Way College: 1892-1903

Citation

Craig Campbell (2015), "Way College: 1892-1903", History of Education Review, Vol. 44 No. 1, pp. 128-129. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-01-2015-0001

Bob Petersen has written insightful and often entertaining studies in the history of education in Australia and beyond for over 50 years. His latest book tells the story of Way College, a South Australian school, open from 1892 to 1903 and “a masterpiece of Federation schooling”. The book is a memorable example of the best of Petersen’s highly individual approach to the writing of educational history.

Never much tempted by the social science turn, Petersen almost always places significant individuals at the centre of his histories, and one way or another remained true to his original doctoral project from the 1960s, in exploring the meanings and histories of progressive, alternative and experimental education in Australia.

We are told in Way College that this school represented a “home-made concept of educational innovation which just happened to anticipate the best school practice of the twentieth century and deserves, therefore, a place in any history of progressive education throughout the world” (p. 72). The book stand or falls on whether this argument can be sustained. Generously, Petersen provides the argument against: the school and its work are barely remembered in South Australia let alone any place else. Yet the argument for its significance is well made. This school pioneered curriculum reforms that helped embed practical and vocational education in a middle class school in a way that seemed to bypass the “parity of esteem” issues that so bedevilled attempts to reconcile the mental/manual labour divide in the secondary schools that derived their reason from English traditions of schooling.

Organised by William Catton Grasby, about whom Petersen has written elsewhere, the agricultural education occurring in the school was brilliantly conceived. The experimental work on different crops that proceeded in each student’s agricultural plot within the school grounds was often remarkable, anticipating later activity of agricultural scientists in more significant institutions.

The curriculum certainly incorporated “university” preparatory studies, retaining David Hollidge as its successful classics master, but there were courses in metal working and harness making as well as agriculture. Petersen makes an argument for the school as a pioneer of Herbartian pedagogy, as a pioneer of sex education (admittedly in the service of “purity”), an early provider of vocational guidance and more. In other respects this school was not a pioneer. It quickly incorporated the reforms which by the 1890s were becoming widespread in church collegiate schools, referred to here as the “machinery of a public school”. So prefects, school songs, school magazine, old scholars association, games, cadets – the expected paraphernalia of the misnamed Arnoldianism also formed the activity and culture of the school.

The school lasted a decade. School historians in Australia often have to deal with foundations lasting a century and more. The brief existence of this school gave Petersen the freedom to explore in some depth the life of its founding and only headmaster, William Torr. It enabled a useful discussion of the place of the school in the history of one of the sects that broke from the main Wesleyan church. The Bible Christians were not much regarded in Devonshire nor elsewhere in England, but in South Australia they boasted the Chief Justice and Lieutenant Governor, Samuel Way, and many prosperous citizens and farming families. The school was closed as a result of the various Wesleyan groups coming together once more. In South Australia the unification into a new Methodist church was completed in 1900.

Petersen gives a lively account of the men who were associated with the school. It is one of the pleasures of this book that the reader develops a good sense of Adelaide and its hinterland, and the families that constituted the school. Petersen’s remarkable knowledge of what was being written internationally about education in the 1890s, and what was being read by his school founders gives weight to his other stories, about how the founders of the public school system for example and how other private and church schoolmen interacted with Way College. The book not only makes an important contribution to the history of curriculum, progressive education and Methodism in Australia, but tells us a great deal about the development of secondary schooling in general. This was the period just before the second wave of public high school foundations, after the not very successful attempts in two of the Australian colonies in the 1870s and 1880s.

Are there problems with the book? There are some if what one is after is a well documented history. Petersen decided against the provision of the usual scholarly apparatus, whether footnotes, bibliography, index or even guides to the sources, though he suggests that anyone interested could work out the sources from the text. This is true to a degree, but it imposes a heavy burden on future scholars who might wish to follow on. Nor is the significance of Way College explicitly linked to the historiography of the New Education and progressivism in Australia and elsewhere, although this is assuaged by the sheer richness of the material and more than useful insight and analysis that occurs. The historiography of progressivism is assumed. There is also the question of for whom the book was written. Multiple groups is perhaps the answer. Lists of as many of the students and teachers that Petersen could track down absorb over 60 pages of the text, suggesting a desire to attract interest from families of old scholars among others. Nevertheless it is a most welcome study, and after its near 25 years’ gestation it is terrific to see it in print at last.