Initially, of course, the role of the Inspector was to ensure that things within the school were being done the way they were supposed to be done, but in an evolving system the way things were supposed to be done was still in the process of being defined.
Consequently, once someone had achieved the position he was in a position to set much of the agenda in schools within his jurisdiction, and much of that agenda depended on his own biases. Much of the actual content was, of course, clearly defined and tightly prescriptive so teachers looking for the extra couple of marks assigned under headings like Industry and Zeal would do well to note the particular Inspector’s concerns du jour.
School inspectors pronounced sagely on matters like pronunciation, and while the emerging education bureaucracy, centred around the Inspectorate, was relatively small in comparison to what we see today it was able to wield an inordinate degree of influence, set about reinforcing beliefs and attitudes that were seen as socially desirable.
The result was, by the time I started my schooling, a system that was extremely prescriptive and hierarchical, and my arrival in the classroom as a newly-qualified teacher in 1972 coincided with some fairly heated controversy about the necessity for male teachers to wear a tie. Seen from a twenty-first century perspective, of course, such questions might seem ludicrous but I would point out that as recently as 1990 it was expected that the coach of the Queensland Primary Schools Cricket side was required to wear his blazer while warming up batsmen with throw-downs!
Once those issues had been tackled there were more important matters that were brought into question and from the seventies onwards the prescriptive curriculum, conventional pedagogy and hierarchical promotion mechanism were all broken down. The way in which those changes were implemented form a substantial part of the narrative that runs through my own years in the classroom, and provides the backdrop for much of the current controversy regarding curriculum issues.
But those issues fit into this exercise further down the track. Having noted the nature of the emerging educational environment it is time to examine the implications of rising literacy in the wider community.
As school attendance became increasingly compulsory (the cynic might also be inclined to question whether truancy laws were enforced with equal severity right across the socioeconomic and geographic spectra) rising literacy levels brought with them a publishing industry that would previously have been unimaginable.
The rise of the dime novel, the penny dreadful and weekly or monthly illustrated newspapers and magazines marked the start of a popular culture that would previously have been unimaginable, but the emergence of the publishing industry was only one aspect of the revolution in entertainment that followed the introduction of the five- or five-and-a-half-day week.
A student of sport history would point towards the almost simultaneous emergence of organized professional sports in the 1860s and '70s. Within a relatively short period England had national cricket, soccer and rugby competitions, and while the American Civil War caused the demise of cricket in favour of baseball, and Rugby or something like it was morphed into gridiron, the same sort of thing happened in North America. Concentrated urban populations produced large audiences for professional or semiprofessional sport on a Saturday afternoon, though Sunday was largely still a day for religious observance.
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