oving from the adage that “children should be seen and not heard” to one that embraces input and places value in the personal decisions made by the younger generation has been a long process influenced by social, cultural and political dint. And though the process began far earlier, the immediate and ancillary effects of the Second World War have had more tremendous impact on the attitudes toward childhood than perhaps any other collateral event. Though the matter is highly nuanced, involving causes and effects that have been both closely direct and many times removed, these changes in the Australian outlook, as a national movement, have always been directly reflected in the expectations and provisions the country has maintained for education.

In the 1840s, the Australian government first began to vest direct interest in children and their education. A report had disclosed that though schoolhouses were prolific, only half of all school-aged children had been educated. (Department of Education, 2017b) The introduction of a national system in 1848 aimed to consolidate schools, focusing education where needed without unnecessary overlap.

Previous to this, schools were almost exclusively maintained by the Anglican Church. (Department of Education, 2017b) New schools, therefore, were established where denominational schools did not already exist. Many were soon forced to close, however, viewed as “Godless” by the clergy. This situation began to change a decade later when the Board of National Education accepted denominational and private schools as within governmental financial oversight. (Department of Education, 2017c)

Full separation of state and denomination came in schools with the Public Instruction Act 1880, proclaiming education “free, secular and compulsory.” (Department of Education, 2017d) With this act, school-aged education (6-14 years old) was made mandatory. Public school attendance increased 25%, and numbers continued to rise as Christian schools closed due to lack of government funding. (Department of Education, 2017d) Compulsory education also increased the population of indigenous students in attendance. Public outcry, however, resulted in governmental establishment of separate systems for the Aboriginal community. (Department of Education, 2017d)

A national system of secondary schools was established when the 1904 Royal Commission highlighted the necessity “to maintain the supply of qualified people needed in a period of growing industrialisation.” (Department of Education, 2017e)

This was, institutionally, Australia’s relationship with its children prior to the country’s entrance into World War Two. Yet even before direct wartime engagement, awareness of the climate in Europe had begun to promote pedagogical change. Education for Complete Living, “likely the most influential of any nongovernment publication about education and schooling in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century”, (Campbell, 2014, p. 1) was published following a nationwide conference in 1937. The authors argued that education of democracy, morality and citizenship was compulsory to combat fascism, concerned over the “general lack of freedom of teachers and schools to develop and experiment with curricula.” (Campbell, 2014, p. 1) The report emphasised a need to address social order and “whole child” pedagogy, with a focus on “religious, spiritual, moral and citizenship education”, as opposed to mere transmission of knowledge (Campbell, 2014, p. 3)

Though the war’s onset in 1939 delayed the document’s immediate efficacy, changes were seen nonetheless, particularly in the personal socio-cultural influence wrought by teachers. With 990,900 Australians enlisted, the workforce was depleted by the absence of over a tenth of the country’s population. (‘Enlistment statistics, Second World War’, 2019) The population of female teachers increased accordingly, a trend that continued even following the war. Whereas previously men and women shared the profession roughly evenly, (Department of Education, 2017a) women in teaching have risen steadily since 1940 to over 76% of the workforce. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019b)

This shift delivered a change in attitudes and classroom management. In general, female teachers place more emphasis on students’ individual needs and learning styles, whereas men tend to be disseminators of information. (Laird, Garver, & Niskodé, 2007, p. 4) Thus classrooms began to be more significantly influenced by women’s inclination to “emphasize higher order thinking skills, active and collaborative learning, and diversity experiences.” (Laird et al., 2007, p. 5) The voices of children who were traditionally “not heard,” as the idiom goes, slowly became more prominent.

The absence of military personnel marked other effects on the teaching demographic, as well. With the dearth of employable teachers being in part filled by women, a new Teacher’s Certificate paradigm in 1943 reduced extant rigorous qualification standards. (Chaseling & Boyd, 2014) This, along with contributions to tertiary financial aid through the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme in the latter half of the decade, helped Australians of all socioeconomic status achieve skills training. (Abbott & Doucouliagos, 2003) In this way, educational outlooks and attitudes became more broadly representative, eventuating as “the essential characteristic of contemporary Australian society”. (Mackay, 1997, p. 15)

Following the war, the government provided financial aid to migrants as part of the multi-national ‘Colombo Plan.’ In combination with other governmental immigration policy, two million migrants entered Australia within the next two decades. (NSW Migration Heritage Centre, 2010) With this influx, an addition of non-native teachers were introduced into schools. Trained in country or naturalised through immigration reform, these migrants entered the workforce at a crucial moment. By 1939, following publication of Education for Complete Living, the minister for education had begun to limit student-to-teacher ratios. (Department of Education, 2019) Notwithstanding this, in the decades that followed the war’s conclusion a significant “baby boom” occurred. For fifteen years, annual population expansion averaged 141% the hundred-year mean. In the years 1949-1952, the rate of growth well over doubled. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019c) This put huge numbers of children in schools. Class sizes by the late 1950s averaged 48 students. (Department of Education, 2019)

Following that peak, however, Australian classes have significantly reduced in size. Repeated studies have highlighted the importance of student-to-teacher ratios idealised to facilitate individualised attention, (Zyngier, 2014) shadowing the pedagogical influence of the increased female presence consequential of the war period. By 2010, the primary classroom averaged 23.2 children. (Zyngier, 2014)

The influx of immigrant teachers not only helped staff crowded classrooms, though, but addressed the changing face of Australian citizenship. Australia under the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, colloquially known as the ‘White Australia Policy’, employed a stratagem of “social cohesion” constructed by politic exclusion of migrants of non-European background. Coming primarily from Commonwealth and English-speaking countries before the 1966 repeal of the Act, immigrants at first did little to challenge Australian identity. After the political stance was officially retracted, however, the nation became ever-more cosmopolitan. The two million migrants who came in the 1950s and ’60s compare significantly in number to the four million children born in the post-war “boom.” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004) As a result, between the years 1947 and 2016 the make-up of society shifted dramatically. Those born in country only account for 71% of the contemporary population, down from 90%. And though the Asian influence posted the most drastic rise (from 0.37% to nearly 13%,) representation has increased across all sociopolitical regions. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019a) As these numbers only take count of first-generation migrants, the look of social cohesion in modern Australia is radically altered.

The “White Australia” policy had been, in major part, supported by schoolteachers before the war; but by the 1950s, social identity was beginning to embrace other cultures (Griffiths, 2006; National Museum of Australia, n.d.) and promote the recognition that teachers of diverse backgrounds bring “significant global teaching experience” to education. (Collins & Reid, 2012, p. 46) Whereas schoolteachers once supported “social homogeneity,” (Griffiths, 2006, p. 239) attitudes toward teaching and culture have adopted the recognition that “cultural difference is central to [modern] Australian classrooms,” calling for higher diversity in classrooms in order to reflect Australia’s ethnic and cultural composite. (Collins & Reid, 2012, pp. 40–41) Within the six decades that have ensued, as high as 20% of the teaching demographic has consisted of overseas teachers, more closely providing a diversity to which the backgrounds of the students have been able to relate. (Collins & Reid, 2012)

The baby boom affected more than the rapid influx of students, as well. Those who fought in the war were of a generation that moulded by the Depression and two World Wars. They found value in work, prudence and loyalty. Their achievements came in stable marriages and long-term careers. (Mackay, 1997) With the post-war economic plenty, Baby Boomers had a very different upbringing, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics considers education one of the areas “most affected.” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004, p. 17) Changes in the nuclear family, collective views of employment, and social consciousness would have lasting impacts on attitudes toward children.

With increased responsibility for work on the homefront, the wartime experience changed many women’s perspectives. Making more money in traditionally “male” jobs, women experienced wholly new liberty. Yet by 1945, they were expected to return to the home or to “women’s positions” in the workplace as men returned. (‘Women at Work’, n.d.) As such, education was regarded as “wasted on girls”. (Anderson, 2005, p. 318) In 1949 and 1950 two lobbies put forth the first cases that would eventually lead toward workplace equality for women. Likewise, whereas girls had heretofore been poorly represented in high school and universities, Australia began its climb toward educational equality. (Anderson, 2005)

Concurrently, there was counter-cultural upheaval in regard to political issues of the 1960s and ’70s. Young, socially-conscious teachers contributed to the demographic in schools. Protests, strikes and rallies, relating to education and broader cultural concerns and attended by teachers and students alike, were organised, giving a new perspective on social citizenship. (Kass, 2019a, 2019b) School became not just an institution of academic but social education, much as outlined in Education for Complete Living thirty years earlier, and children’s voices had a national forum.

One such issue addressed by teacher and student demonstrations was the right to equal education for the Aboriginal community, who had been instructed in segregated schools since before the turn of the century. (Department of Education, 2017d; Kass, 2019a) By 1972, Aboriginal children were legally entitled to an education as equal citizens in all state schools.

Yet for all the social awareness of the culture, there was “a lack of a clear moral framework and of a solid value-system”. (Mackay, 1997, p. 18) Whereas the post-war prosperity of their upbringing had granted the new generation tremendous optimism, the nuclear threat of the Cold War instilled a doubt about the future. Thus they became “poor planners, unenthusiastic savers but voracious consumers.” (Mackay, 1997, p. 17) Previously held values of loyalty and stability came into question. Divorce rates skyrocketed in 1976 with the introduction of “no-fault divorce,” then steadied at a rate five-and-a-quarter times higher than the pre-1970 average. In 2001 the rate finally began a steady, slow decline. (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2019) Career choice was similarly affected. The average time in a job in Australia has become only three years and four months, and the rate of part-time employment has more than tripled since 1975. (Fell, 2019)

With subsequent generations now postponing marriage and parenthood, and not confident in the labour market, (Mackay, 1997, p. 19) the roles and goals of education have shifted drastically. A primary factor for choice in later study and career has become less financial than of personal interest. Yet influence in these choices is still largely affected by the family, (Frigo, Bryce, Anderson, & McKenzie, 2007) and these latter generations of the Baby Boomers are being heard in light of their progenitors’ own social and independent mindsets.

As a result, Australians have been given more choice over their education. Parents and children are choosing schools based on religious, ethnic, economic, and other reasons. (Campbell, 2019) This choice has been made possible by campaigns such as those of the Howard administration in the late 1990’s which funded the private sector, increasing the numbers of not only Catholic and Christian institutions, but ideologues such as Montessori and Steiner. (Maddox, 2011) School has been compulsory since 1880, (Department of Education, 2017d) but choice exits in an abundance not catalogued in the nineteenth century or ever more recently.

The scope of Australia’s attitude toward youth has changed greatly. As outlined by views that were nascent as early as 1937 but unable to be realised until seventy years of global influence had worked itself out through social debate, the national curriculum has begun officially implementing an increasing “whole child” approach. Classes are beginning to be organised in two-year stages, and cross-curriculum learning has been identified as “fundamental” to the education of the child. (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, n.d.) A striking example of this is the integration of the History and Geography curricula. As an explanation for the consolidation, ACARA cites, “[w]ithout knowledge of chronology, geography, institutional arrangements, material circumstances and belief systems, no student inquiry on a past period — however well intended —will lead to understanding.” (National Curriculum Board, 2009, p. 5) This recognition of cross-curricular importance reflects an understanding of knowledge beyond the scope of previous dissemination models of education. The national curriculum now posts primary outcomes which relate almost directly to the “moral and citizenship education” enmeshed in the Education for Complete Living document that predicted the change. (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, n.d.; Campbell, 2014, p. 3)

Even before Australia’s official engagement in the European and Pacific theatres of the Second World War, the conflict began to have its effects on attitudes toward children and national education. And though many social paradigms had to go through trials of experience and institutional struggle before treatises like Education for Complete Living could have their potential realised, the regard of children has matured ever since school was first made compulsory in 1880. The pedagogical approach has grown to encompass students of varied faiths, cultures and backgrounds as equals. And through institutional reform, led in no small part by the personal influence of the diversified demographic of teachers, Australian society has recognised the need to value the social and academic child.

This process is a continuing work, however. The pitfalls and apparent inconsistencies within a framework that has to identify and help guide an increasingly nuanced social cohesiveness can and will only be worked out through the same experience and institutional struggle that helped form the last century of Australian attitudes.