'Shoes Well Cleaned and Heels Repaired': Scientific management, eugenics and teacher selection and preparation in Australia, 1910-1970

Abstract

Standard histories of Australian education and educational administration during the years 1900-1970 largely have ignored the influences of scientific management and eugenics on teacher selection and preparation. Selleck, Connell, Hyams and Cleverly and Lawry are examples of historians who have attempted to analyse Australian 20th-century educational history without any reference to eugenics or scientific management. This paper analyses the connection between the principles and methods of scientific management and eugenics. In the United States, Ellwood Cubberley was an enthusiastic eugenicist who helped popularise the application of scientific management to the administration of schools. He directly influenced the work of the Australian educators Kenneth Cunningham and Harold Wyndham, both of whom were influential in arguing for a 'scientific' process of teacher selection and preparation. Teachers were required to meet prescribed standards of 'fitness' and to fit preconceived criteria of suitability as agents of racial and national efficiency. By the 1950s, with the advent of residential teachers' colleges, State Departments of Education were in a unique position to ensure that student teachers entered the state teaching service suitably equipped with attributes of 'fitness'.