelaide had the ‘horse-less’ carriage. To all of the industrial, diesel-based and chemical inventions that resulted in the internal combustion engine, add the inventions that changed the nature of war. Tanks, aeroplanes, U boats, mustard gas, Zeppelins. Technology was changing at a rapid rate. Add too the impact of photography, in moving pictures as well as still photography: Griffiths in America, director of The Birth of a Nation, had demonstrated how to bring the horrors of war into civilian homes. In Australia the transcontinental railway from Melbourne to Fremantle met at the South Australian border on 17 October 1917. War had intensified the pressure to connect the western and eastern coasts of the continent.

In Europe, in 1915, Marconi was testing his wireless on a train. At the same time Albert Einstein, dismissed by teachers at the age of nine because he did not fit their mould, was challenging the Newtonian view of the universe: the impact of his discoveries would change the way people viewed the world and themselves. Challenging his view of the universe was the Quantum theory, developed by Max Planck, that postulated a random element in physics. On 7 November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought Lenin to power and Russia withdrew from the allied cause. Australia was needing more and more to become self-reliant.

It was time, in South Australia, to change the haphazard approach to the training of apprenticesý Discussions about compulsory apprenticeship had begun in 1913. Instructions to prepare a Bill to ‘embody the recommendations of the Education Commission’ were given in 1915. Australia, and South Australia, could not rely on imports from Europe. German naval ‘raiders’ in the Pacific were laying minefields in the Indian and Pacific Oceans to deter merchant ships sailing to and from Europe. One example of the impact of war was the Australian development of ‘Aspirin’, the pain killer previously imported from the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Germany. New machines could not be bought from Europe. Manufacturers had to make new and repair existing machinery.

The cavalier approach of factory owners to training apprentices was expensive. They wanted good apprentices and tradesmen but were not prepared to put in the money or the time to ensure the continuance of a well-qualified work force. When the Apprentices Bill was first presented in 1916 it included the suggestion that an educationist should be on the Apprentices Board. Charles Fenner was brought from Ballarat to become South Australia’s first Superintendent of Technical Education in 1916. In July, 1917, the Chief Inspector of Factories in South Australia included in his annual report the statement:

 

As a general rule little or no provision is made by employers for teaching apprentices their trades. The apprentices for the most part pick up what knowledge they can in the course of their work, and those who are keen and observant turn out good tradesmen, while the careless lad after finishing his term becomes a disturbing element and a nuisance in the trade owing to incompetence.¹¹

Dr Fenner’s report on the early years of the development of apprentice training emphasised the financial restrictions that frustrated his efforts at every stage. The Technical Education of Apprentices Act had been passed in 1917. He makes this point in his 1924 review of the trade schools he had set up.

 

The present condition of efficiency in this direction would have been quite impossible had it not been for the machinery, tools, &c, taken over by the State from the Commonwealth on completion of the scheme for the vocational training of returned soldiers and, in the case of the Printers’ Trade School of equipment generously handed over by the council of the SA School of Mines.¹²

Just as the School of Mines had needed a preparatory secondary school for potential students, so manufacturing industries required a preparatory secondary school for future apprentices. The idea of Thebarton followed naturally from the establishment of the apprentice trade schools.

Gallipoli and the education of girls

World War I brought about the death of 10,000,000 young men of all nationalities. In 1919 the Age on 15 February listed Australia’s war casualties to date as 58,201 dead, 166,617 wounded, 83,146 sick with others missing or prisoners. In 1915 Gallipoli cost Australia the lives of so many young men that, as early as 23 June 1915, a patriotic appeal was made to parents by the editor of the South Australian Teachers’ Journal, F.F. Wholohan. He was concerned to ensure that South Australian girls were educated to fulfil their maternal roles.

In an article entitled Is It Worthwhile? he told legislators and parents, ‘At present theoretical studies have primary place, and practical arts follow for the few’. He asked them to ‘reconstruct [the] curriculum that the order of things [would] be reversed’ as far as the education of girls was concerned.

Before World War I South Australia had been developing an enlightened approach to the education of girls, enlightened in that preparatory, academic educational opportunities had been opened to them as early as 1879 with the establishment of the Advanced School for Girls in Grote Street. This was the first school of its kind in the world. A fee-paying school, the Advanced School for Girls prepared able girls for tertiary education. Scholarships were available for girls from families with limited income. The University of Adelaide, diplomatically and successfully, fought the Colonial Office, for the right to admit young women to degrees, including the Bachelor of Science, in 1880. The University of Adelaide had admitted women to courses from the first in 1876. In the ‘motherland’, from which South Australia copied so much, the admission of women to science degrees at Oxford and Cambridge did not occur until the twentieth century. In 1909, the Advanced School for Girls was absorbed into the Continuation School which became the co-educational Adelaide High School whose first headmaster was William J. Adey.

Before 1914 there had also been increasing pressure to provide avenues of learning for girls with practical talents. The New Education Fellowship in England was promoting a range of alternative approaches to education. The Fellowship was reacting against the ‘old’ system with its concentration on the ‘three Rs’ that, in two instances, ignored correct spelling! In England a system of payment by results had made many teachers see children only as the keys to their financial future. Subjects were valued for their grant-funding potential and the child was a ‘grant earning unit’.¹³ Schools received an extra shilling for teaching singing! New Education supporters saw children as doers and creators.¹⁴

As early as 1911, the Director of Education, Alfred Williams, who had attended a New Education Fellowship conference, was influenced by the approach of the ‘practical educationists’.¹⁵ They wanted more activity-based approaches, rather than the book-based teaching approved by the university, to bring students closer to ‘real life’. He wanted ‘high’ schools to have manual training and domestic arts. He believed in the education of girls for home duties.¹⁶ The following questions he asked in 1908, were considered so relevant in 1969 that the Karmel Committee incorporated them in its report!

Is the joy of conquering difficulties judiciously fostered? Are the pupils trained to self-effort, to rely on themselves, to be more eager to surpass their own efforts of yesterday than to defeat their classmates? Are they observant and encouraged towards a questioning attitude?¹⁷

In his 23 June 1915 article in the South Australian Teachers Journal, F.F. Wholohan supported this practically-oriented approach to education for girls as part of the patriotic imperative to rebuild Australia’s population. Winston Churchill’s strategically disastrous campaign against the Turks began on 25 April 1915. The heroism and determination of the Anzacs have been well documented. The editor’s patriotic appeal to parents was couched in terms that questioned the value of academically-oriented education for girls. His language reinforced the myth that women were ‘weaker vessels’ whose health was being undermined by ‘cramming’ for ‘empty [academic] glory’.

The whole article is reproduced in this introduction because it accounts for the strength of this view of the ‘right’ education for girls that lasted into the 1960s. It was to take the determination of girls themselves and their parents to demand access to Leaving PEB examinations, without having to transfer to a ‘high’ school, to begin the slow change to technical ‘high’ schools. The stories of Margaret Grant, who became the National President of the Australian Principals Association, Rose Francis, wife, mother and business woman, and Helen Nichols, a solicitor in the Crown Solicitor’s office, reveal students’ and parents’ determination not to be limited in their educational options. As well there were teachers and principals, like Zillah Maschmedt MA, of Unley Girls Technical School, who did not have to be forced to act to open Public Examination Board avenues for tech school girls who wanted them.

Is It Worthwhile?

If ever time was opportune for earnestly considering whether we are fitting our children to serve the best interest of the State, that time is the present. Today we stand at the side of the motherland, locked in death grips with a merciless foe, and when the day of peace and victory dawns, our greatest and irreparable loss must be reckoned in terms of depleted manhood. There is urgent necessity, therefore, of giving to the men and women of tomorrow an equipment that will enable them to meet every demand of the future. Physical fitness must prove a matter for deep consideration, and every home will feel not only its obligation in the replenishing of life’s forces, but the necessity of influencing our lives along the lines of economy and thrift on the one hand, and enterprise and initiative on the other. Therefore the home will become a more powerful factor than ever in renewing our national prosperity, and it behoves us to give the wisest training to those on whom will rest future responsibility. The question arises whether the present-day course of study for girls is calculated to produce the highest good of the community. Does it ensure an intelligent, capable race of home-makers?— for this is the sphere which we are looking to the majority of our girls to fill. Today, the ambitions of the girl student have one outlet, namely, to figure on an examination pass-list with more or less honours to their credit. We cannot help wondering, as we glance down these long lists, how many constitutions have been ruined, how many promising lives cut short through long-continued ‘cramming’ for such empty glory.

How often we have seen bright, intelligent girls, proficient in the theoretical excavation of dams and building of haystacks, able to quote from the classics on the slightest provocation, with sufficient grit and perseverance to sit for hours poring over Euclid deductions or quadratic equations, cast aside their text-books at last, run through a brief shorthand course, and — enter an office! These higher branches of study have certainly developed reasoning power, thought, and a general book-knowledge, but the actual information is largely forgotten with the throwing aside of books, excepting where the minority elect to follow a professional calling. Let us examine how far the girl has now been prepared for the home sphere which we wish her to enter. For instance, an intelligent housewife will need to know something of the food for a home—their values, their preparation, manufacture, cooking and serving. It will also be of inestimable value to her, and those dependent upon her, if she understands elementary physiology, hygiene, sanitation and home nursing. A knowledge of business-law, the keeping of household accounts, cost of living, and market values, together with elementary economics, all of these will find practical application in the management of a home where abstruse geometrical theorems and dams (of every species!) have no place. Art and decoration, every form of beauty which will uplift in its refinement, the secrets of repairing, renovating, and furnishing, so dear to the heart of the skilful housewife, are worthy of a place in every woman’s equipment; as is also the study of textiles, their durability, serviceableness, and cost. Needlework, too, in all its branches, is an art of which she cannot afford to be ignorant. How many girls neglect their music (often on the advice of teachers with an eye to the pass-list) when preparation for examination begins, and so a charm is lost from the home, for which, maybe, a gramophone will serve as substitute in later years! Civics, in a land of universal suffrage, is another important branch of study, and, together with much good literature, will serve to promote that companionship and common interest which make so largely for home-happiness. Last, but far from least, let us glance at our Commonwealth statistics for our final and convincing argument. There we find that between the years 1901-1906, out of 318,298 male and 302,810 female infants born during that period, 32,498 of the former and 26,219 of the latter died under the age of 12 months. Are we sure that experience is not being bought at the cost of precious human life, doubly precious here in Australia, with its mere fringe of population? At present theoretical studies have primary place, and the practical arts follow for the few. Is it worth while to so re-construct our curriculum that the order of things will be reversed? Parliament: Is it worth while? Parents: Is it worth while?¹⁸

Wholohan could not envisage an education which combined the practical with the theoretical, the vocational with the academic. It was either the one or the other. However, an important point not to be overlooked in the article is the fact that he did not deny girls elements of a liberal education. They were to be help-mates as well as mothers, understand civics, have roles as citizens, be able to converse with their husbands on a range of matters, political, social and literary. The aesthetic quality of the home was in their hands.

Central schools and vocational guidance

Many educators, as well as legislators and parents, saw the move to more practically-based, vocational education for Australia’s future mothers as the right one. Vocationally, most were seen to be called to be mothers and wives. Among the educators who acquiesced in this reversal of the curriculum was Adelaide Miethke. The establishment of central schools did give girls an opportunity to gain more knowledge and develop their practical skills – one, mentioned by a contributor, was determined to become a lawyer and did! Miss Miethke was unhappy when she discovered that many women saw this practically-oriented post-primary compromise as providing a lesser form of education.¹⁹

So often forgotten, a supporter of the practical education philosophy encouraged through the New Education Fellowship, Adelaide Miethke wanted girls with practical interests to have avenues to develop their talents. That is one reason she supported the post-primary curriculum of central schools established in 1925 by William McCoy, Director of Education. He had been brought to South Australia from Tasmania to reorganise public education. A man who enjoyed lunching at the exclusive Adelaide Club, according to Dr A.W. Jones in a letter accompanying his contribution, William McCoy was primarily an organiser and administrator. The nine central schools established were to be junior technical, commercial and home-making schools. Able boys could transfer in the third year to a high school or Thebarton Technical High School which Colin Thiele identifies as ‘the forerunner of the comprehensive secondary school’.²⁰

While he supported the extension of traditional woodwork centres, where women could learn as well as men, under the guidance of teachers like Archibald Peake, William McCoy was conservative. Imaginative experiment and research did not interest him and he was not willing to spend money on the new technological communications media, although he did not stop teachers from exploring possibilities in their own time. Colin Thiele describes his lack of interest in radio even though Adelaide had a radio station in 1925. He was cautious about the use of film which worried a number of teachers who feared that the cinema would expose young people to immorality.²¹ The post-war ‘twenties’ did bring with them the records of new American dances on gramophones – the Charleston and The Black Bottom, daring and indelicate. Jazz was coming to Adelaide! And American films in which negroes were either ‘mammies’, happy, protective or frightened female servants or male servants dancing with Shirley Temple. Women working in offices were becoming sophisticated, showing their knees as hemlines crept up, smoking cigarettes in long cigarette holders, enjoying the new apparently freer image brought to Adelaide by imported fashion magazines. It is not surprising that fewer of them wanted to end up in domestic service. This is one reason fee-paying business colleges began to flourish.

William McCoy was remembered as a most significant Director of Education. His suddent death in 1929 brought out admiring obituaries. He had increased the availability of post-primary education for many more, often under-privileged young boys and girls and this, in the words of Bill Holmesby, was ‘a boon to many families’. He raised the morale of teachers worn down by lack of promotion opportunities. He carried out a much needed overhaul of teacher training.²² The new centrally-consolidated Teachers Training College was opened in 1927 in Kintore Avenue.

William McCoy had sought to establish a vocational service to help parents choose the appropriate education for their children but the market was uncertain in 1928 and politicians were wanting cuts to educational expenditure. His efforts to include vocational guidance for parents, students and employers did not die with him.²³ Vocational guidance was meant to ensure that students entered appropriate programmes of education. One of the contributors mentions that the Girls Central Art School was part of that vocational guidance programme.

Supported by Dr Fenner, vocational guidance later became a way, in too many instances, of preserving class distinctions. Much depended on the preconceptions of too many grade seven teachers as well as those who believed that numbers, results in tests, told the child’s whole story and identified his or her educational potential.

The central schools were primary annexes. Administratively cheaper to operate, they were a compromise between the vocational and academic needs of children whose parents could not afford or were not encouraged to envisage the few ‘high’ schools as appropriate avenues of education for their children. Adelaide Miethke was appointed an inspector of the girls’ central schools. She understood the value of technology in education. With William Adey as Director of Education, who had supported the first school radio lesson broadcast by 5AD in 1931,²⁴ she envisaged distance education by supporting the idea of the School of the Air for children in the ‘outback’. Finally established in 1951, this was the first such school in the world.

Gradually, as an inspector, she sought to increase the intellectual rigour in the central schools for girls. Their need for such pressure appears evident in two contributions. The first, by Mary Connell, describes their teachers as lazy. The next, by Ruth Park, recalls that a seventh grade teacher asked her whether she was going on to a ‘proper’ secondary school or a ‘rest home’, a derisive reference to the central schools. A product of her time, and a fighter for women teachers’ rights in the South Australian Institute of Teachers, Adelaide Miethke saw the woman’s place as in the home but believed it ‘need not be her prison’.²⁵

Vocational guidance and intelligence testing was in place in the 1930s. This is not the place for a detailed examination of vocational guidance and intelligence testing which, according to Pavla Miller, was taken up by ‘enthusiastic members of the eugenics movement [which] in Britain …, dating from the late 1860s, concentrated on demonstrating the mental superiority – indeed, the “hereditary genius” – of the professional strata over the working class, the wealthy over the poor… [It was seen by Lewis Terman] in the opening chapter of the first edition of the Stanford-Binet test [as] …the new union between eugenics and science, especially with regard to the “borderline” cases.’²⁶

Pavla Miller goes on to describe the connection between the Carnegie Foundation, the Australian Council for Educational Research and the provision of the vocational guidance tests used in the early days of IQ testing.²⁷ She highlights the funding of the Australian Council of Education Research by the Carnegie Foundation. The early vocational guidance tests were bought from an American firm. Only when their cost was questioned during the Great Depression did the Education Department decide it would be cheaper to produce its own for South Australian schools.²⁸

‘American finance and advanced production methods’, with Henry Ford’s mass production approach in which one person stayed in the same place all the time and did the same job while the car moved along an electrified assembly line, day and night, ‘were being brought into Australia’. The US-financed Australian Council of Educational Research was established in 1930. ‘[In 1931] General Motors USA bought Holdens, the South Australian car body manufacturing firm, for about 63 per cent of its net worth. The production line, piecework, deskilling and ‘scientific’ management were henceforth to be supplemented by the ‘scientific’ testing, vocational guidance and educational research sponsored by the ACER.’²⁹ All this was happening while the Great Depression was increasing unhappiness and despair among young South Australians who had worked hard to gain skills at school and found that the reward they expected of a job was not there.³⁰

However, those teaching and being taught in schools in the 1930s were unlikely to have been aware of the motives of the British and American pioneers of this supposedly ‘scientific’ way of efficiently and economically arranging post-primary schooling for South Australia’s children, or of the impact of assembly line manufacture on the trade-based skills young men were developing. This was still the society that had an immigration policy guaranteed to maintain a White Australia while, in Europe, Mussolini and Hitler developed national policies based on ideas of racial purity and superiority.

No questionnaire preceded contributions, so all recollections reveal what mattered first of all to contributors. What does come out of stories by three teachers, is concern that the IQ tests did not work to the advantage of children. The role of vocational guidance, and the IQ testing that accompanied it, was to be condemned as mechanistic and culturally inappropriate in the 1960s. It certainly did operate to the disadvantage of those Aboriginal children tested and students from non-English speaking backgrounds who could end up down the alphabetical class list in 1G.³¹ Contributors record examples of the adverse impact of intelligence tests. Joan Young tells of the deliberate decision made by the principal of Vermont Girls Technical High School and herself to refuse to be guided by the IQ results in regard to a particular student who, they were convinced, was much more able than her ‘Intelligence Quotient’ suggested. A non-conformist, this girl was of independent character and challenged rules. Her subsequent careeer has shown how right her teachers were.

After a brief flowering post-primary schooling, in the central schools and country-based higher primary schools, suffered from the dreadful departmental cuts that came with the Great Depression. One teacher spoke of a business man, visiting schools as part of the second Committee of Enquiry into the cost of education, who said, ‘Let them pay for their own education’. The bleating of businessmen about the cost of education has resonated throughout the history of public education in South Australia, as well as the blaming when businesses found, often as a result of their own short-term economic decisions, that they did not have the kinds of skilled tradesmen they needed at a particular time.³²

Girls and boys had to be earning a living as soon as possible. Their parents were facing real difficulties. To give them any post-primary education was an investment in their children’s future and their own survival. That is evident in the responses of students from the ’30s. It would have been very hard for ‘Plugger’ Adey, so called by one of the contributors, faced with the draconian cuts suggested by the second committee to fight this business-pushed decimation of schools, teaching staff and increasing fees for post-primary education. However, he refused to sign the report of the second committee, an act of great courage.

William Adey, as Director of Education, attacked the pragmatism of the committee. Opposed to the narrow examination-orientation in schools, he stated that ‘the right balance between Education for a vocation and Education for being just men and women is a matter which will always remain fundamental for a philosophy of Education’.³³ He clearly did not see vocational education as separate from education in its wider context. He had encouraged experiment with new approaches in schools. Colin Thiele describes his encouragement of ‘Freedom Schools’ and quotes his 1936 words. ‘The spirit of freedom is permeating our service and teachers are beginning to realise that they are not asked to conform to any rigid method of instruction.’³⁴ He was influenced by the New Education Fellowship conference in Adelaide in 1937, named by Ruth Park as the source of the inspiration that infused her work as teacher and principal.

William Adey was not only interested in imaginative approaches to teaching children, he cared about adult education. In 1933, when the Liberal and Country League formed the government, he opened the first Folk School at Murray Bridge. At that school, among other experts was John S. Walker speaking about ‘steam engines and turbines, drugs, dyes, explosives, “talkies” and diesel engines and D.A. David, mentioned with respect and affection by one contributor, speaking on ‘Fascism, Hitlerism, Communism, the Industrial Revolution, and “how to tell a good book or film”.’ ³⁵

William Adey was mourned as a Director of Education who had fought to keep the idealistic spirit of education alive in a time when efficiency and cost dominated the thinking of so many politicians and business interests. Business men did show an interest in ensuring that girls could touch type. That was now an essential skill for office workers. The commercial teachers of Adelaide Technical High School are remembered by girls of the 1930s who were only allowed to use the front stairs when it was raining.

Secondary schools in their own right

Dr Charles Fenner became Director of Education in 1939. Colin Thiele, remembered by a contributor as writing poetry when he was on air raid warning duty at the Teachers College, writes, ‘If ever there was a Director of Education with personal experience and interests at all levels of education, from outback bush schools to the University, it was Charles Fenner.’³⁶ He never accepted the primary annex structure of the central schools, blaming that structure for their lowly status. In 1939 the central schools were closed. In 1940, with carefully chosen younger secondary principals of their own such as Cliff Rooney at Norwood, Paul Hilbig at Goodwood and Fred Vickery soon after its re-opening as a junior boys’ tech at Le Fevre, they became junior boys’ and girls’ technical schools.

In the girls’ schools, principals such as Lynda Tapp at Unley and Jessaline Cooper at Nailsworth carried on the good work they had been doing in the former girls’ central schools. Supporting them was Ruth Gibson, once a teacher at Unley Girls Junior Technical School, the successor to Adelaide Miethke as female inspector of girls’ technical schools. She tried to bring into these schools the best teachers she could find. Ruth Park describes the way she was encouraged to overcome her prejudice against technical schools. As a teacher of academic subjects, Miss Park believed that her ignorance of dressmaking meant she was unfit for a role in these schools. Such was the narrow view among teachers of their role. Miss Gibson reminded her that these schools included academic subjects in their curriculum.

The changeover to secondary schools, administered by the Technical Branch, meant that there were now two secondary school systems within the Education Department. The ‘binary system’, admired by a number of academics and technically-minded experts, was in place. That system was to stay in place until the two branches were reunited administratively in November/December 1967 by John S. Walker, the Director General of Education who followed Colonel Evan Mander-Jones. Gazetted in February 1968, that administrative union of the secondary branches, approved by The Hon. Ron Loveday MP, Minister of Education in the Walsh Labor government that finally replaced the Playford administration, was followed by the establishment of the Karmel Committee by the The Hon. Joyce Steele, Minister of Education in the subsequent Steele Hall Liberal government.³⁷

Students and teachers who lived through the changeover from central school to junior technical school recall its impact on them. They were still single-sex schools with imaginary or identifiable divisions, such as drains or lines of trees, between the boys’ and girls’ schools when they were still on primary school premises. Every change was done as cheaply as possible. Men, who were teachers of art and technical subjects, remember the conditions under which they had to work. Geoff Wilson in Chalk dust and varicose veins picks up one constant source of pain for many teachers. Physical pain was often accompanied by frustration with the bureaucracy. Sometimes, if they waited for the department to act, they felt they would be waiting forever. The initiative of those teachers, who had learnt to scrounge to provide for their subjects during the depression, has never been part of an academic appraisal of technical schools. The story of Mr Karney’s method of moving a shed from the site of the old Nailsworth Central School to the new Nailsworth Junior Boys Tech is now legendary for those who took part in that transfer.

For students in girls’ schools the emphasis on ‘conduct, diligence and character’ in their central school certificates was replaced by certificates describing the skills they had gained and the subjects passed. Character had ceased to be paramount for girls. The concentration on the acquisition of skills is described by many women who either loved, enjoyed, suffered or loathed the way they were taught in their explicitly vocationally-oriented commercial, dress-making, domestic arts, craft and art subjects. Women, as former students, have contributed more to this collection and therefore the views of boys about their technical subjects are not as well represented.

While World War II justified further cuts to public education, one school did not suffer. It was Whyalla Technical High School, described by Hartley Searle as ‘the first comprehensive school’ in South Australia. Like Adelaide Technical High School, Thebarton and the Girls Central Art School, it was a special school but special in a different way. This school had the full support of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company. Dr Fenner, with his background as an apprentice in the printing trade, valued the connection between school and industry. He did not consider that vocational schools were for the less able. Interests and talents had to be catered for. Whyalla Technical High School did that. In addition, the school provided a practical foundation for many of the teachers who became principals and later administrators who often understood the connections between ‘vocational’ and ‘academic’ education. They include Joan Young, Bert Mitchell, Lou Kloeden and Glen McArthur among others.

Former students record their impressions of life in the school as well as the value of the apprentice school, on the same premises, established for BHP with considerable BHP funds. One of the apprentices became a valued peripatetic music teacher in South Australian schools when he began his second career. When, in the 1970s, other technically-oriented schools were established in the Whyalla area, the divisiveness of ‘high’ versus ‘tech’ raised its head. That negative attitude was there before Eyre and Stuart were established. At Whyalla High School, with its strong PEB stream, an appreciative former student found herself, late in the 1960s, relegated to a lowly position when she worked there as a home economics teacher.

The direction of children into one or another kind of secondary school was increasingly based on the advice of seventh grade teachers. Parents still might ‘lovingly lock’ children, often daughters, into the technical part of the binary system. Wanting the best for their children, and more education than they had had themselves, believing girls needed home-making skills rather than a liberal or scientific tertiary-oriented education, seeing single sex schools as a protection against pregnancy, it was easy in post war South Australia to make a choice in keeping, as one contributor wrote, ‘with the times.’

Assimilation – the culture of Adelaide in the 1950s

On the surface, these times might be seen as ‘comfortable’. Women wore hats, gloves and stockings with seams inside. Only the more daring women wore their seamed stockings inside out, until seamless nylon stockings saved them from constantly checking whether their seams were straight. Men wore hats and raised them to women of their acquaintance. Hemlines came down when material was no longer rationed. Women waited to be introduced, standing silently beside their husbands until brought into the conversation. Men shook hands. Women only nodded or smiled acknowledgment. While women might take their husband’s arm, no couples held hands in the street. Signs of loving relationships remained behind closed doors. All were expected to speak English. Women, in particular, were encouraged to speak ‘the Queen’s English’ as part of their role in ‘civilising’ their children. Women were back into the home, no longer needed as bank clerks, tractor drivers or farm managers. The facade of the neat orderly society of the past, forgetting the social dislocation and distresses of pre-war unemployment and psychological wartime trauma, was back in place. Full employment meant that women could concentrate on their domestic duties, their war service done, and free the labour market for men, designated the ‘bread winners’.

In fact this post-war decade was not comfortable. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the world forever. Even in black and white, the pictures of the mushroom cloud brought terror into the minds of people. The devastation and human misery delivered at one blow was hard to take in. This evidence of nuclear power had arrived most dramatically. While the after-life of radio-active plutonium was known, Britain, France and the United States, members of the nuclear club, did their testing at Maralinga, Emu Plains and in the South Pacific, a long way from home.

Obvious to scientists was the need to increase the emphasis on the sciences in the schools. Concerned to develop the next generation of scientists, they showed limited interest in the methodologies through which those scientists were to be educated. The content-oriented PEB would take care of that. The idea of practically-oriented science courses did not occur to many.³⁸ General science was seen to be of limited value although it did bring together a number of scientific concepts. Interdisciplinary approaches were rejected by many traditionally-oriented teachers and lecturers as insufficiently rigorous.

Evident, but not so equally obvious in the minds of many members of the community, was the need to expand students’ understanding through social studies, that combination of history, geography, political structures and economics which brought together a picture of the current state of Australia in the world of which it was a part. Students in ‘techs’ who were still leaving school at 14, or just after completing their Intermediate Technical Certificate, needed to look beyond the job to the world they would live in ‘as just men and women’, to use William Adey’s phrase. One contributor values Fred Vickery’s social studies teaching which took him beyond Australia’s shores into the world of the ‘great powers’ and encouraged him to examine it critically.

In 1950 Australian troops, recruited on a voluntary basis, were sent to South Korea to fight under the banner of the United Nations against the Communist government of North Korea and its Chinese Communist ally. In 1952 Australia joined SEATO, the Pacific equivalent of NATO, the alliance with the United States against the Communist bloc, part of the Cold War strategy adopted in the conflict between the two great powers and their ideologies – capitalism and communism. Nuclear war was thought a possibility.

Even if there was almost full employment, domestically the times were not comfortable for civilian widows, locked out of adequate government support because their husbands had died at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Not all returned servicemen returned home. Some left their wives to bring up their children alone. Police did not investigate what they identified as ‘domestics’. As a result much abuse within the family was allowed to go on. Dislocation and distress did not disappear. Anyone who saw the surviving prisoners of war brought out on to the Adelaide Oval when cricket resumed could not but be aware of the horrors of the aftermath of war.

And the times were certainly not comfortable for young girls who might become pregnant. Abortion was illegal in South Australia. The ugly stories of backyard abortions, infection, death, made many desperate girls and women afraid. The double standards of men allowed to ‘sow their wild oats’, while refusing to marry ‘damaged goods’ placed some women in unwinable positions. Censorship of books encouraged many to order those unacceptable authors by mail. Brown paper covered books were secretly passed from reader to reader and fell open at the offending pages. Conservative attitudes of citizens, in the city of ‘pubs and churches’, where six o’clock closing resulted in the six o’clock swill, produced an emphasis on gentility and decorum in the State that prided itself on its non-convict origins. The ‘tech’ schools for girls did their best to ensure that the image of their students was one acceptable to Adelaide society. One contributor saw Unley Girls Tech, for example, as appearing like a ‘girls’ college’, so well-dressed, with hats and gloves, were its students.

South Australia was not comfortable in political terms, although the Liberal Country League was securely in power. The Playford government was busy increasing the state’s manufacturing base and attracting immigrants. Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration in the Federal Chifley Labor government, was insisting ‘Two Wongs don’t make a white’. The dictation test was being used to keep out unwanted immigrants. Displaced persons, as well as £10 immigrants, needed to develop the state’s infrastructure, were barely tolerated. In fact the Good Neighbour Council was formed to make the adjustment easier for newcomers.

When Robert Menzies came to power Colombo Plan students could be threatened with deportation. Studying at The University of Adelaide, as part of Sir Percy Spender’s plan to bring young members of newly-independent neighbouring Commonwealth nations to Australian universities to gain skills of value in their homelands, they had to be wary. The innocent acceptance of an invitation to attend a May Day party could result in a request from the Immigration Department to explain their presence. As part of the Cold War, USSR and USA were in a race to enter space. Each great power worked with German rocket scientists to gain superiority in nuclear weapons in this ‘cold’ war. Americans were outraged when the USSR made the first successful orbit of the planet in Sputnik. At the Weapons Research Establishment at Salisbury, Australian scientists and technicians developed Jindivik, the over-the-horizon guided missile. The Australian Labor Party was split. The Democratic Labor Party supported the anti-Communist stance of the Menzies government. The Joseph McCarthy-led, Un-American Activities Committee had an effect in Australian states.

Robert Menzies, Australia’s Prime Minister, wanted to outlaw the Communist Party. He failed to get the required result in the referendum as Australians voted to protect the democratic right to freedom of speech. However teachers who dared to teach about the contemporary world could be summoned by officers of the Education Department. That happened when Fred Vickery refused to order his teachers to avoid use of a particular text. A principal, with a rare MA, Mr Vickery was not prepared to be told how to run Le Fevre Boys Technical High School. He believed that the contemporary-oriented, social studies programme was very important in a boy’s general education. Mary P. Harris records the concern expressed by a ‘military gentleman’, in a high position in the Education Department, who was worried by the fact that the Girls Central Art School produced plays whose central theme was peace. Teachers might be challenged by inspectors. One inspector, whose ignorance of the political situation in Europe was only matched by his determination to limit the right of students and teachers to discuss current events in a thoughtful atmosphere, got his way.

The irony of this determination to limit the effectiveness of the newly developing social studies lies in its opposition to the educational findings of the Bean Committee. Established in 1943, the final Bean report was presented in 1949. World War II was a catalyst for the re-examination of the best way to educate young people. Unquestioning obedience was no longer seen as a prerequisite for learning. The world-wide recognition, through photographs, the stories of the survivors and German records of the truth of the Holocaust, brought with it a level of disgust at the depths to which human beings could sink. The American judge in the Nuremberg trials, following the defeat of Germany, refused to accept the defence pleas of those who put into operation ‘the Final Solution’: they were only obeying orders. As thinking human beings, with consciences, they were expected to recognise that what is morally wrong cannot be justified by obedience to the orders of those in authority.

At the same time the racism and anti-Semitism, demonstrated in such a calculated, technically-efficient, death-dealing procedure, encouraged the newly-formed United Nations Organisation, successor to the League of Nations, to produce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945. Australia played a significant part in the formation of that organisation for international peace, co-operation and understanding. At the same time Australia still had in place the ‘White Australia Policy’ and migration from Britain and Europe of ‘displaced persons’ was increasing the cultural variety in Australia’s post-war population.

The Bean Report emphasised the need for children to grow up with a sense of their membership of a community. Dr H.H. Penny, whose advice to Joan Young, Find each child’s doorstep – lead him out from there, highlights her approach to education, was a member of that committee. Dr Penny, who followed Adolf Schulz as the Principal of the Adelaide Teachers College, has remained a key figure much-admired for his humane approach to education. The First Bean Progress Report states:

 

Life in the modern community is very complex, and children can be prepared to take their future place in it only by a long and deliberately planned process of education. Yet a great and dreary burden is laid upon children and teachers too, if it is thought that to educate the child for the future he must be taught at school what he might need, and therefore ‘ought’ to know in adulthood. It is right to expect that the information and skills imparted and the attitudes and standards of conduct formed shall equip him for a good adult life. Yet too much of what is done in school anticipates not only the possible needs, but also the interests and capacities of the child. Inevitably the consequence is that schools try to teach by verbal instruction many things that can only be made real and so effective by securing the active interest and participation of the child. The school has to carry on its work in the here and now, with children as they are here and now. It is a mistake to try to teach him now matters which he will not for some years have the capacity to understand, or to have him memorise the answers to problems that have no present meaning for him. The school educates best for the future by using best all the present interests and capacities of the child. Children so taught are indeed armed to face the future. They are growing in present power to see problems and attack them; they are likely to continue in that growth when schooling days are over.³⁹

Given the conventions of the time that ‘he’ included ‘she’, the committee did not want children forced into a rigid structure. Active involvement required conversation, play, laughter, discussion, the capacity of the teacher to change direction and to follow rather than insist on leading. So the school that educated best allowed children and young people to express their curiosity, ask questions, have the opportunity to explore a problem for themselves and allow their imaginations to flower. Control was not the key to effective learning.

The Bean Report went further. It tackled the issue of the convenient, arbitrary division, so prevalent before 1939, between the practical and the academic. Its finding is worth stating here in the light of the impact of so many global, political, scientific, technological, environmental, often media-stimulated changes as advertisers and commercial enterprises, including schools, promote this or that solution to a problem. For some, these changes are leading to more adventures in space. We have moved so far from the world of Buck Rogers. While many, obsessed with the possibilities ‘out there’ ignore the state of this world because the future lies beyond ‘the third rock from the sun’, others recognise the need for the connection of both spheres of interest. Major changes are demanding re-examination of the way we organise formal education. We have moved through the once imagined world of Jules Verne, bypassing E.M. Forster’s 1904 warning in The Machine Stops, into a world of ‘virtual reality’, bionic men and women and ‘cyber space’.⁴⁰

The Bean Committee refused to be simplistic and reminded government:

 

No simple contrast can usefully be made between the academic and the practical. Bookish studies are ineffective not because the child is dealing with books but when he is dealing badly with books. Practical subjects are good not because the child is handling materials and tools but when he is handling them intelligently and with creative satisfaction. There is as great need to guard the quality of the processes occurring in the mind of the child in what are called the practical subjects as in what are called the academic subjects. We do not wish to be taken as urging that the inclusion in the curriculum is justified only or even chiefly because of the intellectual training which may be derived from them. Soundly devised practical activities, including as they do craft work, laboratory work, varied forms of expressive work, outdoor observations and so forth, not only challenge the intellect and inform the mind, they enrich the child’s sense of belonging to society and afford deep emotional satisfaction. It is not necessary, indeed it is unwise, to decry those subjects which deal largely with ideas in order to make a case for those that deal largely with things. The antithesis is false, and will do harm to both.⁴¹

When this report was finally presented, Dr Fenner, because of ill health, had resigned as Director of Education. In 1924, in Apprenticeship Training: An Experiment in Compulsory Specialized Adolescent Education, he had written, ‘The general principle has been kept in mind that “It is unwise to put tight clothes on the growing child”. The work is thus more free to grow and to develop, and less likely to meet with the friction and resentment that might accompany more rigid methods.’ While Dr Fenner is remembered for his role in vocational and technical education, his open approach to learning, so evident in these early words of his, should not be forgotten. He was replaced by Colonel Evan Mander-Jones.

The distinctively different public schools that form most of the opening section of this collection were changed or about to change. The Dalton Plan of student, self-directed learning disappeared from Thebarton. Teachers joined the armed forces. That modern methodology needed conscious staff commitment. War-time cuts to staff, with older men staying on, brought about decline in support for this student-oriented approach. The Girls Central Art School was closed for the reasons given earlier. The School of Mines was expanding and became the South Australian Institute of Technology. It needed the whole of the Brookman Building. Adelaide Technical High School required a new home. In 1963, on its new site at Glenunga, ATHS returned to departmental control within the Technical Branch and lost its élite status.

The words of the Bean Report were ignored. Division between the ‘techs’ and the ‘high’ schools deepened. In spite of the fact that Colonel Mander-Jones tried to justify the division as educationally-equitable, that is not how students saw it, particularly the girls. Some commentators have seen the period between 1940 and 1957 as the ‘golden age’ of the ‘techs’ but technological changes in society were demanding that educational institutions respond. The British less obtrusive approach to ‘trade’, although important in Britain’s relationship with Australia, was being challenged. While considered ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, given the age-old landed gentry and scholarly distinctions, the British still valued an educational approach that included the classics. As a result, in Adelaide, Latin still had an honoured place in high schools.

Television brought American commercial values more obviously into play. The kind of music played was changing. With television, advertising could add visual images and produce more sophisticated sound tracks, in contrast to the advertising jingles formerly played over the radio. For example, ‘white goods’ advertisements for kitchens glamorised the role of and set new material standards for the successful, respectable housewife and mother. A different way of seeing, with technology admired for what it brought in the way of labour-saving devices, was entering families’ living rooms. With almost full employment there was less need for students to leave school early. In television and film young people were being encouraged to question traditional attitudes. Motor cars were beginning to allow young people to move further afield. The age of ‘children should be seen and not heard’ was over.

Boundaries were beginning to blur

In the late 1940s, girls in ‘techs’ began to refuse to go to the neighbouring ‘high’ school to undertake PEB subjects. Heads of the girls’ technical schools could not put back the clock. At Thebarton Girls Tech, for instance, a father insisted that the headmistress include PEB courses for his daughter unless she wanted to lose one of her top students. Later, when there was another attempt to return the school to internally-examined subjects, a girl organised others to force the headmistress to retain the general, tertiary-oriented, externally-examined Leaving subjects. At the same time students in ‘high’ schools, not wanting to transfer to the ‘tech’ down the road, were obviously beginning to need and seek alternative courses. Parents were slowly beginning to put pressure on schools to meet the changing needs of their daughters and sons.

Some teachers might bemoan the loss of freedom to explore ideas with students or suit courses to students’ interests and needs as future citizens as well as workers, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers and people with leisure time to enjoy, but the PEB was king. If one wanted access to tertiary courses, one needed that ‘key’ to the door. University education was expensive. For children in poorer suburbs, access could only come through university scholarships, teaching scholarships, becoming bonded teachers or through nursing. For boys, the School of Mines still provided an avenue for those who wanted to move beyond the top of their trade. One contributor, however, reminds the reader that people from the western suburbs were not expected to have high aspirations.

Colonel Evan Mander-Jones might justify the secondary schools’ division, challenged in Professor R. Freeman Butts’ examination of Australian education. He attacked Professor Butts’ assertion, that there was a hierarchy of the different kind of schools in this country, using the following argument:

 

It is, of course, natural and proper for individual girls and boys to consider their own school best, and that they should have a special pride in belonging to their school. It is also admitted that there are differences between our secondary schools and it is no doubt true that in some States, if not in all, there are one or two schools which for some reason or other – for example, the length of time for which they have been established, or the nature of their buildings, or the principle of selection of those who enter them – are more highly esteemed than others. This is not the general case, and I fear that Professor Butts and other visiting celebrities have allowed their judgement to be clouded by preconceived ideas based on practice in other countries.⁴²

The Director of Education tried to justify the system, insisting that equal opportunity existed by providing the two kinds of public secondary schools. That was not the way that parents, teachers and students often saw it. Perceptions influence reality. As politicians know, and use to their advantage, perceptions – regardless of the evidence or lack of it – often become the basis for far-reaching political decisions.

However, in the same article, Colonel Mander-Jones was beginning to recognise the need to reform the curriculum. His language in this address to the Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Institutes of Inspectors of Schools, Adelaide, on 7 September 1956, is instructive.⁴³

He describes ‘the techs’ as ‘schools which are more or less consciously designed for those girls and boys who are not aiming at occupations in which the accent is on constructive and original thought, but who wish to develop their mental capacity and to use their hands as well as their heads’.

Supporting the push for the reform of the curriculum Mander-Jones wrote, ‘We must try to free ourselves from the prejudices we have imbibed throughout our lives, and which enfold us like closely fitting garments.’ His use of this metaphor is reminiscent of Charles Fenner’s 1924 concern with the tightness of garments on the growing child.

Colonel Mander-Jones’ limited understanding of the situations of so many South Australian families is clear in his description of the decline of home-based teaching by parents in such areas as ‘correct habits of speech, a knowledge of the best of English literature, an acquaintance with the arts and graces of life and perhaps the ability to practise one of those arts, and the development of physical health and strength were accepted as the duty of parents – at any rate in those homes where there was any pretence at the full discharge of parental responsibility.’

How many of the parents he disparaged had had an education that took them beyond primary school? How many had been kept back year after year because they had not reached the pass level required for promotion? How many parents had been encouraged to see school as the place for a broadening, enlightening, educational experience? How many enjoyed the experiences they had? If one goes by nightmarish stories of school discipline and bullying, of heads thrust down toilets and newcomers having their lunch stolen, there is limited evidence that schools were seen as places of friendship and fair play: they were more likely to be places about which one was made anxious by fear-filled stereotypes.

Churches and families seemed to be losing their influence. Mander-Jones believed that schools would have to be the source of traditional moral and ethical standards of behaviour on which the ‘future of our community must rest’.⁴⁴ His seven definite aims for education, with their emphasis on thinking, reveal the fears that influenced his approach, particularly his concern for the manipulation of the minds of young adults of the future in the 1960s. Therefore his address is included in the text. It is the only one that explores the educational situation through the analysis of a contemporary European thinker, Arthur Koestler. The contemporary early twenty-first century political and economic emphasis on individualism was certainly not his. His expressed aims, however, did not encourage him to move towards a more comprehensive approach to secondary education.

In another article in the following year, Max Bone, then an inspector of technical schools, took the opportunity to attack the ‘hierarchy of subjects’ and the ‘hierarchy’ of students that relegated those who couldn’t do Latin to technical subjects. His article, too, emphasised the significance of young people as citizens. He insisted that the absence of a sound theory of secondary education was at the heart of the inadequacy of secondary education in South Australia. In a way, as his curriculum shows, he was arguing for a comprehensive approach to education. As a challenge to the administrators of the time his article is included in the text.

In his essay, ‘The Challenge of Universal Secondary Education’ Denis Grundy recognises that Max Bone saw units of learning as tools for living and writes: ‘Max Bone had a vision that was far removed from the realities he had to administer. To realise that vision, he required strong and sympathetic leadership from his Department’s head, the Director of Education, and an understanding government moved by community expectations that accorded with radical education change. Neither was forthcoming.’⁴⁵

‘Don’t blame poor Elvis Presley’

The pragmatic move forward that did occur came as a result of the school-based population explosion. With it came the desire to enable more students, in their single-sex technical schools, to stay on into the senior years and meet the increasing commercial and industrial requirements for a wider range of better qualified skilled workers. It must be remembered that most of the ‘old’ techs had been housed in buildings constructed for the primary schools-cum-central schools in the late 1920s. Important exceptions were Whyalla Technical High School and Norwood Boys Technical School transferred in the late 1950s to its imposing red brick building on Kensington Road. For the most part expanding school populations were being housed in pre-fabricated, post war constructions being moved around the state. John Walker had been given the task of housing the growing student population after 1945 in such transportables. Therefore, in terms of infrastructure, very little had been done between 1945 and 1957 as far as the ‘techs’ were concerned. The technical teachers describe the conditions in which they were expected to teach and the ways they worked to improve conditions for their students and themselves.

New considerations had to be taken into account in the late 1950s. Fears that television would undermine South Australia’s traditional family values were strong. Since 27 September 1956 the sounds and sights, in black and white, of events throughout the world, but particularly from America, were coming into living rooms where more and more furniture was being bought on the ‘never-never’, the colloquialism for credit. Through the long-playing record young people had more continuous access to the latest music which brought with it a different ‘language’. Advertisers wooed a new market for adolescent-oriented consumer goods. New fashions, new heroes like James Dean, star of Rebel Without A Cause, new ‘rock ’n roll’ dances and the pelvis-driving rhythm of a white, guitar-playing Pied Piper appeared to be leading young people away from paths older people approved. In Australia Johnny O’Keefe became a teenage icon.

So strong were these fears that a non-profit book, ‘The Gap’ of the Years Between – A Book to Bridge the Dangerous Years, was edited by Dick Worthley. A collection of articles, ‘financed by more than a 100 South Australian citizens, companies, organisations and church bodies’, it sought, as the Chief Secretary Sir Lyell McEwin wrote, ‘to maintain our civilisation and the family life we know and desire.’ Examples in the publication reveal the atmosphere that had its influence on the structure of and attitudes encouraged in secondary schools which dealt with ‘the years between’. Schools were seen as bastions for the conservation of those traditional community values.

In the collection Brigadier J.G. McKinna explained Why the Anti-Larrikin Squad was Formed. Constance McGrath wrote Help Wanted – Help Found. Gillian Cashmore looked at the pop scene and said, Don’t Blame Poor Elvis Presley. The young Aboriginal star of the Australian film Jedda, produced in 1955, Ngala Kunoth, asked young people to join her pen club where colour did not matter. Superintendent G.M. Leane wrote about The Art of Punishment. Mary Smith, child psychologist, put The Case for the Migrant Child. Eileen Sharman, so instrumental in the development of film and media studies in South Australia, listed the Ons and Offs of Television. Sergeant Hector Gollan opened The Doors of Delinquency – With a Girl and Her Mother with reference to a ‘widgie’. Foster Williams, Port Adelaide’s legendary captain and coach, recognised that Everyone Can’t Be Champion of the World – But Every Home needs a Captain-Coach. Marjorie Jackson, now Governor of South Australia and one of the great Australian champions of the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, told her story about My Mother and the Olympic Gold Medal.

The President of the South Australian Institute of Teachers, F.H. Davis insisted:

In our young people I have faith abounding. They are as sound as they ever were. An expanding world has given them new outlooks, new freedoms and you can feel, see and sense them responding to challenge. Crabbed age and youth have always been at variance.

Bridges have always had to be crossed. Perhaps the difference is that, in our time, all humanity now stands at the precipice. The enlightened today cannot afford to fail.

Who was enlightened? What was the precipice? Why were atomic bombs being tested at Maralinga and Bikini Atoll? Why were so many concerned about the directions ‘teenagers’ – a new word – were taking? Was it perhaps because they had ‘wash’d eyes’?⁴⁶ Was the ‘gap’ between adult words and actions becoming more obvious to the young?

Mr Davis went on to warn about the latest developments in manufacturing technology. He wrote of the impact that automation would have on the nature of paid work. He foretold that these changes in manufacturing would bring leisure to millions. He begged, Let not the choice be between Einstein and Shakespeare; between relativity and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. He recognised the need for an education which embraced the humanities and the sciences, vocation, even still in the ‘old’ meaning of a ‘calling’, and recreation.

Who was listening? Was the one teachers’ college changing the way secondary teachers were prepared? Was the University of Adelaide’s School of Education ready to take students into this changing future? What of the unions? What of the major political parties? Did the academic teachers in schools see value in the clubs, the leisure and sports-based electives in the schools? How many of them resented time taken from the ‘important’ PEB-endorsed subjects? Did anyone listen to Ngala Kunoth? 1957 was a decade before the referendum that finally recognised the existence of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander peoples who were to be counted in the census after 1967. While the following event came three years later, when the organisers of the first Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1960 wanted to present Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year, with its disturbing focus on Anzac Day celebrations, its choice and subsequent rejection were further evidence that the traditional Australian ‘verities’ were being questioned.

A new approach – ‘Teach them attitude’

The new technical high schools, of which Mitchell Park Boys and Vermont Girls Technical High Schools were the first, did signal one difference. The absence of ‘junior’ and the addition of ‘high’ in their titles marked a change in attitude and perception in at least one section of the Education Department. These schools would now be expected to take their students into senior classes. The Intermediate was no longer the exit point for most students. These new technical high schools also meant less pressure for the neighbouring ‘high’ schools in the suburbs, as the urban-dwelling population spread north and south of Adelaide. In fact they became an avenue of escape for those who wanted ‘high’ schools to keep their academic status. Students identified as not belonging in ‘academic’ high schools could be coerced or encouraged to enrol in the ‘alternative’ technical high school down the road.

Evidence of the change in approach within the ‘techs’ of the 1960s begins with the words of a direct entrant teaching music and social studies at Mitchell Park. When he asked how best to teach a particular group the headmaster, Bert Mitchell, renowned as a former league footballer, gave him this advice. ‘Teach them attitude.’

The new ‘techs’, with John Walker as Deputy Director of Education and Max Bone, now Superintendent of Technical Schools in the 1960s, were encouraged to experiment. Some schools developed programmes on their own. That was the case with Eric Bryce in the field of music at Norwood Boys Tech. His initiatives provided the foundation for effective, instrumentally-based music teaching throughout the state. At the same time, in spite of opposition, alternative courses were recognised as needed in the ‘high’ schools. The overwhelming number of in-service conferences in the 1960s was not just for teachers who were ‘direct entrants’ from trades and commerce. Subject-based conferences encouraged co-operation between teachers. Teaching in isolation was beginning to be seen as inefficient. Teachers were being encouraged to share ideas and methods. Study of the in-service conferences in the 1960s indicates just how constant an effort was made, to encourage teachers to share their expertise.

That encouragement increased after three other teachers’ colleges were established. The Western Teachers College, with its focus on the arts, crafts and technical subjects, was prominent in its efforts to increase recognition of the value of practically-oriented, secondary education. Primary-trained teachers, from Wattle Park Teachers College, were seen to have value in the technical high schools, and area schools, because their training did not as rigidly adhere to subject boundaries. At the same time the High Schools Branch could keep the scarce resource of fully, college/university-trained secondary teachers for its own schools.

Direct entrants, with their up-to-date knowledge of contemporary technology and commercial enterprise, encouraged older teachers to keep up with modern times. New methods of teaching typing were being introduced, sometimes against the wishes of seniors. Shorthand was changing, and it would change further when the dicta-phone and portable tape recorder reduced the demand by managers for skilled stenographers. Students’ concerns about the unfashionable and inappropriate methods of older, single, dressmaking teachers were being addressed. Some girls were happy to wear the clothes they made including, as Avis Gale writes, Aboriginal girls for whom these dresses were a change from the institutional clothing they were expected to wear. For many others the ‘Peter Pan collar’, and all it stood for of sweetness and gentility, was out! Washing machines were replacing the gas or wood-fired copper boiler and hand-turned mangle. Refrigerators, with their capacity for freezing food for long periods, replaced ice-chests and changed home economics. Film was increasingly an avenue of learning.

With the establishment of a second university at Bedford Park, this second School of Education showed interest in working with teachers.⁴⁷ A lecturer at Adelaide University wanted to experiment in schools with more problem-solving approaches to maths. The inspector for mathematics scotched the plans to work in high schools so Mitchell Park, the ‘flagship’ of the new techs, took on the task. In his contribution Brian Fopp comments on the challenges for mathematical methodologies in the 1960s.

Every social and technological development was revealing the need for the two branches of secondary education to be brought together; every move, that is, except entrenched attitudes. Dr Denis Grundy, in his research, commented on the growing challenge of the demand for universal secondary education. That challenge was met in the Karmel Report on Education in South Australia even though, in legislative terms, students could still leave school at the end of the term in which they turned 15.

Would the walls between science and tech studies come down?

This heart-felt question by Maurice Ey is a most appropriate starting point for the consideration of the impact of the Karmel Report on South Australian secondary education. This report insisted that education could not be divorced from the fabric of the society in which it occurred. The Karmel Committee clearly sought to remove the obvious social and educational inequity within the divided secondary system which reflected the divisions of the past. The committee considered that it would be more equitable, economically effective and efficient to deliver a flexible curriculum on one co-educational site. Such a situation would enable greater co-operation between subject faculties and create the collaborative framework to encourage cross curricular connections in the interest of students’ learning.

Moreover, the tendency of the High School Branch to keep those they saw as the best academic staff for themselves, to the detriment of the academic component of technical high schools, would end. Alby Jones admits that the High School Branch set out to ensure that it employed those it considered to be the best teachers in academic terms.

There is evidence that the committee wanted to see more connections between subjects, in particular, between science and technology. The social impact of new technology, such as computers, mattered to them. In Appendix H, among others, these proposals were made.

Regarding agriculture – An integrated course that includes management as well as science should be provided.

For commercial studies – Below the fifth secondary year, studies should be general and not immediately vocational. At fifth year, accounting should be available, together with shorthand, typewriting and communication.

Computers – All children should study the social effects of computers on man, and methods of analysing problems fundamental to programming should be taught at senior levels.

Engineering or Technology Studies – Experiments should be conducted with courses in upper secondary school in which projects in technology are used to interest pupils, encourage divergent thinking and develop scientific knowledge.

History – History should be the basic subject on which an integrative approach to the curriculum should be made. Better teaching and more facilities (texts, reference books etc) should be provided. Aboriginal history should be an important area for curriculum development.

Languages – … Language and cultural studies should be an integral part of social studies courses.

Social studies – Asian studies should be a matriculation subject. Studies should be included of political process in Australia.

 

Health, safety education and field studies of the environment were considered significant for the secondary curriculum.⁴⁸

How far these curricular proposals, particularly those connecting science and technology, were implemented would require the examination of the courses put in place by the powerful Public Examinations Board as well as an examination of the approaches of lecturers in the secondary sections of the Schools of Education and Advanced Colleges of Education. Such analysis might throw light on the attitudes of teachers, trained to operate within their disciplines, towards such interdisciplinary projects. It has taken until the 1990s for many universities to commit themselves formally to interdisciplinary approaches to learning. Teachers are well aware of the influence the PEB has had on the attitude of teachers eager to demonstrate their prowess through the success rates of their students in their subjects in PEB examinations.

One teacher contributor in the late 1960s ‘felt the foundations [of the binary system] rocking’. One girl took delight in her young teacher who was ‘dazzlingly contemporary’. A young man at Mitchell Park Boys Technical High School insists that the best thing that happened to his school was becoming co-educational. Not all contributors long for a return to the separation of the ‘techs’ from the ‘highs’. Girls, on the whole, have not been eager for the return to an education that too many saw as second rate. One contributor, one of the first student counsellors, reports the view of a primary school headmaster who believed that all ‘highs’ should have become ‘techs’. Then they might have developed some of the caring, affective elements of the technical high schools. However, that was not likely given the power of the PEB. By 1975, for instance, not one teacher from the former techs was on the PEB modern history syllabus committee. Dr Jones insists that, without the co-operation of Mr Barter, Director of Education, the high schools – which needed the alternative courses so often developed in the technical schools – would never have agreed to be, often grudgingly, involved in the change.⁴⁹ He need not have worried. Many, mostly general, teachers in the former technical schools were just as hypnotised by the image of the ‘academic’, PEB-oriented high schools as the former ‘high’ schools had always been.

The different reactions to the Karmel Report reveal not only the impact of this change to a unified, comprehensive secondary education system but the limited information provided to individual teachers who relied on their principals, and the gazettes, for information. Maurice Ey’s question, asked about the hopes he had as a technical studies teacher at the now combined, co-educational Marryatville High School, an amalgamation of Norwood Boys Tech and Kensington Girls Tech, was not necessarily being asked, let alone answered, in other secondary schools. For example, I only discovered that we were all to become comprehensive secondary schools when the principal of Brighton Boys Technical High School asked me whether I should like to see this single-sex school become co-educational. It was, and is, not unusual for teachers, concentrating on their daily engagement with students, to be unaware of the implications of ‘big picture’ changes. That is one of the problems schools continue to face particularly as the teacher-aid support staff, brought in during the 1970s, decline in number. Time for reflection, always minimal, is still limited.

Freedom and Authority – The Jones Memorandum

A few principals did understand the significant opportunities offered by this change. Les Kemp, founding principal of Banksia Park High School, former principal of Smithfield Plains and teacher at Nailsworth Boys Technical High School, was one of them. At Banksia Park Les Kemp, with student counsellor Sue Linton, devised the Learning Assistance Programme (LAP) that has been taken up internationally.⁵⁰ He saw the transformation to comprehensive schools as a move in a more equitable direction. His contribution, in particular his letter to John Steinle attacking the backward looking Keeves Report of 1984, concentrates upon what would be lost if that negative report were to be implemented. In 1974 Brian Hannaford, appointed head of Marion High School, formerly spoken of as ‘Cosgrove College’, seized the opportunity to foster a school philosophy based on equal esteem for all learning. Not that he was always successful. He was one of the principals who began, as a result of this new freedom, to appoint seniors with integrative roles, in outdoor education and in the imaginative inter-disciplinary centre, known as the Lalor Learning Centre, to encourage interdisciplinary approaches to students’ learning.

Some principals of former technical high schools saw the addition of the range of subjects as a chance to allow their students to demonstrate their abilities in that wider field of the external examinations as well as in the internal examinations for school-based subjects. On the other hand, Edna Wilson, at Mitcham Girls High School, decided to establish the first, leadership-oriented, non-matriculation fifth year programme in the state. Most principals of former technical high schools saw themselves as retaining the best of both secondary worlds, able to link practically-oriented study with theory in allied subjects while still putting students first. For example, at Mawson High School (formerly Brighton Boys Tech) where the special class was studying safety in the home, the teacher had the co-operation of a science teacher willing to explain the nature of electricity while the electronics teacher helped the students to make models demonstrating the difference between alternating and direct currents. In addition, the presence of newly-appointed student counsellors and deputy principals responsible for curriculum development could help staff to focus on approaches to students as well as content, if the atmosphere within the school fostered such self-criticism and creativity. At the same time more schools began to establish work experience programmes.

These positions were put in place to help schools take advantage of opportunities provided by the Freedom and Authority Memorandum to which Dr A.W. Jones, Director-General of Education, refers in his contribution. Additional supports set up to encourage individual schools to embrace this new freedom included the Wattle Park Teachers Resource Centre. Colin Thiele was its first principal, Garth Boomer its second. Experienced teachers were extracted from schools to become consultants in their subject fields, a number coming from Mitchell Park Boys Technical High School. A transition support group, directed to oversee vocational education and work experience, was established with Bob Walters as its organiser. The Raywood In-service Centre, once the Downer residence, was established to enable live-in, longer term examination of changes and to provide opportunities to think creatively about approaches in schools. Graham’s Castle at Goolwa fulfilled the same function.

Teachers, and school administrators, often committed to dealing with the many increasingly difficult day-by-day issues in schools, a product of the changing, increasingly multi-cultural and less submissive student culture of the 1970s, or the centralised, PEB-directed curriculum, could resent intrusion into their school weeks or weekends. Bringing about change was not easy. Evidence of where there was willingness to re-examine processes and share ideas can be found in the texts produced. For example, Ideas for Year 11 English,⁵¹ published in 1977, contains no contribution from teachers of English at Adelaide, Brighton, Marion, Norwood, Unley or Woodville High Schools. Among the former ‘tech high’ schools contributing were Christies Beach, Eyre, Mawson, Seaton, Smithfield Plains and Whyalla. Area schools, country high schools and newer metropolitan high schools produced contributions. Of the independent schools, only girls schools, Methodist Ladies College and Woodlands Church of England Girls Grammar School provided ideas and, from Catholic Education, St Aloysius College.

Attitudes affect approaches to education. The 1970s were times of political and social ferment. Anti-Vietnam marches demonstrated that Australians were no longer willing meekly to accept the federal government’s decision to go ‘all the way with LBJ’. Another women’s liberation movement had begun. Phrases such as ‘the permissive society’ increased the anxiety of parents. Slogans became substitutes for substance in society and in education. On the rear windows of station, often ‘passion’, wagons, road users read signs saying ‘If it feels good, do it’. In schools, slogans, such as ‘It’s the process not the product’ helped to divide staff about methodologies.

While parents were primarily interested in the outcomes for their children, many parental expectations for children had changed. Some wanted small, more flexible schools. Some wanted the inclusion of ethnic languages to change the narrow, assimilationist direction of education. Others still relied on uniform and the conservative, closer-to-private-school image and structure to protect their families from the impact of cultural changes. Not that all adolescents necessarily wanted such protection. Students’ challenges to schools’ authority increased. The letter Geoff Thorpe sent to parents about a student meeting at Elder Park demonstrates one approach used to meet this new challenge.

The Freedom and Authority Memorandum threw the onus of coping with change on the individual schools. At the same time zoning ended and secondary schools began to compete for enrolments. Zoning had encouraged parents to lie about which side of the street their children lived on to enrol them in the local school with the prestige. Schools were encouraged to adapt programmes to meet the needs of students in their region. Brian Fopp’s description of the changes made when Mt Gambier Technical High School became Grant High School provides an example of successful transition. The Education Department offered advice but avoided responsibility for the impact of changes. For example, schools that dared to move away from the traditional reliance on uniform, a prescriptive set of rules and a PEB-based curriculum made a courageous decision.

The central role of technical studies disappeared. Timetables were no longer constructed around them. The former technical high schools still maintained a focus on these important traditional, vocational subjects but these largely co-educational schools⁵² were being required to include new subjects such as health education, road safety, and alternative secular, ethically-based options for the increasing number refusing to attend religious instruction; that is, until religious instruction by members of the respective denominations ended. New subjects, drama and music, were being made available.

While girls were able to experience the traditional boys’ crafts and vice versa, many very able students moved into the newer technical subjects that included design, plastics, electronics, automotive mechanics and photography. Alternatively, they undertook more academic subjects and fewer technical ones. At the same time new approaches to the teaching of science, mathematics and English increased the anxiety of parents. Continuous assessment was less clear cut than external examinations. In a State where parents, and many teachers, had been used to relying on a dominant, authoritative, central administration, every move to professionally-based, self-direction in schools could be interpreted as a decline in standards. Media found headlines in the resulting uncertainty. The stronger industrial orientation of the SA Institute of Teachers, which helped women finally to receive equal pay for equal work, increased that anxiety in what remained essentially a conservative society, not withstanding the impact of the Dunstan decade.

Pressures on these former ‘tech high’ schools did not decrease. Primary schools still tended to protect the former ‘high’ schools by sending to the newer schools students they identified as needing extra care and help. And the opposite occurred. Protective primary school teachers would suggest the traditional high school as the safer option. The frustration created by the perpetuation of these deeply embedded prejudices is evident in more than one contribution that deals with the transformation of the ‘techs’. Very little assistance came from the Education Department. As enrolments became the key to survival, as early as 1977, the new comprehensive schools had to sell themselves. Marryatville High School, for example, had to out-do the many private schools in the eastern suburbs, as well as Norwood High School. Becoming a special music school helped, as did the personality and educational approach of its principal, Glen McArthur. Some parents had chosen schools after they visited local schools to talk to and judge the calibre of each principal. A professor at Flinders University gave that as his reason for sending his son to Mawson, the former Brighton Boys Technical High School.

Another major change coincided with the establishment of the comprehensive secondary structure. This was the separation of further education, with Max Bone as its Director-General, from secondary education. This departure had unforeseen effects for the former technical schools. One of their reasons for being seemed to disappear. From 1940 to 1974 technical schools had provided evening, school-extension opportunities for adults who wanted to develop recreational interests, complete PEB certificates or improve technical skills. Working at night with mature-age students, in PEB, practical or creative subjects, had been stimulating for many teachers. Day time students often benefited from ideas generated in those evening classes. After 1974, community-based night classes continued only if schools wanted to keep them and many did not. Trade schools, now technical colleges, became Colleges of Further Education. Evidence of changes in the approach to Indigenous education lay in the establishment of the Ananguku Mechanical Training Centre at Ernabella. Kilkenny College of Further Education became the nucleus of the contemporary multi-media centre.⁵³

Whitlam and equal opportunity

The most important change that coincided with the implementation of the Karmel Report, by The Hon Hugh Hudson, Minister of Education in the Dunstan government, was the advent, in 1972, of the first federal Labor government since Ben Chifley’s defeat. As Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam was determined to provide access to higher education for all interested in and able to undertake it. This federal government set out to ensure equality of opportunity. Tertiary education was made free. Student union fees were still paid to enable student unions to provide the range of facilities, clubs and supports needed by university students. That equal opportunity included federal financial support for Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander families in urban and rural areas and for the newcomers of all nationalities. The appointment of Al Grasby as Minister for Immigration showed how far the Australian Labor Party had come from the time of Arthur Calwell. Federal policy relied, for implementation, on the willingness of the States to put in place the educational policies and practices, at primary and secondary levels, that would identify disadvantaged groups and provide the structures and supports needed to make equal opportunity a reality.

At the primary and secondary level, schools were identified as disadvantaged and federal funds went into their support. Wal Fisher and Gordon Phillips provide insights into the programmes established to encourage students to stay at school. The most exciting initiative, as Alby Jones told Marie Cawthen, was the concept of the community centre where health, education, child care, a performance space, recreation, through sporting facilities and a swimming pool, and multi-cultural support would be brought together with the school, which would also bring adults back into education. Thebarton was to be one of those centres. Eventually, only The Parks, created out of the connection of Angle Park Boys and Girls Techs, became such a community school.

That ideal of equal opportunity could be easily undermined. On November 11th 1975 the Whitlam government was sacked by the Governor-General, Sir William Kerr, after the Liberal-dominated Senate refused to pass Supply. Economically it appeared, according to headlines, that the federal government would not be able to pay its way. This meant uncertainty for the States. Federal money had been helping schools to update facilities. Schools were being provided with larger, more attractive and inviting libraries and resource centres with associated tutorial rooms, rooms where student counsellors could talk to students well away from the eyes of school administrators, and rooms for the use of audio-visual equipment and with fully-trained teacher-librarians. Joan Dallwitz, a ‘direct entry’ art/craft teacher, describes how and why she became a librarian.

The early optimism of the 1970s disappeared as unemployment increased in the middle of the decade. That is why Malcolm Fraser won the election following the dismissal. At the same time, statisticians suggested that student populations were on the decline and, in 1977, the Education Department began to displace teachers. Many newly-comprehensive secondary schools began the retreat to the safety of tradition to try to keep their school enrolments above the magic number that would preclude the divisiveness of the ‘displacement exercise’.

Pavla Miller writes:

 

Youth unemployment remained at about 30 per cent of the total but became a visible and highly-publicised social issue … In 1981, according to the Commonwealth Employment Service, there were about 26 young job-seekers for every registered vacancy. The official (and grossly underestimated) unemployment rate for the 15 to 19 year old age group had risen from 3.2 per cent in 1970 to 12.9 per cent in 1975 and 22.6 in 1983 … In South Australia, according to the 1981 census, the unemployment rate for 15 to 19 year old women in working-class Elizabeth was 31.6 per cent and, for men, 29.4 per cent.’⁵⁴

Not all contributors approve of the actions undertaken by the Whitlam government. One teacher equates ‘equal opportunity’ with a new sameness. She interprets the phrase to mean ‘equal outcomes’, resulting in mediocrity. That perception of mediocrity was intensified when letters replaced percentages on reports. Where was the recognition of effort and individual achievement? Other contributors lament the loss of the caring, more imaginative Technical Branch whose inspectors had maintained a personal connection with their schools, knowing and valuing the inventiveness of their staff. These contributors found the reconstructed secondary education administration much more impersonal. Even though internal examinations were legitimised as school-assessed subjects (SAS), the PEB was still the benchmark by which student success was judged. The decentralised regional offices receive very little mention, except in the case of Mawson High School where the southern regional office failed to support the school, which was still taking a preponderance of students with learning and behavioural problems.

Shock waves in the 1970s

In the field of vocational opportunities, air travel replaced sea travel for Australians going overseas. The change from turbo-prop to jet engines meant that more, and larger, planes increased the number of people experiencing the world beyond Australian shores. Qantas, then fully Australian-owned, was taking the flying kangaroo to more and more international airports. Aircraft engineers, mechanics, stewards, pilots, airports, counter staffs, runways, suitcase manufacturers and all kinds of allied occupations expanded avenues of paid work. By the 1970s aeroplanes were capable of travelling at supersonic speed. The development of Concorde brought with it controversy about its impact on the environment. Among its opponents was Judith Wright, one of Australia’s major poets. People were, more and more, seeing their task, as active citizens, was to challenge thoughtless, bureaucratic decisions. Sometimes they made a difference. Concorde, with its sonic booms and massive intake of fossil fuel, only flew across the Atlantic from London or Paris to New York, a lucrative route on which it did not have to fly over a great land mass.

On a global scale the 1970s were full of other shock waves: terrorism at the Munich Olympic games, bombings as a political weapon in Ulster and England, black children gunned down in Soweto in South Africa. Leaks in atomic power stations and spills from oil tankers were showing how easy it was to pollute the earth, atmosphere and coastlines. At the same time society was being shown how difficult it was to bring multi-national perpetrators to book. As a result there was increasing interest in the environment across the generations. Indeed the Karmel Report had targeted the environment, as well as the study of Australian history, as areas for study in school-based curricula. The young were more willing to express their opposition to commercially-based or governmental-initiated schemes that would result in the degradation of the environment. With the Vietnam War over, and colour television bringing the realities of the threats to beautiful natural habitats into suburban living rooms, a significant number of Australians could turn their attention to the environment. Even so, they did not save Lake Pedder. At the same time, the new course of outdoor education was taking more students out of the classroom and into the natural world.

In the sphere of medicine, the heart attack need no longer be fatal. Artificial hearts, pacemakers, could prolong life. Intellectually we had information about DNA, actually discovered by Crick and Watson in the 1950s, but the capacity for the genetic engineering of seeds, animals, and people had not yet entered the consciousness of the general community. While this was not true for Aboriginal people, non-Indigenous Australians in general were living longer and staying in the work force longer.

Quality of life meant different things to different people. I remember a question that was increasingly being asked. ‘Do you live to work or do you work to live?’ The materialist consumerism of the 1950s and the early 1960s was being replaced by the development of alternative life styles. Relationships were becoming more important than possessions to some Australians. The technology of film for the wide screen and television was changing the traditional, vocational approach to ‘making’ and ‘doing’. In this visually-stimulating, distinctively-packaged commercial world, design became more central in the minds of advertisers. Entertainment, on increasingly sophisticated wider screens, was taking people beyond this planet. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, later E.T. moved the focus of mass audiences to limitless galaxies. On television Lost in Space was replaced by Star Trek.

At the same time there were other changes in the field of entertainment. Some startled and disturbed members of the older generations, while exciting the young. The founder of Christianity became Jesus Christ Superstar. Given the development of ‘super stars’ in all fields of sport and entertainment, the composition of this ‘rock’ musical was not as surprising as it might have been. What is interesting is that this musical came out of ‘swinging’, increasingly multi-cultural, racially-confronting, cosmopolitan London.

The revived Australia’s film industry, beginning with Sunday Too Far Away, produced by the South Australian Film Corporation, offered a range of new vocational opportunities. Alvin Purple laughed at puritanism. The Getting of Wisdom gave cinema-goers a different view of the Barry Humphries we know as Dame Edna. In the Australian Kennedy-Miller production, Mel Gibson created a frightening picture of Mad Max, moving us into a dog-eat-dog, hot, dry, red-ochre, desolate future.

The ‘cold war’ still justified massive American tax-payer funded expenditure on missiles and Australia had American bases at Pine Gap and on the north western Australian coast. When American astronauts walked on the moon, the Australian radio-telescope at Parkes in New South Wales enabled the world to watch that landing in their living rooms. Australian astronomers, space scientists and experts in robotics increased the excitement of space exploration.⁵⁵ In 1976 the Viking robotic space mission landed on Mars. For a while there was belief that it had proved the existence of life on the red planet. Disappointment followed. One would have thought that, given the increasingly collaborative way that science and technology were working and the encouragement given to interaction in the Karmel Report, educators in South Australia would have taken up this thoughtful, interdisciplinary, inter-active challenge. It did not happen, although the Oliphant Awards began to provide opportunities for schools interested in enabling their students to participate in scientific experiments and modelling. As was usually the case, many primary schools took up the challenge, while fewer secondary schools were willing to take time from their content-driven, PEB-based science subjects.

In the changing technical studies field, photography received a boost with the renewal of the Australian film industry as well as colour television. Film, with all its allied, collaborative opportunities was a new and exciting avenue for young people. Max Bone had encouraged its inclusion in technical schools. Film and media studies were coming into schools often indirectly. Eileen Sharman was fighting for the inclusion of media studies in its own right as a subject. At first film was an extension of English studies with its emphasis on script writing. Some schools set up media studies courses. George Grachanin, in his references to the united Nailsworth High School, describes the work of an enthusiastic teacher. It took that, the enthusiasm of the individual, to begin to move this contemporary, technical avenue of learning into schools. The audio-visual section of the Education Department became the Educational Technology Centre.

The multi-media nature of elaborate entertainments encouraged the development of cross-curricular connections in schools prepared to move beyond the dictates of the publicly-examined subjects. With music as a subject in its own right, and electric guitars so popular, connections between music and electronics could be made. Music, with its ‘special’ school status, and electronics were offering new ‘vocational’ avenues of learning but that adjective was less likely to be applied to them.

However, except in individual schools, the walls between the sciences and technology did not come down. Maurice Ey’s hope was not fulfilled. Viv Veale describes the decline in the depth of knowledge among technical studies students and the apparent increasing irrelevance of traditional boys’ craft in this world of the secondary comprehensive school. Viv Veale describes the changes to timetabling. Few former academic comprehensive schools made a conscientious effort to accommodate the needs of the technical studies subjects. Marion High School, one of the leading schools, developed an unusual varied length timetable not rigidly confined to slots of 30 or 40 minutes. Most schools, however, timetabled double periods, reduced in number sometimes to one double plus one single, for technical/craft/art subjects. Often on a Friday or a Monday, their position in the week indicated the value placed on them in the school and that had an impact on teacher morale. In his description of the transformation of Mt Gambier Technical High School to Grant High School, Brian Fopp acknowledges his debt to Marion High School’s timetabling structure.

The new co-educational, former technical high, comprehensive schools made an effort to retain technical studies but the experiential approach in first year limited the time spent on the traditional crafts. Four schools, three single-sex girls’ schools, Gepps Cross, Mitcham and Port Adelaide and one single-sex boys’ school, Goodwood, fully retained the ethos that valued the technical/craft components in the schools’ curriculum. Evidence of the continuation of that ethos is the fact that, among the public metropolitan secondary schools until 1999, Goodwood High School in 1987 and Mitcham Girls High School were the only two public schools to take up the challenge of developing a solar-powered car. In 1999 Seaton High School joined a solar car group of private and public schools working with the ‘The Levels’, once the South Australian Institute of Technology, soon to be the Mawson Lakes part of the University of South Australia. Such a commitment requires recognition of the educational value of practical, broad-based, hands-on, inter-active education.

Into the 1980s – Our schools and their purposes

In 1979, under the Corcoran Labor government, the Education Department made an effort to acknowledge the educational impact of social, economic, technological and personal changes that filled the 1970s in its new policy document, Our Schools and Their Purposes, subtitled ‘Into the Eighties’. Authoritarian edicts disappeared. The policy document avoided supporting what might be seen as rigid, mindless, codes of conduct. The introductory explanations recognised the existence of alternative approaches to learning. Care was taken to remind schools of the impact of rapid change and the need for students to have transferable skills to survive. The old division between ‘vocational’ and ‘academic’ subjects was gone from the official policy document but not from the minds and hearts of anxious parents.

Nor was it gone from the minds of many teachers wedded to the neatness of teacher-controlled, subject-based, content-specific curricula. One example lies in the failure of many schools to take seriously cross-curricular educational ideas such as language across the curriculum. Whether this concept was ever supported in the Schools of Education where secondary teachers were being trained, I am unaware. Too many science teachers, for instance, still moaned that English teachers had not done their job when science students failed to use the passive voice, where appropriate, in their journal entries detailing observations of laboratory experiments. It was easier to preserve the divisions of the past and allocate blame than collaborate across faculties. Were there science teachers who actually taught the use of the passive voice, where the subject is acted upon by an outside agent, as part of the scientific skill of recording carefully observed laboratory journal entries?⁵⁶

In the 1980s, with the Department of Further Education changed, under the directorship of Lyall Fricker, to the Department of Technical and Further Education, there was even less likelihood that technical subjects could preserve their former status in the technical high schools. Of course they still had value in the minds of students. A young man, who writes that his learning began after he left school, records his appreciation of the act of ‘practical creation’. A young woman expresses her pleasure in being able to show boys just what girls could achieve in technological subjects. Many students enjoy ‘hands-on’ approaches to work. They like to ‘make’ and ‘do’, practise skills, gain insights and learn the related language and theory through involvement.

Schools were expected to emphasise the development of transferable skills of learning to encourage flexibility.⁵⁷ References to technology appeared in terms of human life not just in terms of vocation or paid work. The knowledge explosion, the systems of storing knowledge, the need for ordinary citizens (my italics) to gain access’⁵⁸ would require appropriate skills. The broad vision expressed in this policy document was inclusive.

This policy for the 1980s recognised the integral role of technology in the lives of everyone. Emphasis on transferable skills reinforced the need for interdisciplinary co-operation by teachers in schools. Adaptive approaches clearly mattered. However, students, anxious to secure their futures, were often encouraged by school counsellors, parents, as well as those employers who showed preference for students who had failed PES subjects before those with excellent results in school-examined subjects (SES), to follow the ‘safer’, more conventional course in terms of community perceptions; that is, to tackle the PES-endorsed subjects. In the sphere of secondary education, Schools of Education were still basing their approach to teacher training, to a significant degree, on separate disciplines.

In schools cross-curricular initiatives still depended on the atmosphere and friendships between colleagues who, valuing ‘hands-on’ approaches, were prepared to work together in spite of timetable restrictions. The making of connections still depended on the imagination, the fearlessness, the ability and humility of individual teachers, their willingness to involve their students in the processes and to learn from those students with expertise in different, formal and informal, avenues of learning. At the same time computing and information technology had begun to influence the educational scene.

In his essay, The Challenge of Universal Secondary Education, Denis Grundy comments on the nemesis responsible for the demise of ‘technical schooling’. He sees the narrowly-’vocationally’-oriented ‘high’ schools as undermining schools that had, by their connection of education and work, embraced the concept of learning for living. In his view it is ironic that the PEB, preparing students for entry to ‘professional’ vocations, such as medicine, law, and engineering, had in fact narrowed the focus and the vision, undermining the idea of a liberal education that embraced the humanities, the arts and the sciences. Prestige attached to narrower pathways. In the more fearful ’80s, with Australia’s highest level of debt reached while John Howard was Treasurer, and banks de-regulated when Paul Keating was Treasurer, willingness to be adaptive in educational practice decreased. Our Schools and Their Purposes seemed insufficiently prescriptive and insufficiently directive. Therefore, it was challenged with another enquiry into South Australian education.

Education through Craft was an accepted banner

The phrase heading this section comes from Les Kemp’s response to the Keeves Report. Set up by the Hon. Harold Allison, Minister of Education in the Tonkin Liberal government, the Keeves Committee minimised the significance of practically-oriented, technical courses in schools. The spirit of educational inclusiveness and economic optimism of the early 1970s was gone. Economics and efficiency preoccupied this committee.

Les Kemp, in a letter to John Steinle, castigated the report as a return to the 1950s. A teacher recruited from England, when Alby Jones was Superintendent for recruiting and inservice training of teachers, Les Kemp had been sent to Nailsworth Boys Technical School to teach maths. Next he taught at Angle Park Boys Tech before his appointment to Whyalla, so he understood life in the ‘techs’. As a consequence, he was made principal of Smithfield Plains. Later, with Brian Hannaford, he was one of the innovative principals in the unified comprehensive schools, being the founding principal of Banksia Park, now International, High School. His experience of the binary and the unified systems makes his contribution to this collection a significant one .

In his response to the Keeves Report, published in the SA Teachers Journal, Wednesday 31 March 1982, Les Kemp wrote:

 

The Keeves Report has started a swing against things cultural, practical and physical … Education through Craft was an accepted banner not so long ago. Those who marched under it claimed that many students could, through the medium of craft, learn much about living and maths and science and social skills and other cultures and they were not wrong.⁵⁹

In addition the contrast between the Keeves Report and the earlier hopes for education, back in 1908, is instructive. In 1908 there had been concern with the affective element in education. Its significance 60 years later was shown when those words of Alfred Williams, Director of Education, were recorded in the Karmel Report, already quoted in this introduction. Into the Eighties contained no neat division of ‘vocational’ from ‘academic’, or ‘hand’ from ‘head’. That theoretical separation,⁶⁰ totally ignoring the nervous system in human physiology, was one of the key justifications for the binary secondary system. Paid work was no longer narrowly defined.

By concerning itself with attitudes, the Karmel Report recognised the role of the affective element in education, that is the role of feelings in response to attitudes and experiences in schools and in society as well as the education of the feelings. None of that seemed to matter in the Keeves Report which recommended a return to centralised decision-making, standardised subject syllabus control and inflexible timetabling. The return to centralised syllabus statements was justified on the basis that young teachers said they were at a loss because the freedom, given in the 1970s, allowed them to programme according to their interests rather than students’ needs.⁶¹

This justification ignores the fact that there were deputy principals/curriculum as well as seniors, guidelines and serious efforts, in a range of ways, to encourage teachers to share ideas and approaches they found successful. However, one of the problems identified was attitudinal, as Ian Purcell points out in his comments on experimentation. Some teachers decided that the Freedom and Authority document gave them the right to deny the teaching hierarchy access to information about what they were working on with their students in their classrooms. Such supervision was seen to be unwarranted interference, an attack on professional integrity! Therefore seniors often had to work in hopeful, collaborative ways to encourage co-operation. Some teachers might refuse to co-operate on the grounds that they were not going to let the ‘bludgers’ have the advantage of their efforts. All this was happening while unemployment was increasing at the turn of the decade.

Many of the contributions by teachers reveal the effect on former techs of the anxieties of the 1980s, the suffering, the sense of betrayal, particularly in the case of the closure of Goodwood Boys High School. Bruce Amos describes the emotional impact of the process of closure on students and staff during the last year of Vermont High School. With the exception of contributions by teachers convinced of the necessity to move towards more comprehensive schools, and the forwarding-looking actions at Mitcham Girls High School, there is a feeling of regret for the loss of the technically-oriented schools.

One change at the top was to have an effect in the 1990s. That was the establishment of the Secondary School Assessment Board of South Australia (SSABSA) to replace the Public Examinations Board. This new board still needed to accommodate the Independent, Catholic and Public education systems and it had to cater for schools like the Waldorf School with its different philosophy. The blurring of curricular boundaries forced the universities to think about the bases for entry to university education. Mature-age students were coming, often via TAFEs, from former ‘techs’. Assumptions that students, from practically-oriented, non-traditional, educational backgrounds, would lack the intellectual capacity for university study were being found to be false. Foundation courses such as those, for example, at Flinders University enabled potential students to test their capacity to succeed in tertiary courses.

The SSABSA board was responsible for establishing the courses for Stages 1 and 11, in years 11 and 12, that would lead to the South Australian Certificate of Education. Here the higher education subjects (HES) were to be the prerequisites for university entrance. Subjects were grouped into four categories: drama had to fight to be included in the ‘language rich’ category. Inevitably the technical studies subjects were once more on the outer. No one was prepared to accept that a top-flight student in metalwork or woodwork would have the capacity to cope with university work. One of the contributors from the 1970s began his working life as a refrigeration mechanic. Now, with a Masters degree in Educational Administration, he holds a high administrative position in Technical and Further Education. There are other examples of successful graduates from those former technical high schools. As we moved towards the 1990s, the federally-funded participation and equity programmes (PEP) were fostering an approach that valued not only a wider range of subjects but also links between disciplines. The combination of information technology and the pressure for transferable skills and ‘competencies’ was, at last, having an influence on interdisciplinary co-operation. All this was driven by the recognition, in business and government, of the need for apprentices in the traditional as well as the more contemporary occupations. Girls were more confident about entering trade-based careers. But so many of the schools that had fostered this ethos were being closed.

Educating for the 21st century

Dr Ken Boston followed John Steinle as the new Director-General of Education. Noted for his concentration on business, Ken Boston wrote, in the foreword to this policy document for the 1990s, ‘The Education Department of South Australia is committed to the vision of a future in which the students of today will play a key role in making Australia a culturally rich and competitive nation.’ Competition was more important than community or citizenship. Once more, as in ‘Into the ’80s’ the labels ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ did not appear. That omission seems to suggest continued awareness of the divisive way these adjectives were used in past documentation. The language of this policy placed emphasis on ‘valued knowledge, skills and understandings’.⁶² Understandings appeared a move forward: from teaching, to learning, to understanding, that felt connection, the essential element for future, thoughtful action.

The document sounded fine: there was recognition of the need for self-reliance and ‘they’ would be able to ‘apply moral and ethical values and skills of social analysis in assessing situations and taking action’.⁶³ ‘They’ would have ‘essential skills and understandings’. However, in those ‘required areas of study’ the interdisciplinary connections to build those essential skills were not made. In fact, through the wording, opportunities to reinforce the educational value of such connections were lost. Craft was subsumed among the visual arts, design, dance, drama, media studies and music in the required area of study related to the arts.⁶⁴ All the practical applications of acquired capacities to ‘make’ and ‘do’ had not surfaced in the minds of those who produced this policy document. Craft disappeared into ‘a range of artistic skills and other skills’ (my italics). Craft, of which design is a part, an essential element in the ‘making’ of a poem, a pot, a piano, a periscope, a pergola, lost its significance.

Technology became process. Studies in technology provide students with opportunities to develop technological capability through planning, developing and refining design concepts, selecting appropriate materials, tools and processes for particular design purposes, carrying designs through to completion and appraising the outcomes. In this statement, with its concentration on process, the traditional technical studies were down-graded. There was no appreciation of the value of diverse crafts. This reduction to general processes ignored the aesthetics, the feelings of achievement and satisfaction in the ‘making’ of the different ‘products’. In fact one could fulfil the requirements of this area of study, given computer-aided design, without knowledge and skill as a worker in wood, or metal, or with knowledge of the applications of electricity in electronics. Thanks to equal opportunity legislation all of these technical studies were at last open to girls just at a time when they were being valued less and less in departmental documentation.

There was no recognition of the affective elements in scientific study. One of the delights in stories by a number of women is their expression of pleasure in discovering the wonders of working in a science laboratory. This is one of the advantageous results of broadening the curriculum for girls in their single-sex tech schools after 1953. One feels a student’s pleasure when her teacher encourages her to tackle experiments in the laboratory and she prides herself on her ability to deal, in later life, with related household problems. Another becomes so hooked on science by her first year science teacher that she stays in the technical school until she is encouraged to move to Plympton High School to prepare herself for university study and her ultimate achievement of high academic status.

While the actual subjects, in the main remained separate and generalised, this policy document did widen the scope of science. Studies in science [will] provide opportunities for students to develop ways of investigating, describing and understanding our physical and biological world and to apply those ways of solving problems beyond the context of the classroom. Studies in science encourage students to seek and use evidence as the basis for forming ideas and taking action and assist in the development of responsible attitudes to the environment. While explicit reference to citizenship and the power of a voter to change the political agenda is missing, this description of scientific studies does encourage the connection of reasoned, informed, scientific argument with the development of an environmental conscience. But no connection was made with allied subjects, such as geography and much socially-influenced poetry which would have been dealing with similar issues.

The Karmel Report’s suggestion that lateral opportunities for innovative and divergent thinking should be provided, through projects connecting the sciences and technology, was lost in this language. All that happened was the ‘boxes’ became bigger. No longer were discrete subjects boxed and labelled. Now ‘areas of study’ set the perimeters at a greater distance but the boundaries were still there. For example, home economics was given a new place in ‘health and personal development’. The hospitality industry brought boys into what became known as industry-based hospitality courses. The connection with ‘home’ diminished as the concentration on industry increased.

The ultimate irony in these required areas of study lies most obviously in the separate areas of mathematics and society and environment. The second requirement for mathematics was an affective one: Appreciation of the role of mathematics in our society and confidence in using mathematical information are essential features of citizenship. Appreciation requires thought, feeling and imagination for conviction and action. The connection was important. People might be blinded by statistics. Voters need confidence to challenge figures, examine graphs and explore alternative ways of allocating money available in local, state or federal government budgets. With this knowledge the democracy gains an informed electorate, able to compare sources of information. By contrast, in the central area of study where one would have expected it, there was no mention of citizenship in ‘Society and Environment’.

One does not confront a problem by ignoring it or substituting language that skates around it. While the language in this document may have been meant to be inclusive, the relationship between education and work was obscured. The connection between the vocational and academic elements in education was not made. Given the anxiety of the late 1980s and early 1990s when Australia was suffering from ‘the recession it had to have’, this policy document did not resolve the educational problems of the divisiveness, recognised by the omission of the adjectives, that still influenced students’ and parents’ choice of subjects and schools

With technical, ‘hands on’ courses excluded from the HES subjects, and universities seen as the essential pathway to full-time, rewarding occupations, there was less and less recognition of the value of technical studies programmes, in spite of the problem-solving approach increasingly used. While students often chose them as electives and delight might be expressed, by woodwork teachers for example, in the competence and feeling for the aesthetics demonstrated by academically-oriented girls who chose woodwork and even metalwork on occasions, staffing officers concentrated on the retention of ‘core’ subjects. ‘Core’ subjects were identified as essential, cheaper to fund, and central to all study. For them to be central connections had to be made with the ‘non-core’. Timetabling structures did not encourage such connections to be made. That failure to connect explains one of the reasons why so many students, in the 1990s, have spoken about the lack of relevance in the courses they have been expected to undertake.

Practically-oriented education is expensive. Students need to move while they are working. Administrators can’t sit 30 or more students at desks, substituting white board and markers for blackboard and chalk. Safety demands smaller numbers. Equipment is expensive and must be properly maintained. Much more electricity is required. Teachers must be able to show how to approach this or that project. Practically-oriented teachers cannot fulfil their function by standing or sitting, answering or asking questions or even forming students into discursive groups. This policy document did not mention practical work in its references to technological study. It was as if the two elements of theory and practice had no place in Educating for the 21st Century.

Oversimplifications in slogans, such as ‘It’s the process not the product’, did not help. Human beings are more than ‘either/or’. That manufacturing metaphor was as inadequate, in its way, as the separation of ‘head’ and ‘hand’. Both set up alternatives in which one was seen as preferable to the other. Neither valued both. Neither recognised the significance of the initial felt response in education, that spark of interest and hope, supported by family and or teachers, not snuffed out by circumstances.

Vocation in education – a broader vision for the future

The phrase vocation in education is not often used because, in the recent past, the adjective has been assumed to limit and confine, not to enthuse and expand. That attitude needs to change. The emphasis on computing, information technology, the use of computers, for example, in design, the media, commerce, science, research in all disciplines, as well as in daily life has produced a new focus. Information technology-based vocational element in everyone’s education is producing a new divide our society between the ‘knowledge rich’ and the ‘knowledge poor’. Private schools can insist that all students own their own lap top machines. That divide is likely to deepen with the change in the basis of federal financial support for private schools. Poverty, a real not an attitudinal problem, will continue to deny too many people the opportunity to widen their horizons unless there is a willingness to provide time, money and dedicated staff in areas where the debilitating effects of poverty have substituted indifference and apathy for hope and determination.

The word vocation has, however, regained intellectual respectability. In advertisements for drama courses at Flinders University distinction is made between vocational and non-vocational courses. While there is still that binary positive/negative separation in the description, the change in language is significant. Twenty-first century culture emphasises entertainment and multi-media ‘info-tainment’. Imaginative people skilled and knowledgeable in the inter-active fields of drama, film, music, the visual arts and related technologies will be needed. Often through their work people will be brought to aspects of liberal education that appear to be being discarded. Expanding technological avenues for the future are as important in the public as in the private schools. Traditional high schools, like Blackwood High School, as well as former technical schools, like Mitcham Girls High School, neither in our socially-disadvantaged northern and western suburbs, now have performing arts centres. In the eastern suburbs of Adelaide, business men have discovered that young people from this relatively affluent area can become unemployed and they are co-operating with local schools to expand opportunities for work experience.

One private school, for example, plans to establish a centre to enable students to move into practically-based science occupations. ‘Hands-on’ work will be central. More students will see the relevance of what they are doing. More will recognise the value of thinking, planning, designing – being competent in workshops, soldering, sawing, constructing, using computerised lathes, sewing, understanding the foundations of whatever practical work is being undertaken and gaining the satisfaction needed to go on. Not all, of course. Some students, like Jeff Heath, erroneously thought to be ‘good with his hands’ because he was in a wheel chair, will want to engage in other paid occupations, for example, writing, statistical analysis, journalism, work not based on manual dexterity.

Pressure from all kinds of business, wanting highly skilled computer operatives, will increase the push for applied studies. Such pressure will narrow the educational focus again and is potentially anti-educational. The danger lies in the perception that this is all that matters in secondary, tertiary, or any level of education. The enjoyment of learning for its own sake is wrongly seen as an extravagance. Pure research is still central because we do not know in advance where exploration takes us. Applied research matters. Research not undertaken for immediate gain but to clarify our understanding, such as the re-examination of the bases of past historical interpretations, is important. The humanities will be even more important as a counterweight to robotics. There will always be the need for the liberalising effect of education, widening the horizons, engaging the senses and affections as well as the intellect, in the adventure of discovery. That broader vision, available to all at their point of readiness, develops often through interdisciplinary connections.

Changes at university level are having their impact on the prior levels of education. Formal interdisciplinary studies encourage lecturers to make connections they might not have made before. Two cross-curricular initiatives in schools came as a result of the new SACE requirements. The first is Australian studies, an issues-based programme in which Aboriginal perspectives must be considered, the second is writing across the curriculum for the writing-based literacy assessment component of Stage I. When both work well, the approaches involved help teachers, as well as students, to make lateral links with subjects or areas of study, in fact aspects of life they had not realised were there.

South Australia’s one local newspaper now highlights entrepreneurial activities in schools. These projects involve focused thinking, assessing the market for product or service ‘x’ or ‘y’, boys and girls working as teams, planning, choosing options, finding the particular resources, working out ways of covering the costs, doing the practical work whatever that task is, identifying the range of skills in the group and ensuring that each person’s talents are used effectively in the enterprise, in the process gaining knowledge through experience, feeling satisfaction when their project works and enjoying their rewards, which may be monetary as well as additions to the curriculum vitae they will take with them when they seek work. While the Advertiser reported on the Youth Parliament recording the significance of citizenship, commerce still comes first.

A lesson from those ‘four very special schools’

While those schools, forming Part 1, may have focused too early on specialisation, one of the special features of ATHS, Thebarton and the GCAS, pre-1939 schools is returning. The horizontal barrier between the secondary and tertiary levels of education is coming down. Link courses betwen TAFEs and senior secondary courses are available for students in a range of areas. Students earn credits which determine the level at which they can enter TAFEs or VET programmes. Transfer credits recognise achievements across the tertiary sectors. In the business area a group involving public, Independent and Catholic schools is working with lecturers in the field of commerce at Flinders University. A mathematics and science high school is to be built beside the Sturt Oval by the Education Department. Appropriate lecturers should be able to work with secondary teachers employed in the school. Opportunities for interaction are increasing.

What matters most of all is not the establishment of this specialised school, reminiscent of the role of Adelaide Technical High School as a preparatory school for the School of Mines, but the recognition and acceptance that different kinds of public, secondary schools, with their different emphases, need positive acknowledgement and financial support. The tendency to denigrate one kind of school to raise the profile and approval of another kind has cost this state and Australia so much in terms of talent. That loss has gone beyond the neglect of talent: it has had its devastating impact on the aspirations of people, taught to believe that there was nothing ‘out there’ for them. Many teachers in ‘the techs’ fought that self-confining depression with every tool at their command. I hear Joy Fisher saying of the English teacher who recognised her potential, ‘I loved her from that minute on’.

A touch of irony. The Advertiser (18 March 2000) reported on the state government’s new vision for ‘schools to become 24-hour learning centres with all sectors of the community involved’. The ‘techs’, with their emphasis on adult education through night classes, fulfilled that function of encouraging life-long learning. One contributor mentions the pleasure she had continuing the study of art, begun at Goodwoood Central School, at night at Mawson High School.

‘All sectors’ should include the tertiary level and be funded adequately. If they do, perhaps the old, prejudicial, socially and politically divisive antagonism of those educated through the’university of hard knocks’ for those educated in ‘Academe’ will disappear. The article by Mel Hein quotes the Director of Enterprise and Vocational Education (EVE).

We think if you teach young people to recognise opportunities and to be enterprising, and have the whole community participate in teaching them, you end up with a high-performance enterprise community.

‘What that means is every community member – old, young, disabled, able-bodied or marginalised – is recognised as having at least one skill of value to the community.’⁶⁵

In contrast to the regretful tone of some of the teaching contributions from the 1980s, the contributions of young students in the 1990s reflect the optimism in this newspaper article. There is Kellie Smith’s pride in being a third year mechanical fitting apprentice. Kathryn Sullivan of Glenunga International High School, sees school as a community of learners. Justin Hooper at Hamilton Secondary College, which has built on its positive, practical Mitchell Park inheritance, values the engineering pathways programme with its links to business and TAFE. Natasha Moore thanks Thebarton Senior College which now supports adult learning. Le Fevre High School, now identified as a ‘Learning Technologies Discovery School’, has close connections with primary schools, the School of Future Technology and the Microsoft Authorized Academic Training Program. Proudly the school announces that two of its students ‘could be the first secondary students in Australia to achieve a new international computer industry accreditation within a school’. A co-educational school now, both successful students, a boy and a girl, are looking forward to studying at university. The days, remembered by Don Hopgood, when tertiary level was not considered appropriate for boys at the Port, are gone. Le Fevre, protected for so many years by Fred Vickery, has its own website – www.nexus.edu.au/ schools/lefevrehs/home.htm – and is one of a number of special ‘Discovery Schools’ established by the Education Department. Le Fevre is not only in partnership with business through the Western Area Business Enterprise Centre, it has status, as a discovery school, with Unley High School, one of the early, traditional high schools, now a ‘laboratory school’ co-operating with the School of Education at Flinders University.

This broader, unfortunately still utilitarian, orientation has been slowly evolving as society has been forced to respond to technological advances, including ‘the pill’ that gave women more control over their own bodies. Today the inclusive school, willing to move to the theoretical through the practical, offers avenues for girls and boys to help them face their rapidly changing technologically-influenced futures. One such inclusive school is Windsor Gardens Vocational Education College in the north western suburbs. Officially opened in 1999, the school has a much broader focus than a ‘trade’ school. A look at the networks, local and international, put in place at Windsor Gardens reveals how far its students can go if they are able to take advantage of the connections that are possible. Those connections not only include working with industry, the Torrens Valley College of TAFE and university but also with students, via the ‘Net’ in Vietnam. The needs and desires of students as human beings, men and women, citizens, members of communities, and young men and women in need of re-creation, have not been forgotten. The humanities have not disappeared, in spite of the serious threats they face in a utilitarian-driven education system.

In 2000 a Vocational Education College was established, with Christies Beach High School as its administrative centre, enabling eight educational institutions in the Fleurieu Peninsula to work with Noarlunga TAFE. The capacity for credit transfer enables students to move to university studies if that is where their interest and ability, and now their finances, take them. Those neat horizontal and vertical divisions that separated young people on the basis of class, suburb, preconceived view of this or that teacher, should be gone. However the language still gets in the way. The need for apprentices in traditional areas has encouraged the federal government to fund vocational and educational training (VET) programmes for those the government sees as not going on to university.

Who knows when, where, how or why people might decide they would like to study, learn, accept a challenge, even for the sheer pleasure of it?. Who knows where that interest might be aroused? It might not be in a university. It might come wandering along a sea shore if one has access to the coast, or walking through the countryside if one has access to the hills. Out-of-school, out-of-classroom experiences often provided the spark that excited the spirit and mind in these stories. A librarian might provide a haven or ideas or both, books to meet individual needs and interests. It might be On-line. All those different moments of connection have been starting points for some who felt the enthusiasm, shared it perhaps or appreciated the fact that some one cared about them and the quality of the life they would lead.

That would be brutal. We are all equal now.

‘Hands-on’ education has its place at last, in spite of occasional attacks. Learning through experience is accepted as part of the process. Proof is in the existence of the foundation courses at universities for potential students coming from what are called ‘non-traditional’ entry points. Among the older generation of teachers ‘vocational’ may still be the adjective used to describe the kind of schooling appropriate for those they identify as less able students. That is not the way students see it. They are demanding it. The Director of Enterprise Vocational Education (EVE) says, ‘I’m confident young people can be the catalyst in developing these communities.’ Mel Hein, in the Advertiser, goes on, ‘But to become the catalysts, he believes it is vital young people are given a chance to learn outside the classroom through enterprise and vocational educational enterprises.’

Throughout this collection the number of examples of student interest being stirred by ‘out of class’ experiences, as well as practically-oriented experiences, reinforces the point he makes. One woman supported by her parents in her initial desire to be a hairdresser, found at Vermont Girls Technical High School a science teacher who excited her interest in science. In 2000 Professor Leanna Read received the Flinders University’s Convocation Medal for outstanding contributions to society. Another woman, who absented herself frequently from school, claims that she was educated in the State Library, the Museum and the Art Gallery where she spent much of that out-of-school time. Later, as an adult, she matriculated, just to prove to herself that she could.

The collection contains examples of efforts made by teachers in the technical schools to help students experience life beyond those narrow classroom-based lessons as well as within the classroom walls. For example, Glen McArthur took boys to the pictures. Helena Nikitins provided dance theatre experiences, Richard Watson brought his passion for music to the schools in which he taught. He was thinking about performing The Meistersingers at Angle Park Boys Technical High School before that accident at school tragically ended his life. Voices from ‘the techs’ express delight so often in the out-of-classroom, aesthetic, adventurous experiences, sporting opportunities, the discovery of theatre and the natural world. Jean Walsh’s love of music, ballet and theatre stems from the opportunities provided by Port Adelaide Girls Technical School. These excursions lie at the heart of her school experience and her pleasure in life.

Heart-felt memories by former students of teachers who were the best they had ever known, who praised them, loved them, provided constructive discipline, or pushed them perhaps vigorously to the best they could do, shared with them their passion for music or maths or science or art or woodwork or sport or literature, or were ‘dazzlingly contemporary’ show the centrality of the affective attitudes of teachers. Education without that affective connection is structure without spirit. The spirit that imbues the structure is central in the quality of experience for students, teachers, principals and parents. Their felt experience provides the incentive, or disincentive, to take up opportunities. Administrators may have helped or hindered. Addresses by Directors of Education and administrators of major significance, like Max Bone, are included at the appropriate point throughout the century to show their connection with their times. Not only is the impact of their times on them a matter of concern but equally significant is the impact of their attitudes on educational directions. Physical conditions, for example, do influence the perception of people about whether they, and their work, are valued. Therefore, I appreciate the willingness of Dr A.W. Jones and John Steinle to add their voices to the collection.

Gale Edwards insists that her ‘dazzlingly contemporary’ English teacher at Port Adelaide helped her to develop a social conscience. Gale Edwards was influential in the creation of the structure for this collection. During a conversation before she returned to London, I described my plan to categorise the sections, to compare like with like, teachers with teachers, students with students. One parent and three school assistants would be in a category on their own. How ironic! The power of past conditioning. I was going to do the very thing that I know tends to decrease engagement. I was going to ‘box’ the contributions. The index would provide readers with access to themes, schools, people, and a wide range of felt responses. This index might include, for example, accidents, relationships, camps, excursions, families, friendships, fun, fear, libraries, lunch hours, lavatories, life experiences as well as the different aspects of curriculum, subjects, methodologies, changing technologies, as well as industrial, commercial and public service contributions to the schools; for example, the roles of the Australian Broadcasting (now) Corporation, BHP, car manufacturers, and most recently Microsoft.

Gale’s reaction was strong. The index would not intrude on the stories. However, to confine, in academically-devised categories, this century of voices would be wrong. That would be brutal, she said. We are all equal now. Therefore, the collection is chronologically ordered. Contributions are set within their schools and times. Gradually the technological, social, political and economic influences are revealed as vocational emphases change. Slowly the vision becomes broader. As a result, there is an imbalance. Some schools have no student voices but the voice of British-born Margaret Davey in Birthing a New Community provides a depth of understanding about the establishment of Elizabeth Girls Technical High School unlikely to be found in an academic analysis of the school. Some schools have no teaching voices. That is the case with Kidman Park Girls Technical High School where Beverly Bills found she had proved something to herself and never looked back and Seaton Boys Technical High School where Neil Piller enjoyed his broad-based, hands-on, inter-active education.

Eric Bryce writes: We led the way out of unimaginative, blinkered traditionalism. Those imaginative developments of new courses, given the nod by Colin Thiele in Grains of Mustard Seed, came from within the schools. With the exception of the Dalton Plan, introduced by Dr Charles Fenner with the active co-operation of the headmaster Alec Paull, they came out of the felt needs of teachers for students and of students for themselves. Through this democratic collection, with contributions from people in all walks of life, pictures emerge of the three specialised schools, the one Catholic technical school, the central and technical schools, set up for such a large percentage of the South Australian population in this last century.

Vocational education is as old as the Middle Ages

Vocational education was always undervalued in South Australia because we ignored a key lesson in the history of education. As a result the division between ‘vocational’ and ‘academic’ education was not only unhelpful, it has been anti-educational. In too many academic perceptions vocational education, with its practically-oriented approaches, was for those identified, early in their lives, as not intellectually equipped for tertiary study. Vocation as a calling, to be a poet as in the case of John Shaw Neilson and Judith Wright, an environmentalist, a fisherman, film maker, teacher, marine biologist, winemaker, engineer, carpenter, for example, was narrowed to mean the schooling appropriate for ‘others’; that is, those not seeking or requiring university education for their future paid occupations.

Angry about this denigration of vocation in education, in 1940, Dr Charles Fenner reminded lecturers at the School of Mines that mediaeval education for ‘priest and pedagogue’ was vocational. He was frustrated by the intellectual arrogance that relegated ‘vocational’ education to the training appropriate for blue collar and clerical workers and most women. He saw real value in the connection between education and work. That connection did not need to deny students the broader education appropriate for citizens and human beings. Dr Fenner’s pleasure in the performance of As You Like It in the Botanic Gardens in 1930 by the students of the Girls Central Art School, recalled in Mary P. Harris’ autobiography, shows that. Those who saw a ‘liberal’ education with music and the arts and the humanities as inappropriate for potential ‘workers’ helped to narrow the concept of vocational education to a cost-effective, utilitarian level. That narrow attitude resulted in many former ‘tech’ school students deprecating their education, saying, ‘I only went to a tech.’

That deprecation of their schooling is an indication of the prejudice from which central and technically-oriented schools suffered. That perception existed in English education long before 1836 and sailed with the would-be landed gentry to South Australia. In the class-driven world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream the ‘rude’ mechanics were mocked. John Harrison, the clock maker who enabled navigators to measure longitude, was dismissed by the Astronomer Royal as a ‘mechanic’. Ironically, this was in the period when the eighteenth century ‘Enlightenment’, or the Age of Reason, brought us the mechanistic universe. Early idealistic South Australian interest in a broad-based education for boys, that of Dr Fellinburgh, which planned to instruct youth in agriculture and other trades, combined with the higher branches of education until they reach the age of 16, quickly disappeared.

Here, where Aboriginal people were dispossessed, their culture denigrated and British culture asserted to be morally superior, that intellectual and social snobbery flourished. As early as 6 January 1838, in the South Australia Gazette and Colonial Register a contributor wrote:

A wise system of education, beginning in infancy, will tend in high degree to promote domestic happiness amongst the poor in the colony: by this means habits of peace, order and subordination must be formed if ever they are to become general in society.

Social engineering nineteenth century style! When public education was being debated later in the century a South Australian legislator, J.W. Downer, claimed that it would be unkind to teach drawing, music and languages to girls, bound by their social and economic conditions to be servants, and lift their sights above their station and ‘make them absolutely unfit for menial duties’.⁶⁶ Social status seekers denigrated ‘mechanics’, those taught to work with their hands who often enjoyed doing so and gained great satisfaction from their occupations. The divisive attitude that denigrated technical/vocational education has not died. Teachers, in 1999, were heard to say there was no need to involve senior secondary students going to university in vocational subjects. Practically-oriented education is often supposed to be for slower learners. ‘Hands-on’ education, short-sightedly, has been dismissed by some academics as ‘play way.’

To my knowledge, except for theses, and Long Division, Pavla Miller’s valuable examination of South Australian education, the stories of the South Australian technically-oriented schools have been largely ignored. Technical schools receive mention in Grains of Mustard Seed when Colin Thiele recognises the essential role of Dr Fenner in the development of all aspects of technical education.⁶⁷ The technical high schools’ ‘imaginative development of new courses outside of the PEB system’ gets a paragraph near the end of the book.⁶⁸

There has been too narrow a vision of what constitutes ‘the best’ form of education for secondary students. That narrowing of focus has been increased by the Federal government’s Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment scheme69 and its latest approach which will move more funds away from public education. It is time for a broader vision. We cannot afford to go on repeating the errors of the past. We cannot go on denigrating students because they don’t fit into preconceived ideas of what constitutes the ‘best’ form of education.

The title of this collection has come from the contribution of Vola Thomas Ryan, a former student of Unley Girls Technical School. She emphasises the value of her education in the process of life-long learning. A mother and a mature age student with a postgraduate degree from Flinders University, she wrote,

I believe that the broader scope of technical education was much more beneficial to me … and I think that I have that broader vision to thank for my progression in life.

The Letter to the Editor, October 1996

The catalyst for this collection was a letter to the editor by Jo Short. That letter appeared in the Advertiser, 31 October 1996. Given the provocative title It’s time to bring back the techs, the letter revived the worst of past attitudes towards secondary education in South Australia. All the old self-fulfilling prophecies were there. This teacher wrote:

It did not take long for me to realise that it does not matter how excellent the standard of teachers, how superb the facilities and resources, there are some students for whom it is a waste of theirs and everyone else’s time to remain at school beyond year 10.

As a teacher in girls’ technical high schools from 1955 to 1969, in a boys’ tech high from 1970 to 1974 and one of the people who helped to bring Mawson High School into existence in 1975, I was angry. There it was again. The old easy answer. Separation for those not identified as ‘high academic achievers’. There was no room for ‘them’ among the intellectual élite. How did this letter writer know? How many students sent to ‘technical’ schools had become doctors and lawyers? Were these careers the ultimate? Were other occupations insignificant? Didn’t society need educated mothers? Didn’t technically-oriented programmes have value in their own right? Might not young people find what could excite the spirit and awake the mind outside of institutions? Who said ‘the mainstream’ was the best way to go? The tone of the letter perpetuated past derogatory, counter-productive, educational and social distinctions.

We hear about the success stories of former ‘tech’ students, for example Murray Bail, author of Eucalyptus, a student at Norwood Boys Tech High School, and Bob Bishop, a leader in the information technology revolution brought to Adelaide for the Festival of Ideas, once a student at Croydon Boys Tech. Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue, who was eager to get out into the ‘real’ world and earn money, and whose work for Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander rights will never be forgotten, was removed and sent to Unley Girls Tech.⁷⁰ Maggie Tabberer, who has given so many of women confidence in themselves, attended Unley Girls Technical School where the only subject that interested her was dressmaking. Gale Edwards, a renowned international theatre director who recently brought us The Boy from Oz, was a student for four years at Port Adelaide Girls Technical High School. So was Rosalba Clemente, now Director of the State Theatre. However we hear little about the many former ‘tech’ students discouraged by the social and educational attitudes around them.

Negative reactions to their ‘tech’ schooling have not only been the result of personality clashes and feelings of being treated badly. Too often they have been the product of intellectual and social snobbery reinforced by the media and advertising.⁷¹ However these feelings of animosity are not only the result of derisory attitudes outside of the formal educational sphere. Such attitudes existed, and still exist, within educational institutions. The proof is in this letter and in departmental language. It is evident in the preference for acronyms which exclude so many in the community from understanding. If a departmental office, for example, displays information saying that a school is said to be ‘educating for the workplace’ and there is not a single photograph of young people, if there is no suggestion that the school is also educating to help young people learn to live as adults, parents, citizens, members of a community and individuals with different interests, hopes and fears, with spiritual as well as material needs, then it is simply reinforcing this narrow, short-sighted view. Today there is no such place as the secure work place for the work force. We speak less and less of ‘the work force’. There are many ‘work places’, particularly since so many people must have two or more part-time jobs to earn enough to survive. We know that, today, it is possible for members of a family to be earning money, working hard, and still be unable to get out of the poverty trap. Displays in offices of educational administrators that omit the human being maintain the narrow view. There is no feeling for the centrality of young people in education. They were not there in that executive’s reception area. Nothing appeared of the spirit of the Delors Report, the latest education report for UNESCO that says each child has the right ‘to know, to do, to live together, to be’. Learning to do, in the Delors Report, is ‘in order to acquire not only an occupational skill but also, more broadly, the competence to deal with many situations and work in teams. It also means learning to do in the context of young peoples’ various social and work experiences which may be informal, as a result of the local, or national context, or formal, involving courses, alternating study and work’.⁷²

Young people know the value of practically-oriented, skills-based study. They are calling for it in recent articles in the Advertiser. Often experience through practice leads to understanding the ideas and theories that underpin that practice. The ‘academic’ or theoretical element in a topic comes out of the practical involvement in the making or doing. The teacher, as Ian Maynard shows, needs to be well enough educated and adaptive in approach to be able to connect both elements, of course, and not be dismissive of one element or the other! At best the teacher will be able to put the work into its historical context to help students understand how the practice and theory came together. That understanding will enable students to go further. Because students are working from a skills base does not mean that they are not thinking. There is often more thinking and problem-solving in the practically-based approaches than in large classroom-based programmes.

‘To do’, the second ‘pillar’ of the Delors Report, was at the heart of the methodology in the former technically-oriented schools. It was recognised early in the century as part of the practically-oriented approach to education encouraged by a group within the New Education Fellowship. However, in terms of contemporary education it constitutes only one of the essential four pillars of education that UNESCO insists are the right of every child.

How far technically-oriented schools enabled students to gain the ‘tools for living’, to use Max Bone’s phrase, excited their spirits and encouraged them to live their lives to the full, giving them life-long satisfaction, appears through these ‘voices’ from these schools. How teachers felt about these schools and attitudes towards them provide another side of the picture. There is evidence that literature and the humanities were not forgotten. Girls gained some insights into science.

Responses to the transformation into comprehensive schools and consequent changes through the ’70s and ’80s highlight the continuing, often negative impact of tradition. Bringing the collection to the present, enables the reader to trace the changing technologies, and the accompanying changing cultures to which students often become acclimatised before their teachers. Doing so, the collection moves from and through the imagined world of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo to that of ‘virtual reality’ and looks forward into a human world affected, for good and ill, for example by miniaturisation, the making of micro-electronic mechanical structures. Bigger will no longer be better.

It needs to be a world in which educators imaginatively engage learners in formal and informal ways, to enable them to gain the broader vision that Vola Thomas Ryan found so valuable. Just as we did not know at the beginning of this century what we would be facing, we do not know what others will be facing. A broad-based, hands-on, interactive approach to education for all will have advantages over the divisive approach that has bedevilled education for most of the last century in South Australia and threatens to dominate political approaches to education in this new century.

I invite you to share with these contributors the recollections of their felt lives in technically-oriented schools.

Return to contents Buy A Broader Vision	© Erica Jolly and individual authors