Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Learning for the future
to ‘teaching a child to read intelligently, fluently’; that ‘is of more consequence to his
development than all of the rest of his school education together. It is giving him the
key to the universe’. Second in importance, she thought, ‘comes writing, not of copies
only, but the thoughts of other, as in dictation and his own recollection of lessons
in his own words’, and third came ‘arithmetic by which he may learn to buy and sell
and manage his own affairs’. She considered that these basics could be supplemented
with ‘grammar, intelligently taught, because it is the only mental training that children
under 12 are capable of receiving, and to be able to perceive differences and
make distinctions between different classes of words helps a child understand better
anything he reads’. Basic education could also include ‘such scientific instruction as
deals with the objects that come into the child’s daily life’. Even though she thought
that teachers should also ‘keep order and discipline and enforce cleanliness and good
manners’, her view of teaching and learning was very far from ‘the drill education
system, which like the bed of Procrustes, stretches or cramped [sic] varied intelligence
to suit one mediocre standard’. Rather, it was, as she claimed, a ‘scheme by
which the poor child’s time may be economized so … that he shall be put in possession
of the tools for self-cultivation as easily, as cheaply and as quickly as possible’. 22
So far from designing ways to keep working-class children docile and uninformed
was her idea of education, that she urged making familiarity and curiosity an incentive
to learn, and advocated the cultivation of initiative and independence. She was
to tell the Criminological Society, in 1897:
It used to be a maxim that the first thing to be done in education was to
break a child’s will, so as to produce instant and unreasoning obedience
… [but] if the ipse dixit of the parent is made the only law of life, the
child has no guiding rules for his conduct in the world. The will should
be trained and strengthened, for it is indeed the real ‘ego’. 23
Such views suggest commitment to enlarging the mental worlds and practical opportunities
of ‘poor children’, not to preserving disciplined subordination.
With those views, Spence watched the changes in public education in South
Australia during the 1870s and 1880s with approval. Despite her initial indignation
at Hartley, she sympathised with his aims. Hartley’s power had increased. In 1875
the South Australian parliament passed an Education Act which dissolved the new
Education Board, appointed a Council of Education, and left most of the details
of reorganising the education system to be drawn up as regulations by the Council.
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