Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington, The comprehensive public high school: historical perspectives, Secondary education in a changing world.

Lowe, Roy ; Fitzgerald, Tanya ; Mirel, Jeffrey 等

Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington, The comprehensive public high school: historical perspectives, Secondary education in a changing world, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, ISBN-10: 1403964890: 978-1403964892. Hardcover, 224 pages.

Review 1

This book is a very significant contribution to the important series of studies edited by Barry Franklin and Gary McCulloch. It breaks new ground by providing an authoritative and thoroughly researched account of the rise and fall of comprehensive schooling in New South Wales. The study is carefully located within the broader context of comprehensive schooling, with the experience of the United Kingdom and the United States being used particularly to demonstrate the extent to which what happened in Australia can be seen as just part of a much wider international movement. The moment of the comprehensive secondary school, as well as its decline, are shared phenomena.

In this review I want, not to detail the achievement or the significance of this book, but to use the opportunity to reflect on some of the broader issues which the reading of this book raised with me. But I must emphasize at the outset that this is an important addition to the literature on secondary schooling during the years since the Second World War. It is authored by two widely respected historians who bring a lifetime experience of studying the recent history of education to the task. The series editors are lucky to have them on board and they, in response, have produced a work which is at once detailed, authoritative and sensitive to wider local issues. For me two particular strengths of the work were first the detailing and highlighting of the role of individuals such as Harold Wyndham, whose name I knew but of whose work I was but marginally aware; and, secondly, the sensitivity to the particularity of New South Wales. The authors repeatedly and necessarily pointed out the particular nature of both suburbs and regions in New South Wales to emphasize that, even within a single Australian State, the experience of comprehensivisation was by no means identical.

But what this book did evoke in this reader is a very gloomy reflection which is worth sharing in this context as my own particular contribution to the debate engendered by these review articles. It is this. I began my career as a young secondary schoolteacher in the late-1950s and early-1960s (in the United Kingdom) as an unmitigated enthusiast for the comprehensive ideal. Those of us who taught during the very early years in these schools (my own career began in September 1959) were convinced that we were at the vanguard of what might be little short of a revolution in terms of the way that secondary schooling was structured and administered. For us the comprehensive school was the future and within years its merits would become so obvious to all that older, more prestigious selective schools would wither on the vine and eventually be replaced. This was not simply my own view but was drawn from the views of much more experienced colleagues who had all taught 'on both sides of the wire', successful grammar school teachers who had moved out and moved on to something they thought far better.

We could not have been more wrong. By the time I returned to teaching in 1963 (in the same comprehensive school) it was clear that the honeymoon was over and that we were now involved in a war of attrition for public esteem. The battle to convince a sceptical public was engaged several years before the appearance of the first Black Papers. Thus, the question I raise is simply that of whether the failure of the comprehensive ideal (in its original form at least) was inevitable from the start. Were we involved in a mission which was doomed at the outset?

There have been two elements in my own work as a historian of education since then which might lead us to conclude that we were. First, the power of eugenic thinking to percolate all areas of educational thought and practice has become very evident as a result of the work of historians of education (most recently by Anne Gibson Winfield in the United States). The recurrent demand for an education system which generates products who are classified, certificated and delivered as labelled entrants to a hungry labour market is not one that sits comfortably alongside the aspirations of those who advocated comprehensive secondary schooling. Secondly, the ways in which schools have been used by parents (perhaps unconsciously) to preserve their social, political and economic advantages into the next generation necessarily results in a schooling system which is not open to the rise of the 'lad o' parts'. Viewed through this lens comprehensivie secondary schooling becomes a threat to the established order rather than a social benefit. My own essay on schooling as an impediment to social mobility, reproduced in Gary McCulloch's Routledge Falmer Reader in History of Education (2005), explores this argument more fully than is possible here. But, taken together, these two twin themes of research suggest an extremely gloomy view of the prospects of comprehensive schooling, at the time of its inception, now and in any foreseeable political and economic context. Certainly, I would suggest that the question of whether or not this project was doomed from the start is one which might feature in the discussions raised by this excellent book. It is a book which offers valuable insights into that issue and into many others surrounding secondary schooling today and I hope it gains the recognition it deserves.

ROY LOWE

Birmingham, February 2008

Review 2

This study which analyses the historical development of the comprehensive public high school in New South Wales (NSW) and the critical and controversial issues surrounding secondary education builds on the significant scholarly work of two leading Australian historians of education. Locating their study in the historiography of state schooling and drawing on examples principally from England and the US, the authors trace the comprehensive public high school as both a policy ideal and a social institution. And while the authors consider the origins, development and inevitable decline of comprehensive high schools over the past century, this is not a 'rise and fall' history. It is a meticulous and well crafted history of the extent to which bifurcated notions of regional difference and residualisation can be used to trace and explain how comprehensive high schools, in complicated and contested ways, responded to differing policy demands, community expectations and the interplay of neo-liberal market pressures and opportunities. Importantly, the authors seek to explain both the decline and survival of the comprehensive public high school and, given their emphasis on the omnipresent education market and marketisation of education that has occurred since the late 1980s, this book offers a refreshing analysis of this period. Much has been written about the neo-liberal reforms and their varied and various impact on schools and schooling; yet the authors have not merely reproduced these debates. Importantly, this book critically examines how one particular form of secondary schooling experienced these changes; there is not attempt to universalise this historical narrative and the authors are to be congratulated for their theoretical and methodological approach. Campbell and Sherington's problematisation of the comprehensive public (or government) high school offers a much needed perspective to the historiography of public schooling.

This study does not seek to eulogise or valorise either public schooling or public secondary schooling. Rather, via the organisation of the book into five parts: (1) Origins of the comprehensive high school; (2) Social and political contexts; (3) The social justice era; (4) The comprehensive high in an education market; and (5) Embattlement and survival, the authors trace the development of the public comprehensive high school as a democratic ideal that drew on the traditions of the English secondary school and which mirrored developments in the US, and assess the challenges this form of schooling faced and the eventual and gradual decline (and survival) of this form of schooling in NSW. One of the particular strengths of this book is that it systematically outlines for the reader the origins of the public comprehensive high school in NSW and the underpinning early aspirations of the middle classes and links with notions of a democratic and just society. Via a chronological examination of the education debates and the emerging image and imagery of the 'public high school', readers are introduced to the key debates raging in NSW about the nature and purpose of the 'comprehensive secondary school' and the deeply social and political antecedents that simultaneously shaped and changed this form of schooling. Using an impressive array of archival and statistical data, Campbell and Sherington eloquently outline and defend their thesis.

This text does offer a new reading of the interplay between education policy, reform and the historical emergence of the public comprehensive high school. However, one of the questions that does not appear to have surfaced is how change within the comprehensive high school in NSW may have precipitated or heightened its decline. The forces that have been identified by the authors as central to the development, decline and survival of the comprehensive high school are external by their very nature; to what extent then did the internal conditions within these schools exacerbate or alleviate the challenges and tensions? Quite rightly, Campbell and Sherington argue that the comprehensive high school increasingly became a residual form of secondary education but the causes of this residualisation and notions of regional difference are linked with forces seemingly beyond the control of the school. A discussion of differentiation within the school would have been helpful.

One of the challenges that authors, especially those from countries located in the Pacific rim, face is to ensure that their publishers are convinced of the 'market appeal' of their text. This market appeal is frequently linked with the question--will it sell or, framed differently, will it be read? Thus, authors are charged with the responsibility to ensure that their work has 'international' appeal. That is, their work will sell on the major education markets. One of the important contributions the work of Campbell and Sherington offers is that it draws on a wide range of international literature and uses contemporary examples from England and the US to demonstrate the extent to which the comprehensive public high school in NSW was part of and contributed to the emerging tradition of secondary schooling in westernised nations. This text therefore has international appeal.

TANYA FITZGERALD

Unitec Institute of Technology

Auckland, New Zealand

Review 3

In the same way that one should never judge a book by its cover, one should never assume that length determines quality. In this surprisingly short book (163 pages of text), Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington make a major contribution to studies of the comprehensive high school, presenting a richly detailed, highly nuanced, and wonderfully thought provoking assessment of this institution in Australia. They move easily across both time and space, carefully describing the development of comprehensive high schools in Australia during the last century, while simultaneously presenting data from other countries (mainly from the United Kingdom and the United States) in ways that shed light on how these schools have fared in other contexts. The book develops a number of themes that illuminate the relationship between comprehensive high schools and democratic education. These themes include: the difficulty of comprehensive high schools in realising their promise of equal educational opportunity; the degree to which ideas from the progressive educational movement in the U.S. influenced policy decisions in Australia; the threat that market-based reforms pose to the survival of comprehensive high schools; and, the effect of the decline of comprehensive high schools on educating a diverse student body about the common ideals and values that guide and sustain democratic nations. I'll discuss each of these themes in turn.

The concept of equality of educational opportunity has been central to the promotion of comprehensive high schools wherever they have developed. In post World War II Australia, such educational reformers as Harold Wyndham saw in comprehensive high schools the possibility of escaping from "the dominance of intelligence testing and its role in distributing students into academic high schools, and then the various junior technical, home science, intermediate, and other post primary schools" (p. 8). In this context, Wyndham's hopes seem eminently democratic. He called for delaying the time in which adolescents determined their educational life plans and offered a wide range of courses and programs for them to sample before making such choices.

In this effort, Wyndham and other Australian educational leaders were strongly influenced by ideas about comprehensive high schools that had been developed by American progressive educators in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Wyndham received his doctoral degree from Stanford in this period and was steeped in the ideas of administrative progressivism. The most troubling aspect of this trans-Pacific intellectual exchange is that Australian educational reformers appear to have ignored the large-scale attack on comprehensive high schools that was raging in the U.S. during the 1950s, the very period when these reformers introduced the comprehensives to Australia. American critics such as Arthur Bestor, who is not cited in the book, argued that these schools masked educational inequalities and relegated most students to a second-rate education. There is empirical evidence that Bestor and other critics were right and it would have been useful for Campbell and Sherington to address whether the same was true in Austrailia. Without delving deeply into these critiques, Campbell and Sherington miss the opportunity to show how in the 1980s market-oriented critics of comprehensive high schools used similar criticisms to attack these schools and create a situation that ironically wound up exacerbating problems of educational inequality.

Campbell and Sherington see the recent rise of market oriented educational reform as potentially fatal for the comprehensive high schools. Well before neo-liberal educational policies were introduced in Australia, parents and students had a considerable amount of "school choice" (including government funded parochial schools as well as selective, magnet public schools). But recent efforts threaten to broaden these policies, creating a system that Campbell and Sherington rightly believe will heighten rather than suppress educational inequality. They argue that growing numbers of comprehensive high schools are becoming "residual" institutions whose most promising students have left for supposedly better schools and whose remaining students are increasingly isolated and marginalised. In short, the new system appears to be creating an even worse situation than the one the comprehensive schools originally were designed to correct.

One of Campbell and Sherington's most intriguing themes is that this decline of comprehensive high schools will make it harder to teach the kind of common political and social ideals, values, and behaviours that are needed to unite Australia's increasingly diverse population. This coupling of neo-liberal educational policies promoting school choice with social policies potentially promoting separatist forms of multiculturalism not only undermine such broad-based, potentially unifying institutions as comprehensive high schools, but may also ultimately threaten the political and social fabric of the nation. In a post-September 11, 2001 and October 12, 2002 world, this prospect is profoundly disturbing.

Campbell and Sherington conclude that while Australia's comprehensive high schools have hardly been models of democratic egalitarianism, they appear to have been better in terms of advancing social justice and nation building than the system and the institutions that are threatening to replace them. This is a troubling but I believe accurate and well-supported conclusion.

JEFFREY MIREL

University of Michigan

USA

Authors' Response

In writing this book we were challenged by two scholars of education who happened to be related. Bill Connell, mainly active from the 1950s to the 1980s, and Raewyn Connell, co-author of the landmark text, Making the Difference, had both been critical of the want of Australian histories of the government secondary school. The absence of such histories constrained contemporary studies of the institutions and practices of Australian schooling.

There were good reasons for our choice of New South Wales as the site of the study. We believed its experience was and might continue to be of interest nationally and internationally. The presence of a "great man", Harold Wyndham, as an architect of an enormous comprehensive reorganisation was of great assistance in developing a narrative about the comprehensive high school. Conveniently he "embodied" both the international influences on Australian education through the 1930s to 1960s and a reversal of thinking. Following a career made by differentiating students and forming their learning groups on the basis of intelligence, he then sought to emphasise the common developmental and learning needs of all students, able to be met in a common and comprehensive school. Wyndham was also a man of the socially-optimistic public service intelligentsia encouraged by visions of post World War II reconstruction in Australia.

New South Wales was also of interest because of a sharp policy change in the 1980s. The comprehensive schools were no longer to be the universal providers. Here was a chance to study new neo-liberal influences on education in a sharply defined policy revolution.

We are delighted that each of our reviewers understood our aims in writing the book, and have considered our efforts successful. We are pleased that they think the study has a contribution to make towards the continuing international effort in trying to understand what universal secondary education should do, and what kinds of educational institutions can best support it. Tanya Fitzgerald points to one of the things that the book does not do, systematically at least. She considers that attention to the internal history of comprehensive schools would have contributed to our historical explication. By writing about student assessment, the rise of the new vocationalism and social challenges arising from increased retention at senior high school levels, we do in fact provide some understanding of the internal changes. Nevertheless it will be a challenge to others to write historical ethnographies of particular schools, and pursue the linkages of themes that may illuminate the broader patterns of change.

Roy Lowe reaffirms one of our arguments that the proximity of secondary students to the labour market was always going to be an inhibitor of curriculum, credential and student-grouping reforms that might have achieved more social-democratic visions of comprehensive schools as teenage micro-commonwealths. In later times, as the youth labour market has both shrunk and changed character, the demands of higher education have imposed a new discipline on what is considered to be "success" at school. Lowe wonders if the new pressures towards hierarchies and differentiation were there from the start, and whether they were always fated to triumph over the progressive visions of what comprehensive schooling might achieve.

Though sympathetic to Professor Lowe's fatalism, we are also very clear about the significance of particular historical events in shaping the modern history of these schools. There was the postwar baby boom, the reintroduction of state aid to church schools, the oil shock of the early 1970s and its effect on youth labour markets, and the rise of economic rationalism (neo-liberalism) in the 1980s. Each of these had a specific influence on the shape, development and diminishing of the ordinary government high school and its various educational and social missions. The forces that argue for different schools for children defined by merit, giftedness, ability, religion, ethno-national background, region and their parents' wealth or class background have ever been strong. Nevertheless specific events and movements have led to the present settlements in secondary education.

We were interested in how Jeffrey Mirel would read our work. He has been a significant critic of progressive enthusiasms in American public high schools. In drawing attention to Arthur Bestor as critic of American comprehensive schools in the 1950s, he extends our understanding of the American system. We took J.B. Conant as our major contemporary referent for the 1950s and 1960s. His identification of location as crucial to the developing social histories of the American schools was important. Urban and suburban, white and black, children from poor or middle class families were some of his themes--so the United States debate of this period was also a significant debate for Australia--but some thirty years later. Of course we never expected to say anything really significant about education in the United Kingdom or the United States, except by identifying some points of comparison. On the whole, our reviewers have considered that we have done this well enough.

Mirel affirms our general conclusion, that by the early twenty-first century, there are significant problems in the way that New South Wales, and probably most Australian states, deliver secondary education. The tendency is to marginalise populations of students that are "at risk" for one reason or another. There is also the tendency--through schooling--to divide the population by separating students ever more exclusively on the grounds of their social, religious and cultural backgrounds.

CRAIG CAMPBELL

GEOFFREY SHERINGTON

University of Sydney