Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemAims, men or money?. the establishment of secondary education for boys in South Australia and in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales - 1836 to 1860( 1980)Young children bring with them to school a certain amount of science knowledge gained from their everyday lives. What they "know", whether right or wrong, may be the result of interactions with family, television, computer programs, books, peers or visits to environmental locations, museums or science centres. In this study, children who have been at primary school for between two and three years are asked to describe their knowledge and their sources of information. The extent to which school factors are influencing their science knowledge is investigated. A survey was developed and protocols trialled before fifty-seven children aged eight and nine years at a provincial Victorian government primary school were surveyed to establish their home background and family interest in science, their own attitudes and feelings toward science and the efficacy of their science experiences at school. Interviews were carried out with nine students, selected to represent a broad range of attitudes to science, in order to gain more detailed information about their specific understandings of a number of topics within the primary school science curriculum and the sources of their information. The students' responses revealed that where they were knowledgeable about a subject they could indeed say from where they obtained their knowledge. Books were the most commonly cited source of information, followed by school, personal home experiences and family. Computers and the internet had little influence. Students who appeared to have "better" understandings quoted multiple sources of information. Positive correlations were found between enjoyment of school lessons and remembering science information, liking to watch science television or videos and remembering science information, and liking to read science books and remembering science information. Mothers were also linked to the use of science books at home, and the watching of nature TV shows at home. There are several implications for the teaching of science at early years level. Teachers need to be aware of powerful influences, from both within and outside of the classroom, which may impact on children, and which may be enlisted to help make learning more meaningful. The research indicates the importance of home background, parental interest and access to books, and notes the under utilisation of computers and lack of visits to museums and interactive science centres.
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ItemStatistics of public expenditure on education in Australia : requirements for the formation of national policy( 1976)In Australia's federal system the provision of educational services is the responsibility of the state governments. However, the federal government has also acquired responsibilities for. education. Since the second world war, the state governments have been dependent on the federal government for a large proportion of the funds needed to discharge their responsibilities. More directly, the federal government has greatly extended the scope of its activities in education, mainly through the use of specific. purpose grants to the states. By 1970 these grants affected all levels of education in the states. To be effective, national 'educational policies should take account of differences between the states as well as of 'national needs. Necessary information includes national statistics which are compiled on the same basis for each of . the states. The coverage and quality of national educational statistics has improved considerably, but there are still deficiencies. In particular, the statistics of public expenditure on education do not provide an adequate account of the states individually, or of national trends. Unpublished records of the Australian Bureau of Statistics provide the basis for a set of figures of public expenditure on education which are both more comprehensive and more detailed than those published. Analysis of these figures for the period 1963-64 to 1973-74 shows large differences in the patterns of educational expenditure in each of the states. Nationally there have been considerable changes in the composition of total public outlay on education, the rapid growth of the tertiary sector outside universities being particularly noteworthy. Official statistics of this kind are needed to make possible an effective assessment of the priorities and directions of Australian education.
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ItemLive and learn: a plan for an educated citizenry( 1946)The creators and improvers of Attic prose, the chief literary and most elegant language of ancient Greece, were the Sophists, who flourished in the latter half of the 5th century B.C. They were really a class of teachers or popular lecturers which met the demand for education among the people in those days. It is extremely doubtful if they had any common philosophical doctrine. Grote has disproved the traditional view of the Sophists that their intellectualism was characterised by scepticism and ethical egoism; this charge is still made against adult educators: Whatever criticism might be made of the Sophists - Socrates and Plato opposed them - they made a definite contribution to culture. Adult education had its genesis with them. They introduced the people to a wide range of general knowledge, they led their listeners into discussions, they investigated history, poetry, mathematics and science. The fact that they received fees for their courses and made a livelihood out of their teaching did not commend itself to the Greece of that time. It is strange how history repeats itself; even today there is a reluctance on the part of some individuals to pay teachers in order that they might make a livelihood: From the time of the Sophists, philosophers of all hues have agreed on the point that education is a lifelong process. It is no matter for congratulation that today we are far from applying that fact. When the franchise was extended greatly during the last century and politicians decided that, in their own interests, their masters should be educated, the education provided was confined to childhood. Some years ago H. G. Wells surprised a complacent world by declaring that we must choose between education and catastrophe. We know now which prevailed. But because we have suffered a world catastrophe, the primary and secondary schools are not to be castigated. The children could have done nothing to avert this conflict; the older generation, the adults, with parochial prejudices, should have served this world better. It should be the supreme aim of a democratic state to have an informed and intelligent citizenry; democracy is sustained by education. (From Introduction)
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ItemAims and purposes of education: Australia, India: a comparative study( 1960)This is an essay in comparative education. It may be described as philosophical, but it is not the sort of philosophical essay which would be written by a professional philosopher; it is rather an attempt to show, by comparison of selected elements in the educational practice of Australia and India, some of the distinctive characteristics of the two nations. The aims and purposes of education to a large extent reflect the cultural, social and political philosophies of any country. For this reason it is necessary to give some attention to the forces working behind the educational scene: basic beliefs, the cultural heritage, religious traditions, racial, linguistic and economic factors, and the political background. In this way it is proposed that the aims and purposes of education should be studied in the discussion of the meaning of elementary and secondary. Tertiary, kindergarten, adult and technical education will not be discussed, and some other problems of education � examinations, teachers' training, discipline for example � will be omitted. We shall concentrate mainly on the contents of the primary and secondary curricula and extra-curricular activities, the ideas behind all these, the legal foundations in which these ideas have taken shape and the administrative and organizational problems which have arisen out of them. As the State school curriculum is largely followed by non-State schools also, we shall not deal with these schools separately but occasionally mention factors peculiar to them. Both Australia and India are federations of States and each state in each country has its own educational policy independent of others. But in India there is an All-India educational policy which is formulated through All-India organizations, such as the Central Advisory Board of Education and All-India Council for Secondary Education, and followed in principle by each state. In Australia, however, as there is no such co-ordinating body, the system of education in each State differs in detail. For our purpose we shall mainly depend on the two most progressive States, namely Victoria and New South Wales, although occasional reference will be made to the other States also. (From Introduction)
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ItemThe Irish Christian Brothers' first mission to Sydney, 1843-1847( 1981)Three Christian Brothers came to Sydney from Ireland in 1843 at the behest of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome. For more than ten years prior to their arrival the missionary priests in Australia had been making overtures to the Founder of the Christian Brothers, Br Edmund Ignatius Rice, to send brothers to educate the sons of poor Catholic people in Sydney, most of whom were Irish convicts or ex-convicts. Rice refused on the grounds that he did not have enough brothers in his young Religious Congregation which had commenced in 1802, had received approval from Rome in 1821 to formulate Religious Rules, and had finalised its Rule Book in 1832. An Irish Priest, John McEncroe, had made the first approach to the Christian Brothers because he had first-hand knowledge of their work among the poor in Ireland and in England. The Benedictines, William B. Ullathorne and John B. Poldings approached the Superior-General of the Congregation in writing and by personal visits to Ireland, but Michael Paul Riordan Who had replaced Br Rice as the leader of the Congregation was forced. to refuse them, on the grounds that he too was short of men and that the isolation of Australia could be a problem for a Religious Congregation in the early stage of its development. There was an added problem of money - not only from an expense point of view, but because the Rule required that the brothers teach the poor gratuitously; and there had been mention made by the Benedictines of government money being offered for the Sydney project. This matter had an added sensitivity for Riordan as he was a firm advocate of gratuitous instruction. He had been successful in withdrawing the schools of the Brothers from the Irish National System because state aid violated the Brothers' Vow of Gratuitous Instruction. News of Governor Bourke's intention to introduce Lord Stanley's Irish National System in New South Wales in the eighteen thirties and of Bishop Polding's compliance in the matter had reached Riordan and the Christian Brothers at an inauspicious time. There seemed little likelihood that the Benedictines would entice the Congregation to Australian shores under the prevailing circumstances. The conditions remained unaltered, but Polding changed his strategy of appeal. In 1842, at the time he was delivering his first report to Rome as Vicar-Apostolic of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, he took the opportunity of pointing out to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith that the faith and morals of the children in the former convict colony were at stake unless the Irish Christian Brothers came to the rescue. His knowledge of Church politics won the day. Rome spoke at a time Riordan needed Papal help to settle a crisis within the Congregation. Almost as a 'quid pro quo', the Superior-General despatched three young Religious Brothers (all under the age of thirty) on the same boat to Sydney as the now-elated Polding and his other recruits in 1843. To the delight of the Irish Catholics of Sydney each brother was given charge of a school close to the centre of the city. Poor boys flocked to the schools in large numbers and the brothers instructed them daily in religious and secular knowledge, using the monitorial methods in which they had been trained and the text books (mainly Readers) which the Irish Christian Brothers had published. The schools were non-fee-paying, and the brothers' Vow of. Gratuitous Instruction was kept intact, as they received only their upkeep from the diocese. The arrival of the Christian Brothers coincided with the first elections for the partly elected Legislative Council set up by the 1842 Constitution Act and with the setting up of an Inquiry into the state of education in New South Wales. In the former the brothers got their first taste of colonial sectarianism and of Irish hooliganism. In the latter they were able to make a positive contribution to proceedings, particularly as one of their number was called as an expert witness. The whole venture gave the appearance of being a most successful missionary project, fulfilling the aims both of the young Religious Congregations of the Brothers of the Christian Schools of Ireland and of the ancient Benedictine Order of Priests. It fitted perfectly the Denominational System of schooling which had been put on a firm basis by Bourke' 1836 Church Act. The monitorial method whereby one brother instructed up to two hundred boys was ideal for the much-needed education of the Irish masses. The brothers themselves, being Irishmen, were compatible with the Irish Catholic colonists. Then, almost without warning, in 1847, four years after the commencement of their apparently successful work, the three young Irish Christian Brothers closed their schools and returned to Ireland. The present thesis has as its central theme the story of the Christian Brothers' first Australian Mission, attempting an analysis of the forces which caused them to undertake the task, of the factors which contributed to the success of their education of Irish poor boys in colonial Sydney, and of the circumstances surrounding their decision to abandon the project. The work encompasses a study of colonial life in the period leading up to the arrival of the Christian Brothers, and during their stay in Sydney, with particular emphasis on the part played by the Irish and by the Catholic Church in Australian life in the eighteen forties. An attempt is also made in the present work to examine the state of the major Christian Churches of the period, looking at the roles of religious leaders in Church and State, and at the part played by the laity in Church life. As the Christian Brothers' Australian Mission consisted of educating the masses, the thesis has as its second major theme the involvement of Church and State in the various attempts to establish a viable education system in New South Wales. Finally there is an analysis and interpretation of the work of Bishop Polding and his Benedictines in the Australian Catholic Church, simply because it was Polding who brought the Christian Brothers to Sydney and it was an altercation with the Benedictines which caused the Brothers to return to Ireland. Polding was originally offered the See of Madras but chose instead the challenge of the "peculiar" convict See of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land. He brought with him to the Antipodes religious zeal, boundless energy and English Benedictine ideals. Zeal and energy were essential to the gargantuan task of carrying the Catholic faith to the distant shores of a vast, unexplored continent, peopled by savages, outcasts and policemen. With a handful of equally zealous priests Polding went about his mission, bringing solace and the sacraments to exiled Irishmen. His English origins made him officially acceptable to the Home Office which would have cared little about his Benedictine origins. Polding, however, saw his Benedictinism as the source of all that was good in him as a missionary and as a man. With the singleness of purpose that drove him into the outback on horseback, in search of souls, Polding pursued his high-minded aim of making the Australian Church one large Benedictine Mission. His own Benedictines who should have shared his vision failed him - in England by not sending him co-workers, and in Australia by not living up to Benedictine ideals. Polding was forced to seek help from Catholic Ireland; missionaries, including members of a young teaching Religious Congregation called Christian Brothers, joined Polding in his zealous apostolate, but failed to share his Benedictine dream.
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ItemEnvironmental education in Australia: phenomenon of the seventies: a case study in national curriculum development( 1980)This study examined the evolving conceptions of environmental education during the period 1970-1979. The development of environmental education in Australia during this decade is explored in the social and educational context against a theoretical form of an environmental education curriculum. Through a case study approach, the study focused on the 1975 Australian National Commission for Unesco Seminar on 'Education and the Human Environment'. This permitted a detailed examination of the impact of the Seminar on the actions of the new national Curriculum Development Centre. The origins and development of environmental education in Australia at the Curriculum Development Centre are explored at different levels: as a sequence of events in time and space; as a response to social, economic and educational pressures and as a product of individual initiative and action. During the period under study, environmental education in the school curriculum came to be seen as concerned with critical social analysis much more than with just increasing the environmental content or facts in courses. Action and social concern became more important. Proponents of environmental education were out to change the legitimate knowledge or common sense of the schools. However they failed to analyse the way that school knowledge is socially constructed and validated. What they were implying was 'counter-hegemonic' to the action of Australian schools. Environmental education is examined as a phenomenon and its future in Australian schools is discussed.
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ItemSources of maladjustment in male sixth form students( 1974)Following Hohne (1951) and a pilot study by Conway (1960) an in-depth investigation was made of 96 sixth form boys from two large metropolitan private secondary schools - one a Catholic college, the other a grammar school. It was planned to test hypotheses that there would be significant differences in personal adjustment between both schools and curricular groupings (Maths-Science versus Humanities- Commercial). It was further planned to investigate the sources of various kinds of maladjustment by qualitative analysis, using individually administered projective tests and interviews. Apart from an appreciable difference in I.Q. between the two curricular groups, no really significant difference was found between schools and groups. There were, however, some differences in the kind of values espoused by contrasted schools and contrasted groups. Furthermore, qualitative analysis established, with a large measure of confidence, that the chief sources of stress experienced by students in their terminal secondary year were not curricular or scholastic. Maladjustments from domestic and extracurricular sources were found to decisively outrank those deriving (or believed to have derived) from the requirements imposed by the syllabus and school milieu. This finding was considered to have some value as a basis for criteria for further enquiry into the relationship between intrapsychic stresses and educational performance.
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ItemSchool teacher in Victoria: the biography of Arthur John Hicks( 1981)Arthur John Hicks was born in 1893 and died in 1970. He was a full-time teacher in the service of the Education Department of Victoria for fifty years, from 1908 until 1958. He started his service as a Junior Teacher, but by 1958 had been training student teachers himself for a number of years. In the course of his fifty years' teaching, Arthur Hicks developed a positive response to the major events of the time, and to the ideas of the educational reformers. Both he and his wife became deeply involved in the activities of the rural communities in which they lived. Such a relationship was more difficult to achieve in the suburbs of Melbourne and Geelong. In the course of his career in country schools Hicks also attempted to increase community awareness of Victoria's education system. He also proved, as early as the 1920's, that it was possible to implement the new "child-centred activity" methods in rural schools. The school at which he had most success in this regard was Bright Higher Elementary School. It is reasonable to suggest that Arthur Hicks, despite the outbreak of the Second World War, never lost his optimistic belief that education could do much to improve human nature. It is equally reasonable to suggest that that optimism was under pressure by the mid-50's, when, for the first time, he was administering a large inner-city school, which had specific problems because of its migrant intake. While Hicks. was ageing, Australian society was undergoing quite radical change. Nevertheless, he had reached the top of his profession, whereas fifty years before he had been labelled as not showing "much promise". Although he was a very ordinary person in many ways, his life demonstrates what can be achieved through commitment to a task.
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ItemA comparison of the educational set of students in two introductory physics courses( 1972)The P.S.S.C. physics course and a traditional physics course taught in Tasmania were examined for differences in aims that might lead to differences in the educational set developed in students taking the two courses. A six-category model of educational set in physics involving recall of specifics, practical applications, mathematical generalizations, verbal generalizations, constructive criticism and destructive criticism was developed and a 24 item test instrument (Test E.S. (Physics)) constructed, subsequent to two different trials. Test E.S. (Physics), the Educational Set Scale of Siegal and Siegal and tests AL and AQ were administered to a sample of 389 students made up as follows:- Form IV - 97 in Tasmania and 58 in Victoria Form V - 49 in Tasmania and 82 in Victoria Form VI - 51 in Tasmania and 50 in Victoria Classes from two schools were included in each sub-sample. AL plus AQ was used as the covariate and the appropriate corrections were made before the technique of planned comparisons was used in a variety of within-state and between-state comparisons. The only significant between-state difference detected was in the categories of mathematical generalization. Within each state the comparison between Form IV students and students in later years resulted in significant differences in all comparison except for category 1 (specific facts). A number of correlations were investigated without any clear pattern emerging although category 3 (mathematical generalizations) was involved in several significant correlations. An off-shoot of the major study lead to the development of an Education Set Test based on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The administration of the test gave results consistent with the order between categories suggested by the Bloom model. The major finding of the study was that both physics courses probably produced significant changes in students' educational set but these changes did not seem to be consistent with the differences between their aims.