Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0020/00204.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 27KB | 441 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00204}
$Pretitle{369}
$Title{Australia
Chapter 6A.   Education, Science, and Mass Communications}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Donald P. Whitaker}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{education
schools
secondary
state
government
system
states
primary
school
federal}
$Date{1974}
$Log{Table 16.*0020401.tab
Table 17.*0020402.tab
}
Country:     Australia
Book:        Australia, A Country Study
Author:      Donald P. Whitaker
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1974

Chapter 6A.   Education, Science, and Mass Communications

     Geography is a common thread that runs through the history of Australian
education, scientific endeavor, and communications development. All three were
strongly conditioned by the historical experience of a small population
occupying a vast island continent. Endowed with a homeland the size of the
United States, but without the latter's natural richness and abundance,
Australians have relied on practicality, frugality, resourcefulness, and
interdependence.

     Although owing much in content to its British cultural heritage,
Australian education took a more decentralized form as a result of the
separateness of the states and individual histories and their geography.
Schooling had long been geared to the needs of ranching, mining, indu try, and
the professions. This practical emphasis gave Australian education a
service-industry direction from which it began to emerge only in the
post-World War II era. This also produced a highly literate citizenry; in the
1970s about 98.5 percent were literate.

     Isolation from one another and from the islands of their forefathers
early inclined Australians to a special interest in those branches of science
that offered to alleviate the impediments of distance. The emphasis on
communications, aeronautics, and electronics technology, laid the base for
Australia's outstanding role in space research and radio astronomy in the
early 1970s.

     Mass communications generally have reached a high state of development in
a linguistically and culturally homogeneous population. The imaginative use of
radio, and most recently of television, in providing schooling for children in
the sparsely settled regions of the country has been one of the notable
achievements of education in Australia. Moreover, so accessible have radio,
television, and the press become that they rival the schools as a source of
informing the youth. The task of preventing the new technology from reversing
the role of mass communications as an adjunct to education has been viewed as
a new challenge to educators in the 1970s.

EDUCATION

     The structure of education in the early 1970s was broadly that which the
Commonwealth inherited when the six colonies formed their independent union in
1901. Highly centralized control at the state level and a dual system of
public and private schools-the legacy of a historic struggle between church
and state for the control of education-were the characteristics of this
system. Both figured prominently in the national debate over education policy
in the 1970s.

     In terms of the overall task of providing for the education of a
population situated unevenly over a vast territory, Australia can point to a
considerable accomplishment. The administrators have been notably imaginative
in adapting correspondence and broadcasting to the task of bringing education
to the Outback. In general, however, the education system has been
characterized by an adherence to traditional and conservative patterns. As
stated by one Australian educator, the system has historically accommodated
itself to social change, never initiated it. Traditionally placing stress on
conduct and acceptable behavior patterns, the schools have been major
institutions for conformity and social control.

     World War II set in motion strong currents of change. The war experience
had made apparent the lasting need for a large number of men who were educated
in the new technology. Accelerated immigration and population increase after
1945 coincided with the acceptance of the idea of secondary education for all
(see ch. 2). Such changes in concert with others brought about a major
expansion in secondary and higher education in particular in the postwar era.
By the 1970s secondary education was virtually universal. The preceding decade
had also seen the federal government move from a peripheral role in education
to one of rapidly expanding influence that was exerting a growing force for
change in the traditional modes of education.

     Postwar quantitative expansion was accompanied by less dramatic but
important changes in public opinion and, within the circle of education,
toward the problems of education. A proliferation of official reports and
inquiries on education in the late 1950s and the 1960s attested to these
changes and to a growing openness and self-criticism among educators. A report
published in 1971, of a study conducted by South Australia, also discerned
striking advances since the 1940s in the professional skills and resources
being applied to educational research; for example, sociologists and educators
had made great advances in interdisciplinary cooperation. As in Great Britain
and the United States, where interdisciplinary cooperation was already paying
large dividends in educational research, educational debate in Australia was
achieving for the first time a firm empiricial footing.

     Prominent among the issues of a growing national debate on education have
been questions of administrative rigidity, the examination system in secondary
education, the supply and education of teachers, and the place of the private
schools in a society that prides itself on its egalitarian tradition.
Nevertheless, some critical opinion in Australia has held that the post-World
War II changes in education have been mostly quantitative and piecemeal. The
cities have questioned the ability of the education system to adapt to the
swiftly changing social realities of the 1970s.

     Educational reform has also had to contend with a parsimonious tradition,
and a relatively low proportion of the gross national product (GNP-see
Glossary)-approximately 4.27 percent in fiscal 1969/70-has been allocated to
education in comparison with countries of comparable wealth. The disparity was
underscored by a high standard of living and a relatively low tax burden. At
the same time Australia's educational demands were greater than most by virtue
of a high proportion of population of school age. In the early 1970s
Australian education was still faced with a marked shortage at every level of
teachers, buildings, and facilities.

     By the early 1970s educational reform had emerged as the central topic of
national discussion. It became a leading political issue as well when the
Australian Labor Party (ALP) adopted a strong platform of educational reform
in 1971. As a result of the coming to power of the labor government of Edward
Gough Whitlam in December 1972, Australia entered upon a period that could
bring far-reaching changes in its education policies and practices in the
1970s (see ch. 9).

The Administration and Financing of Education

     Under the Commonwealth Constitution of 1901 responsibility for education
rests with the six state governments; however, the federal government has
acquired a rapidly expanding influence on education in the post-World War II
era.

     The federal Department of Education advises the government on education
matters, works with the state education authorities, and is the country's
education spokesman in the international community. The department has also
assumed an important function in the administration of the federal program of
grants for education; it shared this function with a number of special bodies,
such as the Australian Universities Commission and the Commonwealth
Scholarships Board. Beginning in 1974 the federal government was also to
assume full responsibility for the education system in the Australian C