Requiem for Defunct Magazines

Many of the education magazines to which I subscribed over the last half-century have died; some were reborn with new ideological or educational commitments, accompanied by a change of name. Indeed, I edited one which underwent a name-change though retaining, I believe, its basic educational philosophy. The reasons for these closures or transformations were varied and often inter-related. Financial difficulties could be sparked by a fall in readership, sometimes in turn associated with a change in the community’s or a sub-group’s worldview. Capture by a rival faction or disputes within an editorial group were other sources of malaise.

All the magazines I am considering had their strengths; they were not always wrong nor always mischievous nor always promoting obscure causes expressed in fuzzy jargon.

I propose to examine some education journals ranging in ideological position (or if you like, philosophy) from left-wing, radical, semi-, proto-, or pseudo-Marxist to progressive or neo-progressive to liberal-humanist conservative-traditional to balanced non-committed. The analysis of these magazines permits me to sketch at appropriate points the background context of relevant education policies and practice.

Two social revolutions during the last forty years have strongly reshaped education in Western democratic cultures. The collapse of liberal humanism and the ideas of the Enlightenment especially circa 1967–74 was associated with the rise of neo-progressive and radical education; the victory of neo-liberal or “economic rationalism” circa 1989–93 intensified the vocational bent in education. The growth of postmodern relativism soon after was a third, minor revolution.

Not all educationists were receptive to the progressive-radical revolution in education which got under way in the late 1960s. An example is the Australian College of Education, which originated in 1959 as a professional organisation advocating traditional liberal education, noticeably supported by principals of the corporate schools. Although the theme of the 1976 annual conference was “New Directions in Australian Education—a Critical Review”, the title of the resultant book omitted the last three words. Most speakers, its editor explained, “preferred to describe and explain rather than to examine critically the directions in education with which they were concerned”. The May 1980 conference, “Politics in Education”, was more adventurous. According to the editor of the proceedings, while the Queensland chapter, which planned the conference, viewed the proposed theme with some alarm, in fact, “critical issues were addressed”. The conference “marked a turning point in attitude”. No longer would discussion of education in its political context “be regarded as unacceptable or unprofessional”. This matched changes within the College of Education, which ultimately became the Australian College of Educators in 2002. The College’s journal Unicorn, published from 1975, adopted a thinner, less academic and less frequent format in 1997 and finally closed in 2002.

A good starting point for an examination of the progressive/radical revolt against liberal humanist culture in education is two post-1974 education magazines. Radical Education Dossier and Discourse illustrate the manoeuvrings of leftist educationists through the shoals of Marxism, neo-Marxism, critical theory and similar mutations. I will consider Radical Education Dossier in detail for the light it throws on the impact on education of the cultural upheavals of the last thirty years. Founded as a neo-Marxist magazine in 1976, it changed its name to Education Links in the 1980s and closed in 2006. It weathered the growth of neo-liberal policy and the decay of Marxism in the 1980s and in the 1990s the full flood of “economic rationalism”, the new vocationalism, and the further dilution of the allure of Marxism when world communism collapsed.

Discourse began in 1980. It embraced heavy theory more than did Radical Education Dossier and publicised somewhat different reactions to the late 1980s and early 1990s. New editors took over in 1993; two years later they paid homage to globalisation and changed the subtitle from The Australian Journal of Educational Studies to Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

From Dossier to Links

Classical Marxism had very little to say about education, while the communist-Stalinist activists embedded in the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation were content to endorse for Australia some aspects of what they thought was going on in Soviet education, such as support for comprehensive secondary schools. But by the early 1970s protagonists of a New Left were beginning to find a foothold in education and teacher training courses in colleges of education and universities.

Radical Education Dossier (later Education Links) was born in Sydney in 1976, after a conference on “What to Do about Schools” at which Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis of the University of Massachusetts attacked both liberal and progressive education. In their book Schooling in Capitalist America they depicted the educational structure as corresponding to, or replicating, the structure and ethos of monopoly capitalism. Yet the conference saw some merit in vocational training in schools and colleges of advanced education. The cover of the magazine’s first number had a sketch of John Dewey, American apostle of progressive education, with the caption “Dear John, … it didn’t work out”.

Seven years after its enthusiastic birth, the magazine suffered a crisis of nerve. In March 1981 it printed a critique of the unthinking radicalism of earlier years. “It would be a mistake to portray the education system as a mechanistic and monolithic agent of social control, or to encourage reverence for the mythology of an undifferentiated ‘working class culture’ in Australia.” In August 1983 the journal organised another conference in Sydney, on “Future Directions in Education”. It mourned the loss of surety: “We seem in 1983 to have lost the coherence and purity of our earlier conceptions.” The last issue to use the title Radical Education Dossier, number 23, commented that in 1976 its name was a challenge, a flag; “now perhaps it is a liability”.

Education Links number 24 remained radical but less Marxian. Both numbers were “produced by a group of teachers, students and university staff working to bring about democratic and socially progressive change in Australian schooling”. From number 28, Autumn 1986, a Melbourne Group produced some issues. The two editorial groups drew much of their strength from the University of Technology, Sydney and Deakin University respectively.

An underlying social factor was the declining strength of the old industrial working class and the increasing importance of a new salaried middle class, an awareness of which contributed to the rise of a New Left, including the development of neo-Marxist theories. In the late 1980s two additional contributions to the ideological and political confusion of the Left in education manifested themselves: the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the vocational drive conjured up by John Dawkins, Commonwealth Minister for Employ-ment, Education and Training.

While Dawkins’s White Paper of July 1988 set in motion the absorption of colleges of education into the university system, his booklet Skills for Australia, produced in late 1987 jointly with Clyde Holding, Minister for Employment Services and Youth Affairs, insisted that school education and training systems had to play an active role in developing skills. To ensure that more students completed the full secondary course a national curriculum was envisaged. The message was reinforced in Dawkins’s May 1988 statement, “Strengthening Australia’s Schools”. Some left-wing educationists responded by reconsidering the virtues of liberal (general) education and even humanism. In late January 1985, Tony Abbott, then a Bulletin journalist, predicted that a united front between Left and Right against the watering down of academic standards would be the “big educational issue” of the year. In the Spring 1987 issue of Education Links Rob White, lecturer in the sociology of education at the South Australian College of Advanced Education, grumbled at the tendency in state schools to seek minimum rather than maximum standards and asserted: “It is absolutely essential that the Left mount a vigorous defence of ‘liberal education’”, though he also referred to this as liberal-progressive pedagogy.

The debate about an appropriate left-wing education philosophy occupied the Spring 1991 Education Links, produced by a Victorian collective of Terri Seddon, Simon Marginson, Julie McLeod and Sandy Ross. Their two-page editorial; “Beyond Liberal Education?” contemplated uneasily the possibility of a Coalition:

“In the 1990s we have a Labor Government which energetically pursues the ‘reform’ of ‘education and training’ at every level of institutionalised education. General education is to be incorporated into vocational education … This threatens both the liberal progressive emphasis on critical thinking and life skills, and the content-based learning in ‘disciplines’ that is favoured by the Right (and parts of the Left).”

The editorial noted that those opposing the reconstruction of education as education and training took the form of defending “the sanctity of knowledge”, education for its own sake—in other words, liberal education. Left activists should feel uneasy with both camps. After much soul-searching the editors reached a tripartite conclusion: (1) liberal education should be seen as a changing concept shaped by its social, historical and political context; (2) schools should be seen as only one site of educational practice, others being television, videos, popular culture, families and work; (3) the Left needed to determine its values.

Remarkably, the magazine’s cover, in contrast with the first issue in 1976, featured a long quotation from John Dewey extolling “the capacity to live as a social member”. Remarkably, too, the editorial collective had recognised that education was the product of a variety of social institutions, not merely the school.

Multiculturalism was another issue facing the Left. Both John Dawkins and Rodney Cavalier, New South Wales Labor Minister for Education 1986–88, displayed little interest in sustaining the educational aspirations of special interest (or minority) groups. Dawkins’s department released a report on Ethnicity, Education and Equity (September 1987) showing that youngsters from non-English-speaking backgrounds participated in post-compulsory education at a higher rate than Australian-born. Education Links began to focus on the curriculum in a multicultural, pluralist society. Thus anti-sexist education was the focus in the Autumn 1985 issue, Aboriginal education in the Summer 1986–87 one, anti-racist education in Autumn 1988.

Multiculturalism was linked to concern for social justice. Until recently the campaign for social justice in education had focused on lower-class children handicapped by poverty. Now the concept addressed the perceived handicaps suffered by a range of groups: children of ethnic origin, of Aboriginal descent, girls, the physically or mentally handicapped, working-class children, those living in isolated areas. Education Links addressed social justice in 1989, when the emphasis on vocational training and developing skills was a central issue. In Summer 1992–93 the journal cautiously entertained vocationalism.

Strangely, it initially resisted the allure of environmental education. The Summer 1989–90 issue criticised the Green position as a meld of utopianism and progressive child-centred ideas.

The magazine was better at denouncing policies than at advancing alternatives. It did not often present a coherent educational philosophy bearing on classroom practice. In one of its frequent fits of self-criticism the editors confessed in Summer 1985: “We have neglected to analyse in detail the nature of radical teaching and learning”. The magazine bravely tackled “Critical Pedagogy” in Autumn 1986, and again in Spring 1992.

The advent of the Howard-led Coalition government in March 1996 intensified the ideological imperatives of leftist educationists. In Autumn 1997, when the Coalition was introducing new policies, the issue was dedicated to “teachers, social justice and the politics of difference”. It traced the adoption by state Labor governments of social justice education programs in the 1980s and early 1990s and warned its readers of the Howard government’s “rearticulation of social justice”. The Spring 1997 editorial lamented that “the principles and practice of liberal meritocratic education and social democratic reform have given way to the rhetoric of choice, competition and entrepreneurialism”.

Education Links:

Self-Analysis and Collapse

Apart from its 1983 crisis of nerve, Education Links conducted several other assessments of its function. The Winter 1995 issue celebrated its fiftieth number by asking “Radical education—where to from here?” Ken Johnston, long-time member of the editorial collective, documented “The Ups and Downs of Radical Education” since the 1970s. Right from the start, he wrote, the magazine reflected a tension between two tendencies: the New Left theory-orientated Marxists, who attacked “liberal reform and soft-minded progressivism”, and the practice-oriented radical progressives, who wanted to “liberate learners from the rigidities and constraints of authority”. Many teachers were very receptive to the latter. The restructuring, renewal and managerial reform brought by economic rationalism in the late 1980s left the radical education movement “fragmented, weak and attenuated”. At the same time, “radical education theory became incorporated into academic disciplines and career conscious radicals wrote abstruse academic prose for other academic radicals to read”. Education Links tried to resist this trend, but “both our contributors and our leadership have become more narrowly academic”.

Summing up, Johnston saw Education Links as committed to social justice, “which means restructuring knowledge and educational institutions” and to “the radical extension of democracy”. So much for the 1921 socialist objective of the Labor Party, the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Nor could the restructuring of knowledge easily accommodate the transmission of a 3000-year cultural heritage or two and a half centuries of Enlightenment rationalism. Johnston believed that “if learners are incompetent, listless and antagonistic to learning, this is not because of some natural disposition or genetic inheritance but because they are socially oppressed in multiple ways”. Society maintained its social oppression by “hierarchies and subordination”. Johnston failed to recognise that the “listlessness” of “learners” could arise from other strong influences: the family, prime educator of the child for the first seven years or so of life; the peer group; the media, especially television and more recently the computer. In the face of such forces the school was greatly circumscribed in what it could do.

The election of the Howard government led Educa-tion Links to commission a stable of contributors to ask “what it is to be radical in the 1990s”. Kevin Harris, one of the Marxist founding fathers of Radical Education Dossier in 1976, urged the need to emphasise theory and thus guide action by analysing the contexts of educational policies. Bob Mackie, another member of the original editorial collective and like Harris an academic, warned the journal against an institutional affiliation. “To seek university attachment … would invite political domestication and eventual mutation into yet one more departmental publication”. He endorsed the idea of another conference to assess the continuities and differences in the politics of radical education in the previous twenty years.

Education Links devoted a large proportion of its life to trying to decide its purpose.

In 1996 Bob Mackie asserted that “there is not one Education Faculty/Department in Australia worthy of taking Links on, and that’s because not one of them have [sic] ever produced a radical journal”. A year later Education Links found shelter in a university—but one of a special kind. From the late 1980s Education Links had been lodged in the Inner City Education Centre. In the late 1990s the Centre became the headquarters of the New South Wales Aboriginal Education Consultative Group. Overcrowding forced a change of location and from the Spring 1997 issue the magazine moved to the Centre for Popular Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. In its later years its “editorial collective” consisted of lecturers from that university, often including Dr Ken Johnston, his wife Betty, and Keiko Yasukawa. In 2001–02 Ken Johnston was one of the two senior inquiry officers assisting Professor Tony Vinson, chairman of the “Vinson Inquiry” whose 447-page report, Public Education in NSW, sponsored by the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation, provided some valuable material on the government schools.

In the final issue, Spring 2005, the “editorial collective” remarked:

“Our decision to cease publication has not been made because there is no longer a need for radical critique (it is more urgent than ever), or because our readers have declined [sic]. It has more to do with generational burn-out on the editorial collective and the difficulty in passing on the magazine to a new generation of educational activists.”

In a sense the readers (as distinct from readership numbers) had declined: they were getting old in body and ideas!

Institutional Change Corrodes Education Studies

A threat to the viability of many education journals was looming. Left-wing and other university educationists were entering a time of anxiety; a threat had developed not only to their agreeable life but to their very existence. John Dawkins had stated in May 1988, “We must examine means of improving the initial and ongoing training of teachers to meet the demands of a changing educational, economic and social environment.” In 1989–90 the Commonwealth generated some seven reports or papers on teacher training. One strong message was the need to make teacher training more practical by ensuring that education lecturers had practical experience and by considering a system of internship or apprenticeship in the schools under master teachers.

The attempt to implement practical pedagogy meant trainees spending more time in school classrooms and less in university lecture rooms. This encouraged a rapid reduction in the number of lecturers in courses providing social and theoretical perspectives on education, known as foundation courses. The foundation studies were history of education, philosophy of education, comparative education, sociology of education, and educational psychology. These studies either disappeared completely or survived in highly truncated form. The anxiety of governments to control the curriculum and determine policy encouraged the rise of curriculum studies as well as courses in educational policy. In the past curriculum was usually studied incidentally, in the philosophy or history of education. The emergence of these two studies provided a refuge for sociologists. The collapse of the foundation studies had a corrosive effect on a range of education journals.

Prospects improved for education lecturers when in February 1992 the New South Wales Office of Education and Youth Affairs reassured them that its Teacher Education Action Plan would strengthen and enrich existing “models of pre-service education”. A carefully worded statement by a new Commonwealth Minister for Education, Kim Beazley, Teaching Counts (January 1993) stated that the government valued “the role of universities in teacher education, not least because of their responsibility for keeping teaching practice at the forefront of knowledge”. He told teachers that the government “would not support an apprenticeship model” but would help “Education Faculty renewal” by funding the early retirement of long-entrenched teacher education staff. Henceforth the schools played a larger part in teacher training, but the academic educationists survived. However, the steady pressure for economies, which intensified under the Howard government, encouraged the decline in the number of lecturers in education. While more lecturers and courses had a practical teaching orientation, sociologists managed to retain a foothold if only by servicing courses such as curriculum studies or educational policy.

A more slowly-developing threat to educationists arose from the pressure on universities to reduce expenditure. This was more easily accomplished by reducing the number of lecturers in faculties of Arts and Education. This hurt both the radical academics in education and the surviving few supporters of the liberal humanist tradition. Some support came from the existence in some states, such as New South Wales, of non-vocational or liberal studies of education as part of undergraduate courses in Arts. Also, all universities maintained postgraduate courses, some of which were oriented to the “education foundations”. The erosion of these courses proceeds, but rather slowly.

What Ken Johnston had called in his Education Links ruminations “career-conscious” radicals were catered for by another, university-dependent magazine which provided an outlet for their often abstractly-worded writings.

Discourse: From Educational Studies to Cultural Politics

By contrast with Radical Education Dossier, Discourse’s reincarnation came at the end of its first life. Its founding editor in 1980 was Salvatore (“Ted”) D’Urso, a University of Queensland lecturer in education with Trotskyist antecedents who had been part of the first (1957–67) New Left. Unlike a growing proportion of academic educationists, D’Urso had considerable teaching experience in primary and secondary schools. He advocated “democracy” in the administration and structure of schools—that is, greater autonomy. But he was most comfortable as the editor of collections of articles, many but not all with a leftist inclination, in books and in Discourse.

This journal was more interested in theory than Radical Education Dossier. Its university-related subsidy ensured that it honoured the persisting if attenuated academic tradition of opening its pages to a wide range of contributors. Far Left activists such as Bob Mackie, writing in Education Links in 1996, feared that its association with a university department might weaken its ideological purity.

In early numbers of Discourse its statement of policy identified its field as the socio-cultural foundations of education. But the great decline in the early 1990s of “foundations” courses necessitated a reformulation. Discourse became “a bi-annual journal in the field of socio-cultural studies”. The new climate explains the use of the word studies rather than disciplines and the preference expressed for “articles with an inter-disciplinary approach”. The journal’s early claim that “Discourse is not bound to any ideological position” was quickly revised to “is not bound to any explicit ideological position”.

Despite the differences between Education Links, Discourse and Arena, the Marxist and neo-Marxist Melbourne journal, they often shared contributors. Thus in early 1988 Doug White of La Trobe University (a speaker at the founding conference of Radical Education Dossier and member of the editorial group of Arena) discussed “The new consolidation of schooling in Australia” in Discourse. He favoured a position reminiscent of classical Marxists of the 1930s, calling for “reformation of a certain independence of schooling from society”. Education, he said, was necessarily hierarchical, recognising “ordering levels in knowledge and society”.

After Ted D’Urso retired at the end of 1991 two of his associate editors, Fazal Rizvi and Robert Lingard, took over. Rizvi was a philosopher of education whose interests (identified in a 1993 collection of essays, Education in Hard Times) were in cultural diversity, racism and democratic theory and practice; Lingard was a sociologist of education whose interests were “federal/state relations and schooling, gender and multi-cultural policy reforms, teacher education and higher education policy”.

The new editors deleted Discourse’s Policy Statement and changed its format. In 1995 its subtitle, The Australian Journal of Educational Studies, became Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Like many others seeking a global market, it moved offshore, to be published by Carfax, a subsidiary of the English firm Taylor & Francis. In their first editorial under the name Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education Rizvi and Lingard signalled their desire to preserve the radical tradition. “While we would like the journal to be global in its reach and character, we also want it to address issues of globalisation and the ensuing cultural politics of education critically.” They reiterated this powerful signal to potential contributors:

“The new Discourse will publish articles from throughout the world which contribute to contemporary debates on the emerging social, cultural and political configurations which currently mark education in all its forms as a highly contested but very important cultural site.”

Clearly the discourse in Discourse was to be guided.

The Liberal Tradition: From Melbourne Studies to Critical Studies

By contrast with Red Education Dossier and Discourse, Melbourne Studies in Education was for many years a vehicle for humanist liberalism, particularly as expressed in the history of education. While it had its share of “revisionist” history in the 1970s and after, it remained a vehicle for the basic humanist intellectual tradition for a few more years before succumbing to pluralist ideologies in the early twenty-first century.           

Melbourne Studies in Education originated in 1957, the second of two journals in the liberal academic tradition which revitalised the dormant field of educational publication in Australia. The first, the Australian Journal of Education, started in April that year. Sponsored by the Melbourne-based Australian Council for Educational Research, it was edited by W.F. Connell, Professor of Education at Sydney University. In its early years it carried a fair number of articles related to the history of education or comparative education. But the educational psychologists and the statisticians soon widened their foothold.

Melbourne Studies in Education appeared in November. Its editor, E.L. French of Melbourne University, was one of the founding fathers of the history of Australian education. It was published annually from 1963 to 1994. Until 1985 it was edited by academics at the University of Melbourne. In 1988 management of the journal shifted to La Trobe University, where it was published by La Trobe University Press, and assumed a more left-wing hue. From 1995 Melbourne Studies appeared as a twice-yearly journal, and lost its bias towards the history of education, reflecting the collapse of the foundation courses. Production shifted to Arena Printing and Publishing (1996–2006), a business associated with Arena magazine.

By the twenty-first century articles in Melbourne Studies in Education were embracing the cloudy language of educational theory. The November 2005 issue was dedicated to “Critical Discourse Analysis”. Article titles provide a good example of the pretentious, jargon-ridden literary style and the content reorientation now considered necessary:

“Interrogating Critical Discourse Analysis for Educational Research in New Spaces and Places; A Faircloughian Approach to CDA: Principled Eclecticism or a Method Searching for a Theory?; Tackling Multimodel News: Some Implications of Critical Analytical Research on the ‘children overboard’ Affair; Critical Discourse Analysis and Hybrid Texts: Analysing English as a Second Language; Engaging with Difference in Science Classrooms: Using CDA to Identify Interpersonal Aspects of Inclusive Pedagogy.”

Five of the authors came from the Queensland University of Technology, and one each from Griffith University, the University of Canberra, and the University of Queensland. All eight were women.

We have come a long way from the spirit of “disinterested enquiry” or objective analysis. One suspects that many of these researchers knew the general shape of their conclusions even before they started their work.

An editorial analysing the fifty-year history of Melbourne Studies in its final, November 2006 issue noted that sales and subscriptions had never fully covered the costs of production, particularly after 2000. Initially funding was provided by the University of Melbourne. Between 1988 and 2003 La Trobe, Monash and Deakin also became financial sponsors. But in the new century it suffered from competition by an increasing number of international education journals and increased online academic publishing. The journal was sold to an English publisher, Taylor & Francis, and in 2007 became Critical Studies in Education.

The new title and its synopsis, wrote the 2006 editor, Trevor Gale, “make a case for a reinvigorated critical engagement with education, important as an alternative voice in the current and pervasive neo-liberal and neo-conservative climate”. For most of its history, he wrote, Melbourne Studies had been dominated by the discipline of history, although recent years had seen “a more sociological and cultural flavour”, a comment which suggests a deteriorated Marxian ideology concerned with the new “minorities”, lower socio-economic social class now being one of a plurality of interest groups. Critical Studies favoured “manuscripts that provide critique of contemporary arrangements in education contexts, particularly from the standpoint of the marginalized, as well as manuscripts that offer alternatives to these arrangements”. It sought articles which made a contribution to theory and empirical research and which aimed at “moving debates forward.”

Unmentioned was the problem of the dwindling number of academics in the “foundation studies”. Two revolutions in higher education had weakened the quality of the corps of academic educationists. While the rapidly expanding numbers of education lecturers in the 1960s and 1970s invigorated a dormant, perhaps ossified academic corpus, it inevitably also brought some dilution in quality. This process was repeated when colleges of advanced education were translated into universities in the early 1990s. Many of the new academics would not have been able to gain appointment in the old universities. A hint of deterioration clings to the November 2006 retrospect by the editor in Melbourne Studies when he remarked that the journal had “in recent years” attempted to help “early career researchers” improve the quality of their initial submissions and encouraged reviewers of articles to “make constructive contributions” to the work of beginning researchers.

In contrast with the three preceding case studies, I was involved with an education journal which transmuted to another body but which, I believe, retained its commitment to liberal education.

From Aces Review to Education Monitor

Aces Review was a response to the 1967–74 cultural collapse and to the inroads into traditional education made by neo-progressive and neo-Marxist ideologies. Education Monitor was a response to the neo-liberal instrumentalist revolution of circa 1989–93. I edited Aces Review for ten of its fifteen years and its offspring, Education Monitor, for four of its seven years.

In 1973 a group of academics and others, many of them from Melbourne, set up the Australian Council for Educational Standards. The Council had eleven “sponsors”, with Leonie Kramer, Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University as President. Another prominent member until his death in 1976 was James McAuley, Professor of English at the University of Tasmania. The Council’s journal, Aces Review, was published from 1973 to 1988. The first editor was Ray Evans of the Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong. At the end of 1974 Leonie Kramer took over the editorship; I succeeded her during 1977. I had joined the Council as a sponsor in December 1975, at that time being Associate Professor in Education at the University of Newcastle.

The first issue of Aces Review presented the principal concerns of the Australian Council for Educational Standards and its journal:

“Many teachers, parents and people whose professional duties bring them into contact with school children and school leavers have become alarmed at the declining standards of scholarship now evident throughout the various school systems in Australia. This decline is apparent both in the basic disciplines—reading, writing and arithmetic—and in the more advanced subjects of the traditional secondary school curriculum.

“Also of serious concern are the current trends in educational theory and practice. The dominant theories, expounded remorselessly in the education pages of the metropolitan dailies as well as in teachers’ colleges and university faculties of education, deprecate the acquiring of knowledge within the traditional disciplines, disparage examinations, and prescribe ‘self-fulfilment’ as the prime aim of education. If these theories are not challenged, our present difficulties will be greatly compounded in the years to come.”

Funds were raised from subscriptions, public appeals, and direct approaches to individuals and organisations. Subscriptions to the journal peaked quite early, at about 1500, but thereafter steadily declined. The maintenance of an office, the use of a public relations firm to handle publication and distribution, and rising costs caused financial problems. Insufficient resources were devoted to promotion; the obscurity of the journal’s name was another handicap. Economies were effected in 1979 when I arranged for the journal to be printed in Newcastle and despatched to Melbourne for distribution. Henceforth subscriptions stabilised at about 550. Further savings were made in 1985 when the manager of a printery in Sydney approached Leonie Kramer after she had spoken at a meeting and asked how he could make some contribution to sustaining the quality of Australian education. She suggested he might help by printing Aces Review. This he did, pretty much at cost.

Initially the highest proportion of subscribers came from Victoria, which suffered severely from the onslaught of radical and progressive education. By 1980 Victorian subscriptions had fallen from 38.5 per cent of the total to 33.6 per cent, while the proportion from New South Wales had risen from 31.5 per cent to 38.7 per cent.

In the mid-1970s a reaction against the excesses of progressive and radical education developed. The 1975 House of Representatives Committee on Specific Learning Difficulties was a landmark in the growth of a more sober view of “innovatory” education. So was a survey by the Australian Council for Educational Research on “Literacy and Numeracy in Australian Schools”. The concerns expressed by Aces Review were coming to be more widely accepted.

At the end of 1983 Aces Review presented a “Special Tenth Anniversary Issue”. The magazine suggested it had made at least four contributions to the education debate in Australia: (1) it had provided support and encouragement to opponents of neo-progressive education, particularly before 1976 when public concern was not aroused; (2) it spoke for a broad coalition of interests arguing for quality education and seemed to have had some impact on individuals in government departments, committees of inquiry, in politics and in newspapers; (3) it provided a “bete noire” for neo-progressives and neo-Marxists, a materialised enemy to explain why the new education was running into trouble; (4) it provided an outlet for educational theorists and commentators, academic or otherwise, for frank analyses presented in accessible language.

As editor I tried to foster a practical orientation to the journal’s focus on education. I had taught in New South Wales state secondary schools, had lectured for eleven years at a teachers’ college closely linked with primary and secondary schools, and in the early 1970s had edited several secondary school history textbooks. And, of course, I was in contact with the academic world. Perhaps one change of emphasis in Aces Review over the years was greater attention to the actual content of the school curriculum.

About 1987 rapid changes were starting in Australian education, one feature of which was the heightened participation of non-educationists, such as economists and politicians, in determining policy. The Institute of Public Affairs set up an Education Policy Unit with Dame Leonie Kramer as Director. The Director of the IPA, Rod Kemp, invited me to edit a new education magazine. Aces Review ceased publication and its subscription list was transferred to Education Monitor, whose first issue appeared in Winter 1989.

Education Monitor appeared regularly until 1995. A year later a farewell number announced its closure. The Australia-wide structure of the IPA resulted in a good coverage of education across the continent, while the resources of the Melbourne office improved the format of the magazine. In 1991 the IPA claimed a circulation of 3800. I resigned the editorship in 1992 after some friction with the assistant editor, who was a member of the Education Policy Unit (I was not) and an American who had lectured in English at Sydney Teachers’ College. I felt she tended to embrace recent American educational fashions uncritically. A letter I wrote describing my difficulties with the assistant editor was taken as my resignation. The reason given for the closure of the magazine was “relatively high production and distribution costs”, which probably had some validity. My resignation saved the IPA my rather generous honorarium. I had edited Aces Review without any financial recompense; indeed, that journal imposed some expense on me.

A Broad Balance: Education Australia

Education Australia, catering for a non-specialist but educated reading public, appeared in 1988. Published in Sydney, it offered “news, information, services, resources”. It adopted a balanced approach to the new era of reform. Education Australia balanced Dawkins’s views, printed in its opening pages, with a satirical article of letters addressed to “Dear Dawk, recently retired from an auspicious political career”. After thirty-nine issues it closed in 1998, at a time when the new education policies were being intensified.

Education Australia lacked Education Monitor’s commitment to a particular position. As its editorial put it, it was to be “a forum for more informed debate”, seeing both “problems and promise” in Australian education. Two issues stood out in “the current media whirlwind around education: user-pays funding for higher education; and the state of our schools”. The Managing Editor was Jose Borghino, who with Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis made up the Editorial Board. Soon Cope and Kalantzis became the Managing Editors, with Lorraine Murphy as editor. These three later collaborated in writing school textbooks for the Sydney Catholic Education Office.

From its sixth number in 1989 Education Australia carried a Statement of Editorial Policy which it retained, with minor changes, until the final issue. The magazine was “entirely independent, not financed by any education system, union or lobby group. It is run on a self-funding, non-profit basis”, drawing its revenue from subscriptions and advertising. It sought articles in non-specialist language to represent “as broad a range of views as possible”. It seemed to succeed in so doing.

From 1990 Education Australia strengthened its nationwide character by appointing editors in the various states. By 1994, when the pace of educational reform had slackened, the journal obtained new sustenance by becoming a project of the Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture at James Cook University of North Queensland and at the University of Technology, Sydney. The latter soon dropped out. Two years later Education Australia boldly moved from being a quarterly to appearing six times a year. Under the editorship of Lorraine Murphy it maintained a good standard until its abrupt demise in 1998. (My assessment may be biased by the appreciation Lorraine Murphy expressed when she received my few contributions to the journal.)

New Horizons or Lost Horizons?

An ancient journal of progressive education disappeared in November 2007. Progressive education began to attract a little attention in Australian schools, mainly private ones, some years after the New Education Fellowship was formed in London in 1921. An Australian New Education Fellowship was established in 1938. Its journal, New Horizons in Education, was published in Sydney until 1943, after which the other state branches took turns. In 2006 the President, Professor Colin Power, announced its phasing out. “Almost all non-government organizations face the problem of an aging and declining membership and meagre financial resources.” In its final issue a former editor and director of education in South Australia, Bryce Saint, expressed his regret that the closure would reduce still further “the influence that educators should have on education”, an area too important to be dominated “by political imperatives and opportunists”. Another former editor, David Massey of the Queensland University of Technology, mourned the changing shape of Australian education, asking whether it was necessary “to imagine new horizons for education” or whether we needed “to retrieve lost horizons”.

Advocates of the old progressive education accepted the basic tenets of Western liberal culture. They often had a religious commitment. They favoured social studies over history and geography not only because it permitted greater child activity but also because it could teach citizenship. In 1966, confused by the changing shape of education and strange new concepts of progressive education, the NEF changed its name to the World Education Fellowship, but continued to publish New Horizons. As the neo-progressives and radicals gained ground in the transformation of the schools the number of WEF branches declined, as did their membership. The neo-liberal reforms circa 1989–93 and the growth of political intervention produced more insecurity. A historical curiosity, the journal expired in 2007.

Invoking Research

Several journals, such as the Australian Educational Researcher and Education Research and Perspectives, asserted in their names their dedication to research.

By opening the door for generous funding of universities by the Commonwealth the 1957 Report of the Committee on Australian Universities (the Murray Report) indirectly encouraged research. But it reiterated the traditional view that the function of a university was to provide a liberal education. It favoured pure rather than applied research, intellectual enquiry for its own sake. The report of the Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education in Australia (the Martin Report, 1965) expressed greater interest in research, though it did not envisage its progeny, the colleges of advanced education, engaging in this activity. The establishment in 1970 of the Australian Advisory Committee on Research and Development in Education released Commonwealth funds for research, which became highly fashionable. Some lecturers in colleges of advanced education extended their remit to include research. The fifth report of the Australian Universities Commission (1972) responded by identifying research as a major difference between universities and CAEs.

The Australian Association for Research in Education, founded in November 1970, published the Australian Educational Researcher. In their history of the AARE, Bob Bessant and Allyson Holbrook estimated that between 1974 and 1994 30 per cent of its articles were on educational research, 15 per cent on educational philosophy, policy and development, and 13 per cent on educational psychology. It underwent “an ideological shift” in 1994 when a “new guard” of editors centred on Deakin University took over, dedicated to “policy and cultural studies” research: more attention to “critical policy studies” and to the “much contested” field of postmodernism.

Education Research and Perspectives steadily evolved in the first decade of its life. First published by the Graduate School of Education in the University of Western Australia in 1950 as the Educand, it became the Australian Journal of Higher Education in 1961 and adopted its present title in 1974. But this evolution was a broadening acceptance of the old tradition, not a rejection. Under its long-time editor, Clive Whitehead, a specialist in the history of education, Education Research and Perspectives maintained its generalist nature, treating changing fashions with some caution, though the inclusion of “research” in its title reflected the developing emphasis in education.

Whitehead says his rejection rate for articles ranges between 60 and 70 per cent: “Many papers, especially from the USA, are either too narrow in their focus, or insubstantial … In an age of publish or perish there is a lot of dross circulating.”

One significant journal did not die and did not change its name. The Australian Journal of Education, a major contributor to the study of education in this country, leaned towards psychological rather than historical or comparative studies.

Memento Mori

So what have we gained from this reminder of lost journals? We have recalled that the growth of education journals after 1957 mirrored the growth of departments of education within universities and the heightened concern with research. The increasing number of education lecturers in universities and state teachers’ colleges was a response to a great rise in the school enrolments caused by a rising birth-rate, immigration, the raising of the minimum leaving age, and the increasing progression from primary to secondary schools. The incorporation of state teachers’ colleges into the recently-created autonomous colleges of advanced education in the 1970s permitted some of its lecturers to engage in previously neglected research activities.

Initially most contributors to education journals accepted, consciously or implicitly, the liberal-humanist educational philosophy established in the early twentieth century. An early division manifested itself between those concerned with the individual child (psychology, measuring intelligence, academic performance, and so on) and those concerned with social aspects of education (history of education, comparative education, philosophy of education, and so on).

The neo-progressive and radical outburst of the late 1960s and early 1970s exalted a semi-Marxist sociology. This involved several processes, all with a crucial impact on education: the collapse of liberal humanism; the rise of alternative philosophies of education; and the advent of the pluralist society for which multiculturalism was the flagbearer. The strongholds of aggressive change were Victoria, South Australia and the ACT; the weakest was Queensland.

The cultural revolution spawned a number of small magazines and changed the orientation of existing journals. The neo-Marxists or radicals were allies of the neo-progressives in opposing the traditional curriculum and values. Both groups favoured school-based curricula, abolition of inspection, and abolition of examinations, for instance. But their prescriptions for the new education differed. The radicals were inclined to maintain the existing subject-curriculum but to infuse new content, such as material likely to foster hostility to capitalism, imperialism, the United States, and favouring other left-wing causes, such as peace education or Aboriginal studies. The neo-progressives preferred to abandon some existing subjects to permit projects or to allow students or teachers to select the content to be studied. In any case, they said, skills were more important than content. They advocated “open education”: physically open classrooms (no walls, open areas), classrooms open to visitors, class visits to the outside world, open-ended class discussions (no decisions reached), the opening by the teacher of his or her personal ideas to the pupils, and so on. In the 1980s conference or process writing, a dubious form of co-operative work, achieved some attention in primary schools.

From the mid-1980s many education journals suffered a failure of nerve. The neo-liberal reforms of economic rationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s intensified pressures for change. The reshaping of higher education encouraged the decay of the foundation subjects and helped transform the underlying ideologies of many education journals; others simply shut up shop. Simultaneously, the collapse of communism intensified the decline of Marxism. Critical and discourse now became code words for those seeking to prolong the radical tradition.

Political, intellectual, social and economic sources of change, deterioration or demise were often linked. Ideological or political changes, for instance, could mean falling subscriptions and hence financial problems. Ideological decline could undermine the sustaining philosophy of a magazine, its editors, its contributors, its readers. Some journals suffered from the loss of leading figures. Generational change provides a broader explanation of the shrinkage or evaporation of the reading market.

The growing importance of the internet for discussion about education, the attention to education in newspapers, and the work of education specialists in think-tanks also helped shape opinion. The busyness of academics often limited their literary productiveness, despite the heavy external pressure to undertake “research”. The weeding out or retirement of lecturers in the educational foundations reduced the possible supply of articles with broad macro-philosophies of education.

Long before they expired, the education magazines of radical or neo-progressive persuasion had lost their bite and their impact. They had survived courtesy of some life support: the ease of self-publication in the age of computers, the membership of many editors of university staff with access to publishing facilities. Globalisation brought a new focus, both a lifeline for survival and a new ideology.

Dr Alan Barcan lectured on the history of education in the Department of Education, the University of Newcastle until his retirement in December 1986.