Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Introduction to the New Edition
- Catherine Magarey
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Acquiring a room of her own
- 2 The line of least resistance
- 3 Faith and enlightenment
- 4 Edging out of the domestic sphere
- 5 Learning for the future
- 6 Round woman in her round hole
- 7 Prophet of the effective vote
- 8 The New Woman of South Australia: Grand Old Woman of Australia
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Learning for the future
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Introduction to the New Edition
- Catherine Magarey
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Acquiring a room of her own
- 2 The line of least resistance
- 3 Faith and enlightenment
- 4 Edging out of the domestic sphere
- 5 Learning for the future
- 6 Round woman in her round hole
- 7 Prophet of the effective vote
- 8 The New Woman of South Australia: Grand Old Woman of Australia
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Spence was in her mid-50s when she composed A Week in the Future, her vision of a co-operative society in 1988, a century from the year in which she wrote. Her dream of its educational practices owed something both to discussions she had listened to in England in the 1860s, and to developments in education in South Australia, but she had carried those ideas much further than many of her contemporaries would have considered possible, or even desirable. In a period when South Australians were still arguing about whether or not parents who could afford to educate their children should be allowed to send them to government-funded schools, and had just established, as a separate institution, the government-funded Advanced School for Girls, Spence's vision depicted an organisation of learning which sought to eliminate intractable hierarchies of class, gender and authority from education.
In the schoolrooms … the children … received instruction in reading, writing and simple calculation, and above all in knowledge of things as distinguished from knowledge of words. The nursery teaching was thoroughly natural and delightful in the manner in which each lesson in knowledge and in skill was felt to be learned as much by the learner's own intellectual or artistic effort as by the teacher's guidance. I could see how early the lesson of bearing and forbearing, of respect for the rights of others, was inculcated without needing any severe punishment or risking any serious shock to the delicate organization of a young infant or little child.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Unbridling the Tongues of WomenA Biography of Catherine Helen Spence, pp. 93 - 104Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2010