Gender and Merit: Coeducation and the Construction of a Meritocratic Educational Ladder in New South Wales, 1880–1912¹

¹ The author has been awarded the ISCHE prize 2005 for this article.

Abstract

Central to the assembling of the New South Wales public education system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the setting of borders and boundaries between different categories of students. These boundaries were particularly decisive in the institution of the public high school, where entry and progress were regulated by tests and examinations. Students were ostensibly grouped according to intelligence, application and age rather than older forms of categorization such as family and social class. Gender as a category was mediated by merit. Although it was known that the spread of public high schools in the United States and Canada had been facilitated by the early adoption of coeducation, the New South Wales government was initially reluctant to establish mixed‐sex high schools. Its first public high schools, founded under the Public Instruction Act of 1880, were all single‐sex institutions. By the early twentieth century, however, the Department of Public Instruction’s policy had changed and coeducation was a significant feature of the expansion of secondary schooling in New South Wales in 1911–1912 and the establishment of a meritocratic ladder of educational opportunity. While the Department’s preference continued to be for single‐sex schooling until the middle of the twentieth century, its willingness to establish mixed high schools in sparsely populated places opened the way for the successful expansion of a public high school network into regional and rural areas, a movement that had been frustrated in the 1880s. There was little public debate about coeducation in late nineteenth or early twentieth‐century New South Wales—unlike in England or the United States for the same period. For the most part New South Wales Education Department attitudes to and policies on coeducation—and gender—need to be inferred by reading more general kinds of discussions concerning the role of the state in higher education and the aims and purposes of secondary schooling. Nevertheless it is possible to assemble a picture of the ideas and beliefs regarding gender and high schools that informed the Department of Public Instruction’s policy first to proscribe, on idealistic grounds, and then tolerate, on pragmatic grounds, its adoption in regional high schools. This article examines this policy transition by reading representative or indicative discussions from key moments in New South Wales public education history. These are: the New South Wales Legislative Council debates over the clauses to establish high schools in the Public Instruction Bill of 1880, public statements demanding educational reform at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the policies establishing the major public education settlement of 1911–1912.

¹ The author has been awarded the ISCHE prize 2005 for this article.

Notes

¹ The author has been awarded the ISCHE prize 2005 for this article.

² New South Wales Department of Public Instruction. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1912. Sydney: Government Printer, 1913: 1.

³ United States Bureau of Education. Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1900–1901. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902: 1241n.

⁴ Dunlop, E. W. “The Public High Schools of New South Wales, 1883–1912.” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 51, no. 1 (1965): 60–86.

⁵ Ibid., 71.

⁶ New South Wales Parliamentary Debates (NSWPD), 1st ser., vol. 2 (1879–1880): 1191.

⁷ Gidney, R. D., and W. P. J. Millar. Inventing Secondary Education: The Rise of the High School in Nineteenth‐Century Ontario. Montreal: McGill‐Queen’s University Press, 1990; Tyack, D., and E. Hansot. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

⁸ NSWPD, 1st ser., vol. 2 (1879–1880): 1190.

⁹ NSWPD, 1st ser., vol. 2 (1879–1880): 1122. On the debate on public schooling and the middle class in New South Wales, see Sherington, Geoffrey, and Craig Campbell. “Middle class formations and the emergence of national schooling: A historiographical review of the Australian debate.” In Transformations in Schooling: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Kim Tolley. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 (forthcoming).

¹⁰ NSWPD, 1st ser., vol. 2, (1879–1880): 1125.

¹¹ See for example Seddon, T. “Social justice in hard times: from ‘equality of opportunity’ to ‘fairness and efficiency’.” Discourse 11, no. 1 (1990): 21–42.

¹² NSWPD, 1st ser., vol. 2, (1879–1880): 1185.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid., 1191.

¹⁵ Ibid., 1193.

¹⁶ Ibid., 1183, 1184.

¹⁷ Ibid., 1185.

¹⁸ Ibid., 1189.

¹⁹ Ibid., 1191.

²⁰ Ibid., 1185.

²¹ Ibid., 1186.

²² Ibid., 1187.

²³ Ibid., 1189.

²⁴ Ibid., 1185, 1188–89, 1191.

²⁵ Anderson, F. The Public School System of New South Wales. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1901: 5–6.

²⁷ Ibid., 464.

²⁶ New South Wales Department of Public Instruction. Interim Report of the Commissioners [Knibbs and Turner] on Certain Parts of Primary Education. Sydney: Government Printer, 1903: 91–92, 464–68.

²⁸ Ibid., 92.

²⁹ Woods, A., ed. Co‐education: a Series of Essays by Various Authors. London: Longmans, Green, 1903.

³¹ Ibid., 467.

³⁰ Report of the Commissioners on … Primary Education, 465.

³³ Ibid., 465.

³² Ibid., 91–92, 465, 467–68.

³⁴ Report of the[US] Commissioner, 1275–83.

³⁵ Mansford, C. J. “The personal element in joint schools.” In Woods, ed. Co‐education, 98–100; Warrington, C. “An experiment in Co‐education.” In ibid., 120; Woods, A. “The dangers and difficulties of co‐education,” In ibid., 132.

³⁶ New South Wales Department of Public Instruction. Conference of Inspectors, Teachers, Departmental Officers and Prominent Educationists. Sydney: Government Printer, 1904: 161–66.

³⁷ Ibid., 161; Golding’s speech was also printed in the Australian Journal Of Education: Official Organ of the Teachers’ Association of New South Wales (1 June 1904): 7; see also Deverall, K. “A Bid for Affirmative Action: Annie Golding and the New South Wales Public School Teachers’ Association, 1900–1915.” Labour History, no. 77 (1999): 117–39.

³⁸ Conference of Inspectors, 165.

³⁹ Ibid., 162.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 163.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 161.

⁴¹ Theobald, Marjorie. “Moral Regulation and the Nineteenth‐century ‘Lady Teacher’.” In Discipline, Moral Regulation, and Schooling, edited by Kate Rousmaniere, Kari Dehli and Ning de Coninck‐Smith. New York: Garland, 1997: 161–81.

⁴² Conference of Inspectors, 162.

⁴³ Ibid., 166.

⁴⁵ Anderson, M. “Co‐education: An Address Delivered by Mrs Francis Anderson, before the New South Wales Society for Child Study.” Australian Journal of Education: Official Organ of the Teachers’ Association of New South Wales 15 (1905): 13–16.

⁴⁶ New South Wales Department of Public Instruction. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1906. Sydney: Government Printer, 1907: 36.

⁴⁷ Report of the Minister … for the Year 1912, 3.

⁴⁸ See May, J. R. “Gender, Memory and the Experience Of Selective Secondary Schooling in Newcastle, New South Wales, from the 1930s to the 1950s.” Ph.D. diss., University of Newcastle, 2000: 24–25.

⁴⁹ New South Wales Department of Public Instruction. Three Years of Education. Sydney: Government Printer, 1913.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 8.

⁵¹ Ibid., 10.

⁵² Ibid., 12.

⁵³ Ibid., 23.