Growing up ‘Australian’ in the 1950s: The dream of social science

Abstract

This article discusses the discursive production of the adolescent schoolchild in post‐World War II Australia in relation to Australia's self‐representation as a liberal‐democratic nation state. It argues that social scientists, including psychologists, educationists and child workers, were especially responsible for scripting a fantasy about young people as subjects who could only grow up into effective Australian citizens within the embrace of the school. It proposes that the development of the educational techniques of intake testing, remedial teaching and counselling to deal with underachieving and disaffected secondary students can be understood as part of the staging of a fantasy in which the adolescent had to be loved scientifically if it were to grow up successfully. Through a symptomatic reading of a key 1950s educational text, the article also locates the desire immanent in the discursive practices of these psychological and eduational agents, and suggests that a certain ambivalence in the nature of this desire brought the adolescent schoolgirl into the centre of social science's national dreaming.