Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Learning for the future
cause they taught ‘things that make for human happiness and intellectual freedom’,
‘lessons on the right relations of human beings to each other’. 13 From that conversation
Spence derived an increased concern that education should explain ordinary,
every-day practicalities.
Later, back in South Australia, she was provoked to public statement by the
question of the content of elementary education. In Britain, a liberal government
passed a first measure for universal elementary schooling in 1870. In South Australia,
dispute over education raged from 1872 until a royal commission on education
reported in 1882. In 1873, discontent among the colonists sharpened in response
to reports of the implementation of the 1872 Education Act in the neighbouring
colony, Victoria, which provided generally free, compulsory and secular schooling. 14
When the South Australian parliament met in July 1873, the government promised
to bring in a bill which would make use of ‘the experience gained from the working
of the new Education Act in Victoria’. But the South Australian bill was first
amended beyond recognition in the House of Assembly, then in December, thrown
out by the Legislative Council. 15 Dispute centred on continued bible reading and
government provision of fees for all, or only destitute, children. Divided opinion
inside the parliament was a pale reflection of that outside. In the advertisements,
articles and letters in the press, at the meetings held in local schoolrooms and the
Adelaide Town Hall, practical determination of the content of the education to be
imparted was lost from sight. 16 Despite defeat in parliament, the government probably
retained some hope for improvements within the existing system. At the beginning
of 1874 its negotiations with the old Education Board, initially appointed in
1851, resulted in the Board’s resignation. The government appointed a new board,
and made John Anderson Hartley its chairman. Hartley, the headmaster of the private,
denominational boys’ school, Prince Alfred College, had been a member of the
old Board since 1871, but his attempts to increase professionalism throughout the
education system had been unsuccessful. As chairman of the new board he won his
colleagues’ support for a policy of sweeping change. 17 One of his first moves was to
draw up new examinations for teachers requesting certificates which entitled them to
government grants. Then, in July 1874, he published the first results from the new
examinations. The account which appeared in the daily press presented the teachers
for general mockery and derision. 18
Spence was furious. In the first place, she protested, the teachers were ‘inadequately
prepared’: ‘The promised list of books recommended for teachers to prepare
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