Committed to Learning: A History of Education at the University of Melbourne

Citation

Sherington, G. (2018), "Committed to Learning: A History of Education at the University of Melbourne", History of Education Review, Vol. 47 No. 2, pp. 230-231. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-10-2018-060

Being a part of the prestigious Miegunyah Press series, attached to Melbourne University Press, this publication is designed to recognise the establishment of the Faculty of Education at Melbourne in 1903; its struggle to maintain its place within the University for the next four decades; and its growing significance after the Second World War culminating in the recent emergence of the Graduate School of Education. The account is framed as a celebration of prominent staff over this period. As such it serves principally as a biographical register of academics in education at the University of Melbourne. While it does not give the intellectual and pedagogic history of the faculty that I was expecting, “Committed to Learning” does reveal certain trends in education as an academic discipline in Australia which will be of interest to other scholars in the history of education.

The opening sections focus on the colonial history of education in Victoria recognising the role of the state in the training of teachers including a college. This was of course in keeping with practice in Britain and its Empire of settlement. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that education became an academic discipline within universities influenced by German and American examples. In Britain Scotland led the way in finding means to integrate the teaching practice of colleges with the university teaching of education based on research. Significantly, the first academic to teach education at Melbourne was John Smyth, educated at the University of Edinburgh and Jena in Germany. Smyth was also Principal of Melbourne Teachers’ College later being elevated to Professor within the University. This connection between College and University continued until the Second World War.

There were similar joint appointments between university and college across Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century, the best known being Alexander Mackie at Sydney. In Melbourne a Faculty of Education emerged in the University. But like elsewhere the discipline of education suffered from lack of money and status. As the author points out, there was little co-operation and often tension between education and the university departments and disciplines on which teaching subjects for the schools were built.

With a little support from American friends, education began to prove itself through research. And here I think the author could have made more direct reference to the role of the Australian Council of Educational Research founded in 1931 through American philanthropy. Based in Melbourne the ACER had close connections to the University. The book does refer to the American-trained Cunningham as the Director of the ACER but the overall issue of ACER-sponsored research Melbourne deserves more attention. And this was a part of a continuing shift towards America which had come to influence the world of education through the ideas of Dewey and Terman and models for teacher education in the graduate school of Teachers’ College in New York.

After the Second World War, Education in Melbourne began to exercise more influence within Australia. As the first established Faculty of Education in Australia it held some status and increasing numbers of students as the demand for teacher graduates grew. The Melbourne Graduate Bill Connell helped to create a Department of Education at the University of Sydney founded on principles he had learnt in part at Melbourne. And the Faculty at Melbourne became known for employing ministers of various religious background, far more proportionately than the rest of the University. How far this may have shaped teaching and research is not clear. What was more significant is that in an era such as the 1950s and 1960s, when females were so few in academic life, education gave opportunities to many women who engaged in both teaching and research.

The last third of the book is mainly concerned with the post-Dawkins era of amalgamations. Having once scorned education as a discipline the university now saw opportunities in absorbing many of the Colleges of Education in Melbourne which were engaged in teacher education. Some but not all the staff from the former Melbourne Teachers’ College became part of the new Institute of Education renamed again as the Faculty of Education in 1995. Hawthorne Institute affiliated with the University in 1991 adding a further part of the Melbourne pattern. In effect, the University soon ensured that the old binary system of higher education, of most prominence in the field of teacher education, would give way to the mode of Education as a university discipline based on research.

The new Graduate School of Education at Melbourne is continuing this trend as part of a search for global recognition. From an historical perspective, one could say that there are hopes that its current global ranking of five amongst world Faculties of Education may grant the status that graduate schools such as Teachers College New York held from the late nineteenth century.