Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemFrom ‘tech’ school to academe: personal narratives and the history of technical education, 1931-1988( 2002)'From "tech" school to academe: personal narratives and the history of technical education, 1931-1988', explores technical education at junior, intermediate, trade, post-trade, diploma, and degree levels, including technical and TAFE teacher education. The methodology is autobiography-as-history and history from documents: the narratives convey life stories of men and women - my technical education people - who have had a significant technical education involvement, their transition through primary, secondary/technical and trade/post secondary education to higher education. Emergent documentary themes include: affirmation of technical education during the Great Depression, notwithstanding the 1931 McPherson 'Economy Committee'; the very important contribution to the war-effort, 1939-45, the Commonwealth Technical Training Scheme, to post-war reconstruction and ex-service rehabilitation, the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, and a program for the war-wounded; the 1950s, extension of Commonwealth Government involvement in university education through the Murray Committee report (1957) and initiatives in senior, apprentice and junior technical education, the latter including psychology and guidance and school chaplaincies; the 1960s, the Martin Committee binary system report, leading to the Victoria Institute of Colleges (1965), in apprenticeship, the introduction of block release and a reduced term of training, and in junior technical education, trends to a liberalised curriculum; 1972-75, the Whitlam Reforms, including the Karmel Schools Commission and needs-based funding, Commonwealth full-funding of tertiary education, the abolition of student fees, and the Kangan Report, its recommendation of capital and recurrent funding of the new TAFE sector with its philosophy of open access, broad-based, vocationally-oriented recurrent education; in apprenticeship, introduction of the modular curricula, and in junior technical education, developments which made it the most comprehensive sector under flexible, autonomous administrative arrangements; the 1980s, the ending of the binary system of tertiary education with the Dawkins' program of 1988, expansion of TAFE's utility function, and closure of the secondary technical schools, an outcome of the 1985 Blackburn Committee recommendations, their passing part political, part technological, part social, part economic and, at official levels, barely acknowledged. Emergent narrative themes include: the antecedent work-ethic and underdog culture; family resourcefulness, resilience and moral integrity; puzzles of childhood; school experiences, for example as a junior student during the 1940s or as an adult in post-war rehabilitation training; employment experiences, for example in sheetmetal during the 1930s; trade teaching in the 1940s and Special Method lecturing in the 1950s; mentoring and role modelling; trainee resourcefulness; diverse pathways to technical education; system flexibility; enabling school leadership; chronic resourcing deficits; teacher professionalism; the vital 'acco' -'tradie' mix; innovations in technical curricula, including co-ed, pastoral and welfare initiatives, for example work experience and the alternative techs; the dynamism of the 1970s, including Kangan and TAFE, university accessibility, and introduction of the new technologies; the 1980s, concern for the loss of the technical schools and their comprehensiveness, inclusiveness and egalitarianism; ambivalence about TAFE - accessible, occupationally relevant yet doctrinaire and narrow; concern for the demise of dedicated technical teacher education; and the personal integration of my technical education people. In the light of the narrative and documentary evidence, I conclude that technical education has delivered clear personal and social benefits.
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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.