The material practices of school, as they relate to the child, have not figured prominently in the repertoire of educational inquiry. They have been examined only in so far that their understanding might result in optimising the conditions of learning or provide systematic explanations as to why school processes are inadequate. Any idea that the practices themselves might encode and instantiate visions of childhood and pedagogy contingent on broader schemes of social planning and ideas of the public good, does not appear to have entered the purview of those writing about education. Under the impact of the nouvelle histoire of Philippe Ariès and Michel Foucault, this situation is being redressed and there is an evolving body of literature devoted to the genealogy of classroom practice, with a specific focus on its origins and underpinning logics. Of special significance to such practice is the venue in which it takes place, namely, the school, which is a specialised form of architecture, housing a range of furnishings and facilities designed to enhance the positions of teacher and child in such a way as to advance the cause of education.

Most Australian school children, whether public or private, primary or secondary, had been finely tuned for warfare long before the Great War of 1914–18 had actually begun. School papers and reading books, history, geography and civics lessons, the personal persuasiveness of teachers trained to accept unequivocally “the power for good in teaching patriotism” to captive and captivated young audiences, the “rhythmic harmony” of loyalist singing, marching and versifying, the Imperial pageantry of Empire Day and the militaristic inculcations of highly disciplinary cadet training schemes all combined, in the closed educational environment of the schools, to produce young Australians well primed for unquestioning obedience to the State and martial sacrifice to the Empire. Children at a Sydney primary school were ordered to chant, in 1907, “I give my mind to my country to think for it; I give my heart because I love it; I give my hands to my country to work for it”; — “[and] to fight for it”, all the boy pupils were then expected to intone. Such orchestrated love of country was subordinated, in tum, to love of Britain's Empire — “our peace-bearing, peerless, guardian Empire” as one educator described it - which was presented as not only the largest but the worthiest empire in world history. The “cement of Empire”, it was said, contained such essential ingredients as social conformity, duty and sacrifice, which non-Catholic private schools and state schools applied with a heavily-laden trowel to impressionable young minds both preceding and during World War One.

In Sex Education in the Eighties, Mary Calderstone concludes her article with the most common raison d'etre for formal, school-based sex education: