Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

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Learning for the future
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, 1 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.
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