England and Australia: National education in two pluralist societies

Abstract

The problem of establishing a national system of education in a pluralist society raises a series of inter-related and involved questions, to which there are no simple answers. To some, in the last resort, there are no answers at all, although the questions are clear enough. Who is to administer and control the educational system? How is it to be financed? Who is to be taught? What is, and what is not, to be taught? What is to be the relationship of the national schools created under such a system to those already in existence? There is no satisfactory compromise between the mutually incompatible answers to many of these questions. It seems that a system of national education can be, on the one hand, essential, and on the other impossible to establish, an example of the collision between immovable object and irresistible force. In England, a settled society with a long tradition, immovability proved the stronger element; in the state of Victoria, irresistibility. In considering the English Elementary Education Act of 1870 Professor W. F. Connell compares it with the legislation which provided the Australian colonies with their system of national education, and, he remarks that the free, secular and compulsory provisions in all of the latter were 'one of the clearest demonstrations of their intimate connection with the problem of establishing some form of national education. He suggests that the Act of 1870 not only failed to decide these questions, but also failed to furnish England with a national education. Ninety years have passed since the Victorian solution was written into the statute books, long enough for it to have created its own tradition. Twenty-five years ago Professor G. V. Portus, of Adelaide, speaking to an English audience, said that the system adopted in Australia had 'now become a tradition in Australian education. Theoretically it may be indefensible; practically it has come to stay'. Many would be less certain of this today. Recent events in Goulburn,