But there was more that came out of what we might call the Education Revolution than rising levels of literacy, and a scholar could probably come up with a lengthy treatise on the ways in which the emergence of a literate population shaped events through the twentieth century.
The systems that grew out of this Education Revolution in many ways resembled a multi-headed hydra, constantly evolving through the interaction of politicians, educational bureaucrats and, increasingly, as time went on, those working at the coal face.
No two systems across the developed world worked in quite the same way, but it’s possible to draw a general picture that covers most of the basic aspects of systems that operated under slightly different local ground rules but were, basically, heading in the same direction.
At the same time those systems would be almost totally unfamiliar to anyone under the age of thirty, so it’s probably worth spelling out their basic features. Given my experience as a classroom teacher a discussion of the way things changed after the early seventies will, naturally, be the subject of a later chapter, but the social and political impact of the Education Revolution was such that it’s worth examining here.
Bu and large, we’re talking about a system where a prescriptive curriculum was largely taught by rote learning, where behaviour management might have been a mixture of the carrot and the stick but the stick was the predominant element, and where attainment and scholastic achievement was measured through external examinations, which also, as time passed, came to be associated with particular career opportunities.
Those external examinations were, at least in the early stages, meant to establish who was capable of moving on to the next level. For example, passing the Queensland Scholarship examination, administered to students in their final year of primary school entitled successful students to tuition at Government expense at any State High School, Technical High School, Grammar School or other approved secondary school.
Unruly or potentially disruptive students were kept in line by a mixture of physical violence, the threat of withdrawal of privileges such as access to sporting teams and emotional blackmail (How do you expect to be able to provide for a wife and family with that attitude, boy?). As a result, while the threat of physical pain might not have been enough to persuade you to bend not break the rules your decisions in that regard came from the interaction of your own risk assessment and your ability to endure physical pain.
The rise of public education also brought with it the emergence of social, cultural and linguistic engineering that would previously have been impossible.
To anybody who didn’t live through a fifties-style education, the concept of an education system as a means to create and disseminate national and ethnic mythologies would probably seem to be stretching things more than a little, but consider the following scenario, bearing in mind that education systems across the western world and in Japan were probably cut from substantially the same cloth. The actual content would, of course, vary in its orientation, but would almost inevitably reflect the official government and cultural party line.
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