Alexander Mackie grew up in Edinburgh at the end of the nineteenth century, when long-established Scottish educational traditions were being reframed. Since the Reformation, Scottish parishes and schools had been part of a public education system linked to the universities. Teachers in the parishes, called ‘dominies’, were part of this system, helping to identify pupils of talent who would go on to university. Social and demographic changes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including increasing urbanisation, created a demand for education among the middle class and led to calls for the provision of mass schooling for the general population. Teaching was increasingly recognised as a profession based on extended education and training. Education emerged as an academic discipline, underpinned by both theory and practice, and drawing not only on Scottish traditions but also on the transnational world of research that was developing in Europe and North America.
Mackie was part of an early generation of Scottish academics who were committed to promoting education as an academic discipline that provided a foundation for the teaching profession. In his studies at the University of Edinburgh, Mackie’s academic supervisors emphasised the significance of education as an area of liberal enquiry. Philosophic idealism – which was drawn, in part, from German philosophic traditions – was an early foundation of the academic discipline of education. Mackie began his university teaching career in Wales. Through networks of Empire, he soon became part of the Scottish academic diaspora, arriving in Australia in 1906.180
As the inaugural principal of Sydney Teachers’ College, Mackie sought to shape teacher education and training in New South Wales to reflect what he had known in Edinburgh. Of particular significance was the close association between the college and the University of Sydney, created in part by Mackie’s role as both college principal and university professor. For more than a decade, Mackie’s alliance with Peter Board, the director of education, and Francis Anderson, the Challis professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, sustained and consolidated his efforts. Mackie promoted the academic discipline of education by appointing staff committed to both teaching and research. By the early 1920s, the status of education at Sydney Teachers’ College and the University of Sydney was celebrated across the Empire – these institutions provided a model for the future of teacher education.
During the interwar years, Mackie strove to maintain the study of education as an academic discipline despite increasing antagonism and indifference. S.H. Smith, who succeeded Peter Board as director of education, had little sympathy for Mackie’s views, preferring a more traditional approach to teacher training that focused on teaching practice, in accordance with the old pupil teacher system. Mackie continued to defend Sydney Teachers’ College’s position as an autonomous institution within the University of Sydney. Smith strove to humiliate Mackie personally and to assert bureaucratic control over the college’s curriculum and students. Within the university, Mackie lost an ally when Professor Anderson retired.
Responding to these changes, Mackie turned to the general public to gain support for the college. He drew on ideas from overseas – particularly American progressivism. Whereas his education in Scotland had emphasised idealism and the role of the state, Mackie now looked to the teaching profession to bring about change. By the late 1930s, organisations such as the New Education Fellowship were providing models of change involving academics, teachers and community organisations.
Changes in Mackie’s academic life were paralleled by the emergence of academic values within his family. In raising their children, Alexander and Annie Mackie initially embraced progressive methods, applied through homeschooling. Alexander and Annie retained faith in formal academic subjects and in the idea of academic merit that had been ingrained in their own school and university educations. Significantly, they avoided sending their children to state schools, 181even though state high schools in New South Wales were the most successful in the state administered exams in the 1930s. Alexander and Annie chose to enrol Margaret at Abbotsleigh and John at Knox, in part because of the schools’ proximity to their home, but also because these schools were academic in orientation and non-state in governance, avoiding the centralised state bureaucracy that had hampered Alexander as college principal.
Alexander and Annie’s academic values were, in part, passed on to the next generation, albeit in new contexts. At the University of Sydney, Margaret and John came under the influence of John Anderson, who presented himself as an example of the academic as sceptic and critic. But in some ways, they followed the approach to academic life that their father represented – a continuing commitment to progressive forms of teaching and to research. Following their father’s example, both Margaret and John chose to pursue philosophy.
Attending the University of Oxford opened up opportunities for academic careers, although Margaret’s and John’s experiences at the university were very different. As a woman, Margaret found her time at Oxford difficult. She returned to Australia and focused on many of her father’s aims, studying the philosophy and practice of teacher education. In contrast, his years at Oxford helped to shape John as a professional philosopher. His career followed a transnational path, including professorial appointments in Australasia and Britain and culminating in a chair at Oxford, where he achieved international prominence through his publications on moral education.
The academic lives of Alexander Mackie and his family spanned almost a century, from the 1890s to the 1980s, across universities and colleges in Britain and the Empire. Within this context, the Mackie family demonstrated certain values that they saw as the foundation of academic life; these included autonomy, independence and freedom of expression. In different ways, Alexander, Annie, Margaret and John fought hard to protect these values. Their lives still offer lessons for academics in the ‘mass universities’ that have emerged in the twenty-first century.