Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemProvision for the education of Catholic women in Australia since 1840( 1988)An historical perspective of the Religious Orders of women which entered the Catholic education scene in nineteenth-century Australia, and an appraisal of their adaptation to the forces within Australian society which influenced their provision for the education of Catholic women in this country as they operated under the powerful direction of the bishops.
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ItemA history of technical education in Australia: with special reference to the period before 1914( 1966)In this thesis the attempts of colonial man to adapt to his environment and to train the young worker, the artisan and the technologist are discussed. Initially education in the form of practical training was merely an aspect of charitable beliefs or intellectual presumptions. The colonies relied in the main on obtaining their needed skills from overseas. But, especially after the gold rushes, indigenous technological challenges arose to which pragmatic educational response was made. Thus the transition from the mechanics’ institutes, largely agents of ‘improving’ purpose, to the schools of mines, ostensibly dedicated to the service and advancement of colonial industry. Technical education however was retained, throughout its history in Australia, a strong ideological component. Its most effective real contribution, in the period before 1914 at least, was in the field of opening opportunity to the socially and educationally underprivileged; but the general insistence was on its immediate industrial relevance. This latter was largely an illusion, but it served to nurture the technical schools while they performed multi-functional tasks and developed as poor men’s grammar schools. The hey-day of technical education in Australia was between 1880 and 1900, when it became a cause which appealed to free-traders, protectionists, the labor movement, the manufacturers, the nation-builders and many other important social groups. In this period it became a means of liberating the potential of democratic man, and thus a prime plank in the liberal platform. But after 1900 the vision became narrower, and technical education became increasingly identified with the concepts of ‘national destiny’, man as a social unit, and educational specialisation. Instead of being a vehicle for the concept of undifferentiated man, it became an excuse for a narrow and rigorous view of individual function. By 1914 the anti-liberal educational revolution had been achieved, and education in general, and technical education in particular, was henceforward conceived as being subservient to the objects of a modern industrial society. But public response was fickle, and the will to plan an industrial economy, and the educational system such an economy demanded, fluctuated. We are still affected by the ambivalent nature of the origins of technical education, still not clear in our own minds as to what our own responsibilities to the development of our own country are.
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ItemThe systematic delivery of Catholic schooling in Australia: Catholic school systems as living organisations( 2001)This research investigates the systematic provision of Catholic schooling across Australia through the state, territory and diocesan systems of education. It sets out to determine the manner in which the problems faced by the seemingly independent and autonomous schools within the Catholic sector in the early 1970s have been addressed in the systematisation of the delivery of Catholic education. The research was based on a multi-site case study of the sector which involved data collection through interviews with system leaders in 25 Catholic dioceses and was supported by surveys of school principals in every diocese as well as a collection of documents over the period of the study. The study identifies the organisational models and the operational principles evident in the modern systems and investigates the functioning of the localised systems in terms of personnel and resource allocation. Practices within the systems generally align with the theoretical and rhetorical Church statements but the study isolates a number of areas, particularly in the areas of authority, governance and decision making, where there is a clash of priorities between local autonomy and collective wellbeing. The data gathered through interviews and surveys clarify the current challenges facing the sector including the anticipated outcomes of Catholic schooling, the inclusiveness of the systems and the relationship between the systems and the local church.