Education
Book Details

Academic Success and Social Power

Examinations and Inequality

Richard Teese

Drawing on strikingly original research, this study of Australian secondary education looks beyond clichés about ‘excellence’ to analyse the historically specific nature of the scholarly ideal against which successive generations of Australian students have been judged.

Opinion

“It is one of the most important books ever written about education in this country, and we ignore it at our peril.” (Janet McCalman, The Age, 6 September 2000)

“. . .Teese’s work is uncomprising and compelling.” (Julie White, Postgraduate Review, Vol 7, No 1, February 2001)

About this Title

A most significant text that says something new about how student achievement is shaped. Richard Teese cuts across much of the recent talk about reform and allows us to think about the issues afresh. His findings will fascinate all.
Professor Simon Marginson, Monash University

This eye-opening study of Australian secondary education looks beyond clichés about ‘excellence’ to analyse the historically specific nature of the scholarly ideal against which successive generations of Australian students have been judged. Drawing on a wealth of strikingly original research, Richard Teese offers a penetrating analysis of Victorian secondary schooling in the half-century after World War Two. This was a era in which higher secondary schooling ceased to be the preserve of an elite and emerged as a system of mass education. It was also a period marked by successive waves of reform in curriculum and assessment. Yet, at the end of it all, Australians have been left with a sharply polarised system of schooling in which the most economically vulnerable populations of young people are also those most at risk of educational failure.

This book asks the hard questions. Are our systems of secondary teaching -- and the expectations they place on students -- anachronistic in an age of mass education? How far is the curriculum itself responsible for the manifest disparities in achievement between sectors and regions, and between boys and girls? What has been the universities’ role in the process of reform and counter-reform? And what have all these upheavals implied for the practice of teaching?

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

1 The Age of Curriculum
2 English in the 1940s: A Service Course for the Professions
3 Cultural Ideal and School Systmes: English in the 1970s
4 English under the Victorian Certificate of Education
5 Searching for the Scientist: Post-war Chemical Reform
6 Structural Chemistry and its Social Beneficiaries
7 Resisting Chemical Reform in the 1980s
8 Chemistry and the Victorian Certificte of Education
9 Traditional Mathematics
10 Reforming in the Shadow of New Maths
11 Pedagogical Freedom in Institutional Power in Mathematics Reform
12 Mathematics for the Majority: Reform and Counter-reform
13 Cirriculum Hierarchy, Monopoly Access and the Export of Failure
14 Power over the Curriculum, Historical Progress and Structural Reform

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Richard Teese is Associate Professor and Reader in Education, and Director of the Educational Outcomes Research Unit, in the University of Melbourne. He directed the Educational Outcomes Survey in 1994–97. His previous books include The Colleges (with John Polesel, 1998) and Who Wins at School? (1995).

Book Preview

978-0-522-84896-0