Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Learning for the future
interconnections between state and education, and state and religion. No minister
of religion could be a member of the central Board of Education which was appointed
to administer government grants to schools; schools receiving funds ‘must
provide good secular instruction, based on the Christian religion, but apart from
all theological and controversial differences of discipline and doctrine’; teachers
should read a chapter from the old and new testaments every day. 4 This legislation
remained in force until 1875, and after that year bible readings were given only on
request and then, out of school hours. Denominational religious instruction did
not appear in South Australian state schools until 1939. 5
Nevertheless, questions about the place of religion in education continued to
provoke frequent and fervent debate. In 1850, Spence considered religious instruction
integral to any education, and her difficulties with her own religious beliefs
mean that she was profoundly troubled at the prospect of teaching. Mrs X ‘must
keep the moral responsibility of her children to herself’, she wrote in her diary, when
she was about to go to a live-in post as ‘nursery governess’: ‘I shall not have it. I will
do them as much good and as little harm as I can, but I hope I may not have their
souls to answer for. It is a dark subject’. 6 By 1856, her despair and anxiety dispelled
by her conversion, she had translated dogma into general morality. When she added
a youthful voice to the general clamour in the press, she argued not for religious
instruction, but that
teachers endowed by public money … should be bound to teach morality,
not upon utilitarian principles, not because honesty is the best policy,
but because goodness, truth, honesty, courage, patience, temperance and
obedience to law are eternally and immutably right, noble, and beautiful
and in conformity with the will of our Heavenly Father.
She was prompted to the expression of such worthy sentiments by precisely the kind
of interventionary motives that Kay Daniels has ascribed to her. She considered that
religious and moral principles were better taught by parents, but went on to observe:
when I look at a shipload of female immigrants, and consider that these
are the future mothers of South Australia; when I recollect how much
the education of principles and feeling has been neglected in the mother
country, I maintain that we ought not to trust implicitly to parental
guidance. 7
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