The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the War on two prominent academic liberal historians.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the War on two prominent academic liberal historians.
Design/methodology/approach
The research is based on a narrative of their lives and careers before and during the War.
Findings
The findings include an analysis of how the War engaged these academic liberals in the pursuit of the War effort.
Originality/value
By the end of the War, both sought to reaffirm much of their earlier academic liberalism despite the political and social changes in the post-war world.
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Geoffrey Sherington and Julia Horne
From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire…
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From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.
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This article suggests an explanation for the complex history of the relationship between the government high school and the Australian middle class. The main elements in the…
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This article suggests an explanation for the complex history of the relationship between the government high school and the Australian middle class. The main elements in the constructing of a framework necessarily include the following inter‐related effects: the historic alienation of the Roman Catholic population from the Australian public school system, federal government interventions into school policy and funding, demographic pressures, the rise of neoliberalism, and the development of distinctive and multiple ethnic populations in the cities. The final section of the article takes as its case study, the history of middle class schooling in the city of Sydney, especially from the mid 1970s to the end of the century. Sydney is an atypical Australian city in many respects, and the study of its middle class and schooling does not stand as representative of the Australian experience. Nevertheless, its great population and significance in the national economy makes its story a crucial story in the national context. Because much of the evidence for this last section derives from the Australian census, it is introduced by a brief discussion of census‐making. Preceding that section of the article is a summary discussion of the significance of social classes in the history of Australian schooling.
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This article probes the dimensions of a newly constructed, modern citizenship within the context of post‐war tensions between a national history that recognised and asserted…
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This article probes the dimensions of a newly constructed, modern citizenship within the context of post‐war tensions between a national history that recognised and asserted sexual, racial, and cultural differences and an assimilationist state drive that enshrined one law and one way of life. In particular, I address the question of what we can learn about gender and race relations and their relationship to national identities and citizenship by studying government and educational policies and publications. As recent scholarship on education and citizenship has observed, issues surrounding national identity/identities, citizenship, and education in Australia were critical to state formation from the late 1940s to the 1960s. This research has done much to expand our understanding of the pedagogical and curriculum components of citizenship education and the central role of teachers within the education enterprise. As well, other scholars have informed our understanding of the related processes of post‐war social adjustment of young people. This article draws on a range of theories and perspectives from post‐colonial literature, cultural and performance studies, and critical ‘race’ and feminist theories to analyse the texts and images. A discourse analysis of these documents highlight the complex and competing forms of identity/identities, colonialism, ‘race’, and gender. In particular, I address the following questions: First, what representations of modern young citizens were featured as part of the ‘Australian way of life’ in both state education policies and publications? Second, in what ways were gender and ‘race’ constitutive of Australian citizenship? Third, how do the images and texts in these publications manifest the multiple performances of education in the 1950s and 1960s? Although this study focuses on education reforms, the results of the research speak to wider issues of historical representation, gender, and culture and the complicated relationship between state policy, nationalism, and reform.
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Julia Horne and Tamson Pietsch
The purpose of this paper is to: introduce the topic of the relationship between universities and the First World War historiographically; put university expertise and knowledge…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to: introduce the topic of the relationship between universities and the First World War historiographically; put university expertise and knowledge at the centre of studies of the First World War; and explain how an examination of university expertise and war reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace.
Design/methodology/approach
Placing the papers in the special issue of HER on universities and war in the context of a broader historiography of the First World War and its aftermath.
Findings
The interconnections between university expertise and the First World War is a neglected field, yet its examination enriches the current historiography and prompts us to see the war not simply in terms of guns and battles but also how the battlefield extended university expertise with long-lasting implications into the 1920s and 1930s.
Originality/value
The paper explores how universities and their expertise – e.g. medical, artistic, philosophical – were mobilised in the First World War and the following peace.
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The purpose of this paper is to set out three dilemmas that challenge historians of education who write for both professional and academic audiences. It focuses on the example of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to set out three dilemmas that challenge historians of education who write for both professional and academic audiences. It focuses on the example of using fiction as a source for understanding the informal education of girls in the twentieth century. It contributes to the debate over the purpose of history of education and the possibilities that intersecting and contested analytical frameworks might contribute to the development of the discipline.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper discusses the rules of engagement and the duties of a historian of education. It reforms current concerns into three dilemmas: audience, method and writing. It gives examples drawn from research into girls’ school stories between 1910 and 1960. It highlights three authors and stories set in Australia, England and an international school in order to explore what fiction offers in getting “inside” the classroom.
Findings
Developed from a conference keynote that explored intersecting and contested histories of education, the paper sets up as many questions as it provides answers but re-frames them to include the use of a genre that has been explored by historians of childhood and literature but less so by historians of education.
Research limitations/implications
The vast quantity of stories set in girls’ schools between 1910 and 1960 necessarily demands a selective reading. Authors may specialise in the genre or be general young people’s fiction authors. Reading such stories must necessarily be set against changing social, cultural and political contexts. This paper uses examples from the genre in order to explore ways forward but cannot include an exhaustive methodology for reasons of space.
Practical implications
This paper suggests fiction as a way of broadening the remit of history of education and acting as a bridge between related sub-disciplines such as history of childhood and youth, history and education. It raises practical implications for historians of education as they seek new approaches and understanding of the process of informal education outside the classroom.
Social implications
This paper suggests that the authors should take more seriously the impact of children’s reading for pleasure. Reception studies offer an insight into recognising the interaction that children have with their chosen reading. While the authors cannot research how children interacted historically with these stories in the mid-twentieth century, the authors can draw implications from the popularity of the genre and the significance of the legacy of the closed school community that has made series such as Harry Potter so successful with the current generation.
Originality/value
The marginal place of history of education within the disciplines of history and education is both challenging and full of possibilities. The paper draws on existing international debates and discusses future directions as well as the potential that girls’ school stories offer for research into gender and education.
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‘Countrymindedness’ is a resonant but perhaps manufactured term, given wide currency in a 1985 article by political scientist and historian Don Aitkin in the Annual, Australian…
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‘Countrymindedness’ is a resonant but perhaps manufactured term, given wide currency in a 1985 article by political scientist and historian Don Aitkin in the Annual, Australian Cultural History. Political ideology was his focus, as he charted the rise and fall ‐ from the late nineteenth century to around the 1970s ‐ of some ideological preconceptions of the Australian Country Party. These were physiocratic, populist, and decentralist ‐ physiocratic meaning, broadly, the rural way is best. Aitkin claimed the word was used in Country Party circles in the 1920s and 1930s, but gave no examples. Since the word is in no dictionary of Australian usage, or the Oxford Dictionary, coinage may be more recent. No matter. Countrymindedness is a richly evocative word, useful in analysing rural populism during the last Australian century. I suggest it can usefully be extended to analyzing aspects of the inner history of Euro‐settlement in recent centuries.