The education evolution
Vol 18. Number 01, January/February 2009
When the founders of Queensland's education system put their grand plan in place some 150 years ago, they couldn't have imagined the impact it would have on future generations of students and teachers. REBECCA PERRY steps back in time to discover how history was made in classrooms throughout the state.
The town of Warwick, on Queensland's Southern Downs, was settled in 1840 and its many sandstone buildings stand as a monument to its pioneering past.
One of its proudest links to the first years of settlement is Warwick East State School. Established in 1850 it is Queensland's oldest state school and still used by today's students.
For students Danica, Caitlin and Hayley Schnitzerling - the family's fifth generation of children to go to Warwick East - every day is a living history lesson.
The girls' mum, Melissa, says they proudly take the family's old black and white photographs for 'show and tell'.
To really brag, they could get their classmates to look out the window at the quaint, heritage-listed building sitting centre stage in the school grounds facing Fitzroy Street.
Its bricks, made to last, were built by the Schnitzerlings' forefathers in 1863.
The building, now used as the school's music centre, was built with bricks made from clay dragged by horse and cart from a quarry to the family's factory.
The result is not just a family legacy - it's more like a symbolic foundation on which Queensland's educational history was built.
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At nearby Toolburra, pioneer George Leslie employed a tutor to teach local children in a shepherd's hut, where the Rosenthal Creek met the meandering Condamine River.
Back then Queensland was a wild and wooded outpost of New South Wales, with schools governed by the National Board of Education.
Leslie submitted his 209 pounds plan for a six-room building to accommodate 50 children, a chapel and teacher's residence, including 40 pounds a year for a schoolmaster and mistress.
With patrons covering a third of the cost, construction on a timber structure was soon under way and the school opened with 30 students on November 4, 1850.
After Warwick East, schools at Drayton near Toowoomba and the boys and girls 'normal schools' - as they were called back then - in Brisbane followed.
By 1859, when Queensland separated from New South Wales, these nationally run schools were taken over by the new state system.
With 1500 students on record, and nearly half of them attending church schools, a new era began, starting with the Education Act of 1860, which enabled a Board of General Education to offer primary school studies.
A Scot, John Wood Rendall, became one of Queensland's first official state school teachers in 1860.
It may have been 150 years ago but imagine being a fly on the wall when his wife, Letitia, with four children in tow, arrived from Sydney with the promise of a 'picturesque' country house at Drayton.
Instead they found a decrepit building with a dirt floor and no windows or door. But they made a home - hanging Letitia's lacy, handmade wedding undergarments as the school's curtains - before moving on to work in the newly built addition to the normal school in Brisbane.
There they faced the daunting task of teaching 350 pupils in one room, with numbers swelling to almost 500 by the end of the year.
Hector Holthouse's book, Looking Back: The First 150 Years of Queensland Schools, describes the stark reality of the times.
It includes a board report noting 'instances have occurred of one teacher being required, single-handed, to control and instruct from 60 to 180 children'.
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Our first education minister, Sir Samuel Walker Griffith - who later became premier of Queensland - wanted to provide equality to Queensland students.
Sir Samuel believed 'the greatest need existed at the lowest level'. He drafted a bill that advocated 'free primary education for every child, irrespective of class, creed or location'.
To meet the growing need for teachers, the normal schools juggled teaching students alongside educating teachers, with a trend of pupil-teachers beginning to emerge by 1860.
As Greg Logan and Tom Watson explain in their book Soldiers of the Service, 'one could be a barefoot ruffian on Friday, and a young teacher on Monday'.
Being paid quarterly in gold and cash sums lower than the average farm labourer didn't deter a rush of willing educators - many of them teenagers, whose parents were already teaching.
But their training regimes were 'arduous', as an early education inspector David Ewart observed, with lessons before and after school, and again on Saturdays.
And once in the classroom, life then - much like now - wasn't without its challenges.
Women, for one, were often judged on their 'virtues', like their ability to cook and make clothes. In Looking Back, teacher Sarah Allen's credentials for working at Maryborough in 1886 included questions such as 'Does she go out much to fatiguing evening parties?'
Despite their efforts - like selling food to buy supplies and battling goats in the playground - teachers weren't always appreciated, as Holthouse found in a description of a teacher in a Brisbane newspaper from 1869.
'If it was not enough for him to render the lives of the young Condamineites miserable by pestering them with alphabets, multiplication tables and slates and pencils, he must, forsooth, begin instilling into them revolutionary ideas about fencing, cultivation, pig keeping and other abominations to a pastoral people.'
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During the 20 years between the two world wars, two-thirds of Queensland's primary institutions were one-teacher schools.
Even at the age of 107, Florence Marshall could still remember running one. For nine years in the 1920s, Florence taught at Glenwood State School near Gympie, built on land donated by her father.
Her younger brother, Joe, was one of her first pupils, and she's been correcting her family's grammar ever since. She also worked at the old Rossmore school west of Gympie, which had hessian bags for walls, before having to resign when she got married.
'But I didn't want to give up teaching,' she recalled. 'I loved it.
'For mathematics, I would get them to count matches I had bundled up, teach them their ABCs and geography and show them how to sew, so even the boys could patch their clothes after they ripped them in the cane fields.'
Some of the 'kids' Florence taught - those now aged in their nineties - still keep in touch.
One recently wrote, 'I realise now that one's achievement in life, though insignificant, is based on one's formative years at school and for that period, although belatedly acknowledged, I must sincerely thank you Florence for your teaching qualities which must have influenced me greatly.'
Glenwood's current principal, Damian Olsen, was shocked to read the list of bans for female teachers listed in an early 20th century memo.
The document warns against wearing bright clothes, getting married, dyeing their hair, 'loitering down town in ice cream parlours', wearing less than two petticoats or 'riding in a carriage with any man unless he is your father or brother'.
'And they could have been sacked for going out after 8 pm,' he says.
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If you thought the questions on television's Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? were tough, spare a thought for schoolchildren undergoing tests more than 100 years ago.
Questions on the 1874 tests for primary school students wanting to attend the then grammar high schools included:
'What number must be added to seventeen millions thirty thousand and sixteen to make it divisible without remainder by three millions eight hundred and three thousand and forty?'
Or try, 'supposing a ship were to coast along the shores of Europe, from St. Petersburg to Sebastopol, a) what river mouths would she pass? b) what straits would she pass through? c) what countries would she sight?'.
Much of Griffith's early primary curriculum endured, with Logan and Watson in Soldiers of the Service outlining lessons in 'reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, geography, history, elementary mechanics, object lessons, drill and gymnastics, vocal music and (in the case of girls) sewing and needlework'.
These basics - and the way they were taught - must have sunk in for 109-year-old Miriam Schmierer, whose young life was shaped at Mount Whitestone State School, which still stands in a farming community in the Lockyer Valley.
After milking the cows and armed with a hearty sandwich of homemade bread and butter, she would 'run a few miles' through neighbouring paddocks to get to school.
'In my time, when the world was just like a bud, we learned our ABCs and our times tables and even today, I try to remember the tables when I lie in bed and can't sleep at night,' Mrs Schmierer said.
'The teacher Mr Thom was at the same school for 40 years - today I'll say he was a good teacher, but I didn't say that then.'
And it seems gossiping in the schoolyard is nothing new.
'I wasn't sports-minded so my friend and I would sit under the pepperina tree and have a yap.'
From her Pialba nursing home, Mrs Schmierer said she was thrilled to receive a birthday pack from the school's current students, who sent handwritten letters, postcards and a homegrown passionfruit.
Mount Whitestone principal Joan Quinn says today's teaching techniques have changed, but the region's rural lifestyle remains.
'The kids do interesting and relevant things, using computers and the latest technology, while still being very much aware of their lives on the land,' she says.
It speaks volumes of the way education has skilled young Queenslanders in our most essential industries.
Agriculture, mechanics and domestic courses were the first to be delivered. The opening of technical colleges and the introduction of railway carriages, which took training to the regions, offered more subjects.
But before long, almost everyone was learning one of life's toughest lessons through the impact of war.
The Teachers' Volunteer Corps began in 1893 and the first state school students signed up six years later at Indooroopilly in Brisbane.
By 1911, war games became reality when it became compulsory for medically fit boys aged 12 and over to learn skills like rifle shooting and first aid. After the Depression in the 1930s, when many teachers were retrenched, the Second World War saw girls making supplies, flags flying at half-mast for teachers and parents killed in action, and air raid drills sending kids jumping into trenches.
One recalled to Holthouse that they were 'more scared of the toads than we were of anything else'.
In the 1960s, a State Government ministerial committee began focusing on secondary studies.
This paved the way for students to pursue their own interests and talents while shaping their skills.
The high school scholarship process was scrapped, teachers began formal three-year training courses and in the 1970s Queensland became the first Australian state to abolish external exams in favour of Junior and Senior Certificates.
School assessments now counted towards university entrance while learning concepts, rather than facts, reflected a changing world adjusting to life with decimal currency, metric measurements and computers.
In many ways, today's 'learning or earning' strategies mirror the early ideals of equipping students with practical training, with the newly introduced Queensland Certificate of Education ensuring young people have broad skills and reach specific benchmarks in literacy and numeracy - skills now measured over their years of schooling.
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Delivering education to children in a vast state, seven times the size of the United Kingdom, was one of the biggest challenges faced by early educators.
Some of the first teachers took to long, dusty roads on horseback, motorbike or unreliable cars. Queensland's first itinerant teacher, T.D. Johnstone, visited 113 families and taught 319 isolated pupils.
Charters Towers teacher David Patullo spread kerosene-soaked ropes around his campsites to ward off snakes, and broke in local brumbies when his horses needed rest.
As classrooms cropped up, facilities were often far from ideal.
Near Kingaroy, Old Yarraman State School teacher Miss Albion arrived to find her only supplies were a packet of nails left behind by builders, while a teacher's family who moved to Grandchester, between Ipswich and Toowoomba, had to live in a tent.
But the adversity of distance became a challenge teaching by correspondence would eventually overcome.
It was Allora-raised education inspector Bernard 'Barney' McKenna who pushed for a system similar to that of New South Wales and by 1922, students in remote areas began to receive lessons and exams in the post.
After the first wireless radio lessons at Morven State School in 1925, Bernard McKenna was appointed director of education, sharing the talents of school choirs and students with audiences on Brisbane radio station 4QG, broadcasting music recitals at the end of his regular segments.
Cloncurry's flying doctor service opened its airways for education in 1960 and before long Queensland boasted the world's biggest school of the air.
Today, in the seven schools of distance education across the state, there is the internet streamlining learning for around 4460 students, some overseas, on a host of subjects, including chess.
Traditional schools have also changed with the times. From one-room timber buildings in the early days to hastily constructed buildings in the 1950s, more open-plan designs began to be built.
In 1975, a 'prototype' high school at Craigslea in northern Brisbane featured six separate faculty units and since then, modern and flexible learning spaces fitted with the latest technology have become the norm.
Today's rooms are better equipped for students. It is certainly the case for students with a disability, whose skills have been enhanced through practical learning facilities and people from non-English speaking backgrounds, who learn English and share their unique cultures with classmates.
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In the early 1900s, Dr Eleanor Bourne was working with children who faced a host of health hazards caused by fleas and flies, eye disease and tooth decay, and epidemics like influenza and polio.
More than 90 years before junk food was officially scrapped from tuckshops, the young doctor was educating parents about children's diets, while travelling dentists worked to improve oral hygiene.
Free milk was supplied to schools between 1953 and 1987, but Queensland's climate meant it was often curdled by the time children stopped for little lunch.
Queensland College of Teachers director John Ryan said a highlight of his time at Brisbane's Stafford Heights State School was the coveted honour of delivering free milk to classrooms.
'In about Year 4 or 5, they switched from bottles to cartons - they were like missiles to throw at each other and cover a kid in milk for the rest of the day,' he recalls.
Sport and physical activity played an important role in Queensland education's history.
Hector Holthouse in Looking Back notes former Director-General Lewis David Edwards saw sport as a way to 'educate, not merely the body, but the whole individual through the body'. It sounds much like the vision behind today's Smart Moves physical activity strategy.
But before iPods and Wiis, kids needed little encouragement to keep fit, with games like hockey once played using old condensed
milk tins.
An inflated bullock's bladder or old stockings stuffed with rags once served as makeshift footballs - a trend Rugby league legend Wally Lewis is thankful had passed by the time he honed his talents on the ovals at Cannon Hill State School and Brisbane State High School.
'Playing games is part and parcel of being a kid, and I still get a laugh as I drive past schools now and see games like hopscotch still being played,' he says.
The former Test and state sporting great credits some of his old teachers for helping him pursue sport, especially at Brisbane State High School, which has been a breeding ground for some of Queensland's most successful sport stars.
In the 1960s, legendary football talent scout Cyril Connell was deputy principal at the school.
Last year, at 81, Cyril retired from the Brisbane Broncos but long before he was discovering stars such as Darren Lockyer, he had worked his way up to the department's deputy director of secondary education. It was the culmination of a 47-year-long teaching career across a host of Queensland schools.
Mr Connell never forgot his much-loved past profession.
'I did miss teaching when I stopped - I really missed the children and the other teachers too.'
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By the time Whitney Houston was singing, 'I believe the children are our future' in the mid 80s, Queensland had already established Australia's first preschool unit, offering free education for children aged between four and five.
When the Prep Year was reintroduced in 2007, Patricia Cummins couldn't wait to be among the state's first teachers to take on the challenge - because she was in the last group of students to go to Prep before it was abolished in 1953.
'I went to Collinsville State School and our Prep classroom was called the "little house on the prairie " because it was separate from the rest of the school,' she recalls.
'It was the first time many of the kids had been away from their mums and back then, it was very structured. But it made a huge difference and by the following year we could tell which students hadn't taken part.'
The 61-year-old from Cannonvale State School at Airlie Beach says it is 'magic' to experience Prep from both sides.
'I still include structured activities like I received, but it's important to balance that with free play,' she says.
Patricia's own Prep teacher, Mitzi Tudehope, was just 16 and a pupil-teacher in her first year on the job when she taught Patricia 56 years ago. Mitzi's mother was a teacher, and so is her son.
'It was wonderful working with the little kids, and really exciting to be able to teach them things that would set them up for life,' Mitzi says.
'When it was scrapped, I didn't give it a lot of thought but it is great to see it back. I have a great-granddaughter who has just been through Prep and she did very well.'
So while everything old is sometimes new again, Warwick East State School principal Warren Elder believes history helps shape the future.
'Looking back certainly gives a nice perspective,' he says. 'The ways of doing things may have changed but the values have stayed the same.'
With four new schools opening this year - three on the Gold Coast and another at North Lakes in northern Brisbane - the next 150 years of Queensland education is already beginning.
Five-year-old Prep student Cameron Gough, the first enrolee at the Gold Coast's Norfolk Village State School, shows every indication the future is in safe hands.
'I'm really good at numbers and I can already count to 90,' he says. 'It takes me about five hours.'
And along with thousands of other students just like him, Cameron has all the time in the world to keep learning, as the next generation starts turning its own pages in history.
For more on the history of education in Queensland go to our website.
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