Instruction in the basic subject areas would largely have been administered through standard text books, on the basis of one text per year per subject area, with each text containing enough material to keep the average student occupied for the time allocated to each subject.
The Queensland version of what would these days be termed the Language Program had a Reading Book, containing carefully selected age- and cultural-appropriate prose and verse, along with an accompanying English book which worked through areas such as Vocabulary, Grammar, Punctuation and Derivation, with exercises that would be transcribed by the students and marked by the teacher, and exercises in Composition in which students completed further exercises that would these days be regarded as explorations of particular genres.
Handwriting was taught through the Copy Book, an avenue that provided further opportunities for the dissemination of homilies and expressions of cultural values.
Mathematics content was administered through the text book, supplemented by the content transcribed from the blackboard, and when you’d finished the Maths and English exercises for the day, had them marked by the teacher and completed whatever corrections were necessary my experience was that you were told to read your Social Studies book.
The Social Studies book was an interesting creation. You wouldn’t have been inclined to spend too much time rereading the Reading Book, but the standard version of historical and geographic instruction tended to be based around narratives that allowed a certain amount of daydreaming, particularly when you looked at the stories through which basic geographic knowledge was disseminated.
These, from what I can recall, were largely based around the train journey with a boy and a girl boarding, for example, the Sunlander which would stop at each of the major centres along the Queensland coast, and at each stop there’s be some interesting adult who would describe the area, give a potted version of the local history and detail the industrial and agricultural production in the hinterland.
For any student towards the top of the class, the frequency with which you were told to read your Social Studies book meant that by the end of the year you probably knew the content backwards, forwards, right to left and back again.
The possibilities for cultural propaganda in such circumstances would seem, at least as far as I’m concerned, patently obvious, and I’d confidently predict that a reading of the corresponding texts in, say, the United States, France and pre-war Japan would, respectively, be heavy on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the reforms that followed the French Revolution and unwavering loyalty to the Emperor.
While I have neither the time, resources or linguistic skills to explore such texts in Nazi Germany and the old German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany) I suspect that the content of such texts would have been a major influence on the flood of German youngsters who ended up in the Hitler Youth, and that as the Iron Curtain came down and the Cold War kicked in the content would have been strong on socialist solidarity in the face of fascist and so-called democratic capitalist aggression.
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