Masculinity and social class, tradition and change: the production of ‘young Christian gentlemen’ at an elite Australian boys’ school

Abstract

High fee-charging non-government schools for boys comprise a small but significant sector of the Australian schooling market. In different ways in different historical periods these schools have represented themselves as being concerned with more than just an instrumental or utilitarian education, making both explicit and implicit claims about the kinds of values they work to instil in their students and the kinds of men they aim to produce. This article looks closely at one such school in order to gain an understanding of how it sought to shape a particularly classed, leadership-oriented masculinity, during a period of institutional change. The historical context for the study is the final decade of the twentieth century, a period that saw the approximate beginning of a ‘boys’ crisis’ in Australian education, which for schools like the one in this study meant a degree of reconceptualisation of practices and ideologies of masculinity. The article draws on a set of oral history interviews with former students and executive staff of the school.

Keywords:

• masculinity
• social class
• private schools
• values
• boys’ education
• twentieth century

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Meredith Lake for her research assistance and Geoffrey Sherington, Craig Campbell and two anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions on earlier drafts of the article. I would also like to thank the ‘City Grammar’ interviewees for their time and thoughtfulness.

Notes

The school name and the names of all interviewees are pseudonyms.

I have used the terms ‘elite’ and ‘private’ for this school and the high fee-charging corporate sector more broadly because they are recognisable terms in wide use. Neither term is entirely satisfactory. The meaning of ‘elite’ is contestable because of its conflation of ‘exclusive’ with ‘premium’; ‘private’ implies a level of independence beyond that of any mainstream Australian school. Australia is internationally unusual in that all private schools – including the high-fee sector – attract a degree of government funding. Private schools are also subject to considerable government oversight (Campbell, Proctor, and Sherington 2009).

In Australia the term refers (pejoratively) to Greek or Italian immigrants.