Nature enthusiasm, social planning and eugenics in Australian State schools, 1900‐1920

Journal of Educational Administration and History

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 1-19

  Rodwell, Grant ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2342620494     PISSN: 00220620     EISSN: 14787431     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0022062970290101     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1907, 17, Victorian Parliamentary Papers for the Year 1908‐09(hereafter VPP).
2. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1908, 13, VPP 1909‐10.
3. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1911, 31, Joint Papers of the Parliament of New South Wales, 1912 (hereafterJPPNSW).
4. See, for example, R. J. W. Selleck, Frank Tate: A biography(Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1982); Connell, A History of Education in the Twentieth Century(Canberra, CDC, 1980); B. K. Hyams and B. Bessant Schools for the People? An introduction to the history of state education in Australia(Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1972); and J. E Cleverly and J. Lavvry (eds), Australian Education in the Twentieth Century(Melbourne, Cassell, 1972).
5. Rob Watts, ‘Beyond nature and nurture: Eugenics in 20th century Australian history’, Australian Journal of Politics and History40 (1995), 318‐334. Watts states that typical of these standard histories are Alan Barcan, A History of Australian Education(Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1980); Connell (1980); and Cleverly and Lavvry (eds, 1972). Typical of the new revisionist histories is M. R. Theobald and R. J. Selleck (eds), Family, School and State in Australian History(Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1990).
6. C. L. Bacchi, ‘The nature‐nurture debate in Australia, 1900‐1914’, Historical Studies1 (1980/81), 199‐212.
7. Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and identity, 1788‐1980(Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1981). Mary Cawte, ‘Craniometry and eugenics in Australia: R. J. Berry and the quest for social efficiency’, Historical Studies22 (1986), 35‐53. Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier settlement in Victoria, 1915‐1938(Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1987). Stephen Garton, ‘Sir Charles Mackellar: Psychiatry, eugenics and child welfare in New South Wales, 1900‐1914’, Historical Studies22 (1986), 21‐34; and his ‘The rise of the therapeutic state: Psychiatry and the system of criminal jurisdiction in New South Wales, 1890‐1940’, Australian Journal of Politics and History32 (1986), 337‐389.
8. Michael Roe, ‘The establishment of the Australian Department of Health’, Historical Studies17 (1976), 176‐192; and his Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Australian bourgeois thought, 1890‐1960(St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1983).
9. Roe (1976), 183.
10. Stephen Garton, ‘Sound minds and healthy bodies: Re‐considering eugenics in Australia, 1911‐1940’, Historical Studies26 (1994), 163‐181; quotation from 166.
11. For the complexities of the British eugenics discourse, see especially: G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900‐1914(Leiden, Noordhoff International Publishing, 1976); and his ‘Eugenics and class’, in Charles Webster (ed), Biology, Medicine and Society, 1840‐1940(Cambridge University Press, 1981). Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failing: The Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain(London, Routledge, 1992). Greta Jones, Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain(London, Croom Helm, 1986). Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the declining birthrate in twentieth‐century Britain(Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
12. Roe (1976); Garton. ‘Sir Charles Mackellar’ (1986); ‘The rise of the therapeutic state’ (1986); ‘Sound minds and healthy bodies’ (1994). J. Powles, ‘Naturalism and hygiene: Fascist affinities in Australian public health, 1910‐1940’, paper given at the ‘Attractions of Fascism’ conference, University of New South Wales, July 1987, duplicated. Milton Lewis, ‘Introduction’, in J. H. L. Cumpston (ed), Health and Disease in Australia: A history(Canberra, AGPS, 1989). Bacchi (1981). Alison M. Turtle, ‘Psychology in the Australian context’, International Journal of Psychology20 (1985), 111‐128. Ronald Taft, ‘Psychology and its history in Australia’, Australian Psychologist17 (1982), 31‐39. H. Bourke, ‘Sociology and the social sciences in Australia, 1912‐1928’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology17 (1981), 26‐35. Kereen Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian family, 1880‐1940(Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985). D. Deacon, Managing Gender: The state, the new middle class and women workers, 1830‐1930(Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1980). C. Bacchi, ‘Evolution, eugenics and women: The impact of scientific theories on attitudes towards women, 1870‐1920’, in E. Windshuttle (ed), Women, Class and History: Feminist perspectives on Australia, 1788‐1978(Melbourne, Fontana, 1980). S. Siedlecky and D. Wyndham, Populate and Perish: Australian women's fight for birth control(Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1990), especially 105‐120. Ann Curthoys, ‘Eugenics, feminism and birth control: The case of Marion Piddington’, Hecate15 (1989), 73‐89. G. Davison, ‘The city bred child and urban reform in Melbourne, 1900‐1940’, in P. Williams (ed), Social Process and the City(Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1983). White (1981). Judith Bessant, ‘Described measured and labelled: Eugenics, youth policy and moral panic in Victoria in the 1950s’, Journal of Australian Studies31 (1992), 8‐28.
13. David McCallum, ‘Eugenics, psychology and education in Australia’, Melbourne Working Papers4 (1982/83), 17‐33; TheSocial Production of Merit(Lewes, Falmer Press, 1990); ‘Knowledge, schooling and power: Questions about the eugenics movement in Australia’, ANZHES, Proceedings 21st Annual Conference(Adelaide, October 1992). M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Preventing the unfit from breeding: The Mental Deficiency Bill in Western Australia, 1929’, in P. Hetherington (ed), Childhood and Society in Western Australia(Nedlands, University of Western Australia Press, 1988). J. Lewis, ‘"So much grit in the educational machine”: Schools, society and the intervention of measurable intelligence’, in Bob Bessant (ed), Mother State and her Little Ones(Coburg, CYCS, PIT Press, 1987); and ‘"Removing the grit”: The development of special education in Victoria, 1887‐1947’ (unpublished PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 1989). Pavla Miller, Long Division: State schooling in South Australian society(Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 1986).
14. See, for example, Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian attitudes in American thought(New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1963). Lyndsay A. Farrall, The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement, 1865‐1925(New York, Garland Publishing, 1985). Searle (1976), (1981). Mazumdar (1992). Jones (1986). Soloway (1990). R. A. Lowe, ‘Eugenicists, doctors and the quest for National Efficiency: An educational crusade, 1900‐1939’, History of Education8 (1979), 293‐306; ‘Eugenics and education: A note on the origins of the intelligence testing movement in England’, Educational Studies6 (1980), 1‐8. David Barker, ‘How to curb the fertility of the unfit: The feeble‐minded in Edwardian Britain’, Oxford Review of Education9 (1983), 197‐211. L. J. Ray, ‘Eugenics, mental deficiency and Fabian Socialism between the wars’, Oxford Review of Education9 (1983), 213‐222. Ian Brown, ‘Who were the eugenicists? A study of the formation of an early twentieth‐century pressure group’, History of Education17 (1988), 295‐307. Patricia Potts, ‘Medicine, morals and mental deficiency: The contribution of doctors to the development of special education in England’, Oxford Review of Education 9(1983), 181‐194. John MacNicol, ‘Eugenics and the campaign for voluntary sterilization in Britain between the wars’, Social History of Medicine 2(1989), 147‐170. Harry Torrance, ‘The origins and development of mental testing in England and the United States’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 2(1981), 45‐59. Charles L. Vigue, ‘Eugenics and the education of women in the United States’, Journal of Educational Administration and History19: 2 (1987), 51‐55.
15. Deborah Tyler, ‘Going Like a boy: Making up girls in the 1930s kindergarten’, Australian Historical Studies25 (1993), 357‐370. David Kirk and Karen Twigg, ‘Regulating Australian bodies: Eugenics, anthropometrics and school medical inspection in Victoria, 1900‐1940’, History of Education Review23 (1994), 19‐37. Grant Rodwell, ‘Clitoridectomies in glasshouses: Eugenics in our kindergartens’, ANZHES, Proceedings of 21st Annual Conference(Adelaide, October 1992); ‘Lessons in eugenics from Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia‘ANZHES, Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference(Sydney, July 1995); ‘Australian open air school architecture’, History of Education Review24: 2 (1995), 21‐41; With zealous Efficiency: Progressivism and Tasmanian state primary education, 1900‐1920(Darwin, William Michael Press, 1992). See also Bob Bessant, ‘Eugenics as an influence on the history of education’, ANZHES, Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference(Adelaide, October 1992).
16. For example, William L. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900‐1920(Port Washington, Kennikat Press, 1974). Mervin Robert Swanson, ‘The American Country Life movement, 1900‐1940’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1972). For a brief summary of Bailey's life and work see Bowers (1974), ch 4. The standard biographies are Andrew Dean Rodgers, Liberty Hyde Bailey(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1949); and Philip Dorf, Liberty Hyde Bailey(Ithica, Cornell University, Press, 1956).
17. L. H. Bailey, The Country Life Movement in the United States(New York, Macmillan, 1911), 20.
18. Bailey (1911), 59.
19. See, for example, David B. Dambom: ‘Rural education reform and the Country Life movement, 1900‐1920’, Agricultural History53 (1979), 462‐474; The Resisted Revolution(Iowa, Iowa State University Press, 1979).
20. See, especially, L. H. Bailey: The Nature‐Study Idea: Being an interpretation of the new school movement to put the child in sympathy with Nature(New York, Doubleday, 1903); The Outlook of Nature(New York, Macmillan, 1908); and Bailey (1911), 61‐84.
21. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American education, 1876‐1957(New York, Vintage Books, 1964), 75‐85.
22. See especially, Soloway (1990), 43‐46.
23. Alfred F. Tredgold, Mental Deficiency,1st edn (London, Ballière, 1908), 72. See also Mazumdar (1992), 80‐81.
24. C. W. Saleeby, Sociology(London, T. C. and E. C. Jack, [nd]), 92‐93.
25. Jones (1986), 75‐77.
26. C. W. Saleeby, Worry: The disease of the age(London, Cassell, [nd]), 106.
27. Neville Hicks, ’This Sin and Scandal’: Australia's population debate, 1891‐1911,(Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1978).
28. Daily Post[Hobart], 23 September 1911.
29. For these developments in Victoria, see Kirk and Twigg (1994).
30. Report on Medical Inspection and Kindred Subjects, Appendix J of the Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1908‐09, 100, VPP 1908‐09.
31. New South Wales Department of Public Instruction, Report upon the Physical Condition of Children Attending Public Schools in New South Wales,(Sydney, 1908), 20.
32. Tom Griffiths, ‘"The Natural History of Melbourne”: The culture of nature writing in Victoria, 1880‐1945’, Historical Studies23 (1989), 339‐365, quotation from 353.
33. Michael Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia(London, Macmillan, 1898), 480.
34. W. M. Hughes, ‘The story of Australia and New Zealand in the twentieth century’, in F. H. Hooper (ed), These Eventful Years: The twentieth century in the making(2 vols, New York, Macmillan, 1924), 2, 291.
35. P. R. Cole, ‘The development of an Australian social type’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society18: 2 (1932), 54.
36. Davison (1983), 143‐174.
37. Macdonald's ‘Nature Notes and Queries’ began in the Arguson 25 November 1904; his ‘Notes for Boys’ column began on 23 February 1909. Griffiths (1989), 357, note 13.
38. Griffiths (1989), 354. And K. S. Inglis, C. E. W. Bean: Australian historian(St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1970). Davison (1983) shows how Bean was developing his ideas from early in the century.
39. Roe (1983), ch 3 for a history of Barrett's contribution to social planning and eugenic causes, especially 57‐88.
40. James W. Barrett, Twin Ideals: An educated Commonwealth(2 vols, London, H. K. Lewis and Co.
41. Richard Arthur, ‘Farm training for city lads’, Agricultural Gazette of N.S. W.2 (1907), 702‐704.
42. W. L. Neale, Report on Primary Education in Tasmania, 1904, 6, Journals and Printed Papers of the Parliament of Tasmania for the Year 1905.
43. Educational Record3/4 (July 1907), 45‐46.
44. Daily Post[Hobart], 27 January 1913.
45. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1906, 11, VPP 1907‐08.
46. Charles R. Long (ed) Record and Review of the State Schools Exhibition(Melbourne, J. Kemp, Government Printer, 1908), 19.
47. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1909, 36, JPPNSW, 1910.
48. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1909, 42, JPPNSW, 1910.
49. Mercury[Hobart], 8 August 1910.
50. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1908, 29, JPPNSW, 1909.
51. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1911, 42, JPPNSW, 1912.
52. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1913, 36, JPPNSW, 1914.
53. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1905, Education, Appendix C, 35 VPP 1906‐07.
54. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1906, Education, 23, VPP 1907‐08.
55. The Year Book of Agriculture for 1905(Melbourne, J. Kemp, Government Printer, 1905), 20‐28.
56. Argus[Melbourne], 2 February 1906.
57. Selleck (1982), 319, note 83. Selleck makes the point that a major motive behind Tate's effort with the agricultural high schools was to gently ease the Department of Education into a role in secondary education, and it was politic for him to appeal to the strong rural influence in Parliament. Also see R. A. Martin, ‘The Victorian agricultural high schools: The vocational fallacy in state secondary education in Victoria, 1900‐1925’, in E. L. French (ed), Melbourne Studies in Education, 1965(Melbourne University Press, 1965). And M. A. Clements, ‘Frank Tate and the politics of agricultural education in Victoria, 1895‐1905’, in Stephen Murray‐Smith (ed), Melbourne Studies in Education, 1917(Melbourne University Press, 1977).
58. Mercury[Hobart], 18 November 1907.
59. Arthur (1907), 704.
60. Roe (1983), 164.
61. Robert Van Krieken, Children and the State: Social control and the formation of Australian child welfare(Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1991), 103‐104.
62. Van Krieken (1991), 104‐105.
63. See, for example, McCallum (1990).
64. See, for example, Lake (1987)