This book is a comprehensive history of the Australian Council for Educational Research throughout the 50 years of its existence. It is based on an examination of the archival material accumulated at the ACER, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Australian Archives, and the records of the Australian Education Council. It examines the interest and impact of the Carnegie Corporation on the early years of the ACER, reports on the development of educational research in Australia and the influence of the ACER on it. The ACER's interest in educational and psychological measurement is explained, and its range of other activities in publication, curriculum development, and educational service is described.
Despite the Australian Constitution implying school education to be a state responsibility, the Commonwealth has increasingly interfered with state school education. The Australian Government Muscling in on School Education therefore offers a historical account of this government involvement in Australian education, from federation to the present day, providing a much-needed, fully updated and relevant overview the topic. Arguing that education has become an arena for competing political forces, this book examines the powerful influence of the Commonwealth over education and the political motives behind it, exploring how politics influences aspects of the curriculum, teaching standards, assessment and reporting, funding, teacher selection and policy more broadly. Ultimately questioning whether this influence is in the interests of the members of the community who depend on education, the book holds government engagement in education to account. Taking the major epochs of federalism as an organizing framework, the book’s chapters include explorations of: The efficiency dynamic and the progressive years (1919–39) Postwar imperatives and the Menzies years (1949–72) Coordinative federalism and treading softly: the Whitlam years (1972–5) and Fraser years (1975–83) Corporate federalism: the Hawke/Keating years (1983–96) Supply-side federalism and globalization: the Howard years (1996–2007) National control and the Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison years (2007–15) A thorough and significant examination of the historical engagement of the Australian government in education, this book is essential reading for student teachers and postgraduate students in education studies and politics.
This volume explores questions about hope, optimism and the possibilities of the ‘new’ as expressed in educational thinking on the nature and problem of adolescence. One focus is on the interwar years in Australian education, and the proliferation of educational reports and programs directed to understanding, governing, educating and enlivening adolescents. This included studies of the secondary school curriculum, reviews of teaching of civics and democracy, the development of guidance programs, the specification of the needs and attributes of the adolescent, and interventions to engage the ‘average student’ in post-primary schooling. Framed by imperatives to respond in new ways to educational problems, and to the call of modernity, many of these programs and reforms conveyed a sense of enormous optimism in the compelling power of education and schools to foster new personal and social knowledge and transformation. A second focus is the expression of such utopianism in educational history – themes that may seem novel, or incongruous, or even inexplicable in the present – and in studies and representations of young people as citizens in the making. Finally, developing broadly genealogical approaches to the study of adolescence, the chapters variously seek to provoke more explicitly historical thinking about the construction of the field of youth studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Educational Administrative and History.
Here, the authors address questions about the utilization of knowledge from social research and offer evidence that challenges allegations about the 'awful reputation' of educational research and its supposed lack of impact.
‘The Right Thing to Read’: A History of Australian Girl-Readers, 1910-1960 explores the reading habits, identity, and construction of femininity of Australian girls aged between ten and fourteen from 1910 to 1960. It investigates changing notions of Australian girlhood across the period, and explores the ways that parents, teachers, educators, journalists and politicians attempted to mitigate concerns about girls’ development through the promotion of ‘healthy’ literature. The book also addresses the influence of British publishers to Australian girl-readers and the growing importance of Australian publishers throughout the period. It considers the rise of Australian literary nationalism in the global context, and the increasing prominence of Australian literature in the period after the Second World War. It also shows how access to reading material improved for girls over the first half of the last century.
