42

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Empire was brought closer together not only through formal conferences and meetings but also by the continued improvement of sea travel. The Moldavia reached Sydney Heads on Thursday 22 November 1906, after a six-week voyage. While at sea, Alexander had written sixteen letters to his father, William. After arriving, he composed a long correspondence to William detailing his favourable first impressions of his new home.

Over the next decade, Alexander sent letters to his father on almost a weekly basis. His correspondence to William in Edinburgh sought not only to provide details of his new environment but also to give insights into his prospects and career in Australia.

44New South Wales had many connections to Scotland, beginning in the early years of colonial settlement. Scottish migration – mainly of free settlers – to the colony had begun by the 1820s. In the 1830s, the Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang founded the Australian College, which was designed for all Protestants, not just Presbyterians. Its curriculum was ‘broad and liberal’, following the Scottish tradition drawn from the Reformation. Among the ‘professors’ Lang brought from Scotland was Dr Henry Carmichael, who soon left the Australian College to found a normal school in the Hunter Valley to provide non-sectarian teacher training.134

By the early twentieth century, Scottish influences were represented in the New South Wales education system in a number of ways. Some Presbyterian secondary schools had emerged; however, the English public school tradition’s focus on sport and the formation of character had come to prevail over Scottish ideas of intellect and merit in many of these schools. The best example of this trend was The Scots College in Sydney. Founded in 1893, the college adhered to principles that owed less to the ideal of the ‘democratic intellect’ and more to Thomas Arnold’s moral and intellectual principles – now interpreted as a form of ‘muscular Christianity’ – which celebrated sport.135

Scottish influences were more clearly seen at the University of Sydney. There was a significant Scottish presence at the university from its foundation in 1850. Scotland was the birthplace of more than one-fifth of the small number of academics at the university between 1850 and 1890. Many of these academics had been educated at the University of Edinburgh – almost as many had degrees from Edinburgh as from Oxford.136 In the next half-century, Scots continued to constitute at least one-fifth of the academics at Sydney, and degrees from Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Aberdeen were prominent.

The role of Scots in the public school system that emerged in the late nineteenth century was equally significant. From the 1860s, the Presbyterian community in New South Wales abandoned its own government supported elementary schools to patronise state public schools. Increasing numbers of school

45teachers and inspectors of public schools were Scots by birth or origin. These Scots promoted ideals of opportunity and merit based on academic achievement.137 This was what Mackie found when he arrived to take up his new post: a climate similar to the educational environment he had emerged from.

Peter Board, the son of a Scottish migrant and director of education in New South Wales, and another Scot, Mackardy, the acting principal of the new Sydney Teachers’ College, met Mackie at the wharf. Mackie soon dismissed Mackardy, describing him as ‘a little elderly man of about 50 with a fierce moustache like a sea lion’s’.138 Board was another matter. In his departmental report for 1906, Board had already endorsed Mackie’s appointment, stating that Mackie ‘brings with him a very extensive knowledge of educational methods and of systems of training, as well as a varied experience of teaching in both primary and secondary schools. There is a good reason to believe that under his management the Training College will take a high place among institutions of that character.’139 The relationship between Board and Mackie blossomed once they met.

Peter Board’s career provides a clear example of the influence of the Scottish diaspora in New South Wales. His family and professional background made his appointment as director of education particularly significant for Mackie. Board’s father had migrated from Scotland in 1842 to farm. He became a teacher after the birth of his son Peter in 1858. Peter’s mother’s brother, the Reverend Archibald Cameron, was a Scots graduate appointed to the Manning River parish and a follower of John Dunmore Lang. Educated at his father’s schools, Peter Board was serious and studious. He had an early association with the University of Sydney; he attended the Fort Street ‘model school’ and completed the university’s junior exam. In 1873, at age fifteen, he became a pupil teacher. Twelve years later, as a trained and experienced teacher, he became one of the first of a small group of evening students to enrol at the University of Sydney. Board graduated with a BA in 1889 and an MA in 1891, gaining second class honours in mathematics. As part of a fragment of Scottish culture in the Antipodes, he became an example of the modern ‘dominie’ transposed to New South Wales.

46After twenty years as an inspector of schools in rural and metropolitan areas, in January 1905 the new state government under Premier Joseph Carruthers appointed Board to the position of under-secretary of the Department of Public Instruction and to the newly created post of director of education. Most see Board as a harbinger of reform in New South Wales, albeit with predilections towards academic curricula for elite students and more vocational subjects for the majority of pupils.140 Overall, he became a major agent of change in public education in New South Wales.

After his luggage was taken to the Hotel Australia in Pitt Street, Mackie spent the afternoon with Board at the director’s offices. In a letter to his father, Mackie described Board as ‘a very nice fellow, somewhere over forty and I think that we shall pull very well together’. Mackie also met various others and concluded that, while he could not remember names, ‘they were all very cordial and in fact there is much less reserve among people here than at home’.141

Contexts for change

Mackie had arrived in Australia at a moment of heightened hopes in education. The federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 had created paths for educational reform, not so much through the new Commonwealth government as through the states. Under the Commonwealth Constitution, the states held residual powers in important areas such as education, which encompassed public schools and universities. Following the 1890s depression, there was a new emphasis on students, rather than the formal curriculum, in education politics, accompanied by active policy making. A form of educational renaissance emerged, accepting parts of the ‘New Education’, which was already having an impact in Britain, Europe and North America.

In the early twentieth century, foundations were laid for a public education system, which would remain the focus of government action for at least the next half-century. There was more emphasis on the practical aspects of what became known as ‘primary schools’, and various types of secondary schools emerged,

47including academic high schools for the elite and vocational and continuing education institutions for the rest of the pupils. There were also efforts to include universities in this public education system. Among the Australian states, New South Wales became the leader in new forms of nation building, extending its school system and increasing opportunities. Developments were often based on the principles of merit and academic credentials that had shaped education in Edinburgh in the late nineteenth century. Building the nation through education was conceived as part of Australia’s contribution to the Empire.142

These changes had major implications for the education and professional training of teachers. From the early nineteenth century, the Australian colonies had mirrored the trajectory of teacher education in England and Scotland. This led to the adoption of a number of experiments in New South Wales, including a brief trial of the monitorial system. By the 1850s, the English-based pupil teacher system had been introduced in the Antipodes, just as a similar system was emerging in Scotland. For half a century, males and females, often aged only twelve, were recruited from within public schools, learning to teach through four-year apprenticeships. Some were awarded scholarships to attend the model school at Fort Street for a few months.143 In contrast to the approach in Britain from the 1840s, there were no efforts in Australia to develop teachers’ colleges associated with the churches. Rather, the colonies regulated and provided trained teachers for their own schools.

The growth of the public school system led to a search for new methods of teacher training. In New South Wales, English-born William Wilkins, who trained as a pupil teacher under James Kay-Shuttleworth (the United Kingdom administrator of schools from 1839), became the head of the Fort Street model school and then the chief administrator of public schools. In the 1870s, Wilkins travelled overseas to study teachers’ colleges. The Parkes government of the 1880s was strongly committed to public schools. With the enactment of the 1880 Act – and its principles of ‘compulsory, free and secular’ – the government accepted the need

48to extend training for men at Fort Street and to establish a residential training college for women at Hurlstone Park.144

For much of the nineteenth century, Australia’s universities played little role in the formal training of teachers. The public examinations of the University of Sydney and University of Melbourne, introduced in the 1860s, were open to both school students and teachers, allowing them to undertake further studies in the humanities and sciences. The University of Sydney thereby encouraged an academic meritocracy through matriculation. It also influenced the curricula of boys’ and girls’ secondary schools in New South Wales, including some public schools, such as Fort Street, which produced not only future teachers but also many of the colony’s academic elite.145 However, the public school system and the provision of teacher training had no direct relationship to the university. In part, this was because the colonial public schools were for the ‘people’, while the university was designed for the academic elite.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Australia’s universities had begun to assume a more prominent role in the professionalisation of teaching. In 1876, the newly established University of Adelaide allowed students to attend classes without matriculating. Many of these early students were female teachers seeking to upgrade their qualifications. Thus Adelaide became the first Australian university to admit women and initiated a new relationship between Australian universities and school teachers.146

The admission of women to the University of Sydney from 1881 was indirectly associated with curriculum reforms, including the introduction of new academic disciplines and the creation of a Faculty of Science. By the late 1880s, there were also moves to include the university in the education and professional training of teachers. The University of Sydney entered into negotiations with the colonial government over a proposal – initiated within the professoriate – to allow some students from the teachers’ training colleges to undertake studies at the university.147 The initial negotiations broke down. But in the 1890s, Joseph Carruthers,

49then minister for public instruction and a graduate of the University of Sydney, proposed that not only should training college students be allowed to attend the university, steps should also be taken to locate a teachers’ training college within the university grounds.148

The growing recognition of teachers and education within Australian universities was related to both local needs and new perceptions of the Empire.149 Australia’s attachment to the Empire in the late nineteenth century was associated with the colonies’ culture and identity as well as matters of defence and trade.150 Education in the dominions of settlement, and in domains of conquest such as India, had long been part of the mission of the Empire.151 Throughout the Empire, common patterns of education had emerged with the creation of state school systems and the foundation of state-sponsored universities. By the early twentieth century, the sharing of knowledge among the universities of the Empire was accomplished through networks of research and teaching. Relationships with other academics in the Empire were cultivated through correspondence, direct contact and more formal conferences.152 This network of research and sharing of knowledge paralleled general international movements, such as the New Education in Europe and America, which focused on child-centred curricula. But ideas of and connections to the Empire remained preeminent in Australian teacher education until well into the twentieth century.153

Ideas formed in Scotland were part of the New Education movement. The most significant Scots-born academic at the University of Sydney in the area of education was Professor Francis Anderson, who was a prominent supporter of Alexander Mackie. When Mackie arrived in Sydney, Anderson’s influence within the university and in the general community was at its height. He had become an icon of educational change, attracting attention through his ideas, style and general approach.154 One of Anderson’s students recalled:

50

Anderson sought to engage with both students and the wider community. With his background in philosophic idealism, he sponsored the foundation of new academic disciplines in the social sciences at the University of Sydney – including anthropology and education – all of which were located in the expanded Faculty of Arts.156 By the eve of World War One, he was influencing a generation of undergraduates, including the young Herbert Evatt, who became a High Court judge and then the leader of the federal Australian Labor Party.157 Knighted after his retirement, Anderson’s achievements were later engraved in stone; a commemorative fountain was constructed at the University of Sydney, opposite the Anderson Stuart building.

From the late nineteenth century, Anderson was involved in a number of educational organisations and causes. Through the Kindergarten Union, he met Maybanke Susannah Selfe, whose father had been involved in technical education. They married and formed a partnership for educational reform.158 Following Federation, Francis Anderson extended his influence into the politics of public school reform. He began a major campaign for change, including overhauling teacher training.

On 26 June 1901, at the annual conference of public school teachers, Anderson delivered a clarion call to the community and government. He criticised the whole system of public education; his critique of its leadership, the pupil teacher

51system and the training colleges was particularly severe. His student (later Professor) Elkin wrote: ‘Those of us who attended his lectures in the days of his prime, can well imagine his incisive tones cleaving the air in the manner of the prophet Amos.’159 The press indicated that the effect of Anderson in full flight had been electric: ‘Women were standing on chairs waving their handkerchiefs and parasols, men were stamping and shouting and shaking hands with perfect strangers.’160 Anderson published his speech in full – with certain additions – in a pamphlet entitled The public school system of New South Wales. In the pamphlet, he drew attention to the failings of the pupil teacher system and the associated training colleges – ‘the greatest defect in our system, the blackest spot upon our “glorious luminary”, the fault which most urgently stands in need of correction’.161

Anderson continued his campaign for reform from within the University of Sydney, playing an important role in engaging the university in contemplation of the nature of the public school system. For the first time, a University of Sydney professor had begun a major debate over the future of public schools. Anderson published articles in the university magazine, Hermes, on the role of universities in national education. He pointed out that teachers in public schools had ‘for many years been practically excluded from any direct participation in university instruction’, and noted that the study of education in the university ‘remains without its professor’ and that no place had been found in the university for the ‘professional training of teachers’.162 There seems no doubt that these views drew upon Anderson’s understanding of the emerging role of universities in teacher education and training in Scotland.

In November 1901, Joseph Carruthers, then leader of the opposition, called a meeting at the Sydney Town Hall. His aim was to pressure the premier to establish a royal commission or a committee of experts to enquire into the state of the public school system. While Anderson was the chief speaker, Carruthers took the opportunity to push for a deputation to meet with Premier John See and John Perry, the

52minister for public instruction.163 In early December, See and Perry conferred with a deputation including Carruthers and Anderson. Once again, Anderson argued that the need for proper teacher training was a critical issue. Another member of the deputation was the chief statistician for New South Wales, G.H. Knibbs, who handed the premier a document outlining arguments in favour of a royal commission. Knibbs was a statistician and surveyor, an author of numerous publications, and a lecturer in geodesy, astronomy and hydraulics at the University of Sydney from 1890 – a further indication that school reform was being taken up at the university.164 By January 1902, Perry had informed a meeting of Department of Public Instruction officials that he would appoint two officers to ‘inquire into education abroad’ to see whether the system in New South Wales was meeting the needs of the times.165

In early 1902, the New South Wales government appointed two commissioners to undertake surveys and enquiries in Britain, Europe and North America. The first was Knibbs; the second was John Turner, a former pupil teacher who became a headmaster and was then promoted to the Fort Street model school. These appointments struck a balance between a declared educational reformer and someone within the leadership ranks of the public school system. Over the next five years, the commissioners drew upon international examples to guide reform in New South Wales. Among their early recommendations were proposals to improve teacher training and appoint a director of education.166

Even before becoming director, Peter Board had been caught up in the education reform movement in New South Wales. In 1903, he went abroad on leave, taking the opportunity to compile a report on primary education, which soon became even more influential than Knibbs and Turner’s more voluminous report.167 By 1904, Board was playing a major role in a conference convened by the minister for public instruction, which included the commissioners and representatives of the University of Sydney and of the community. The conference

53carried resolutions that called for the abolition of the pupil teacher system, the establishment of a chair of pedagogy in connection with the university and the provision of a normal school with a practice school attached.168

The debate over the future of teacher training went well beyond what Wilkins had sought when he went abroad just two decades earlier and what some university professors had urged in the 1880s. Once appointed director of education, Board placed emphasis on reforming teacher training with the aims of phasing out the pupil teacher system and providing full-time pre-service preparation. In 1905, steps were taken to replace the pupil teacher system with a new form of ‘previous training’ of teachers. Board announced the establishment of a college within the grounds of the University of Sydney, offering a two-year course of training with provision for students of ‘special ability’ to graduate from the university after a third year of study. In the meantime, the school buildings at Blackfriars, near the university, would become a ‘temporary training college’. By March 1905, the training of male students had been transferred from Fort Street to Blackfriars; they were joined later in the year by female students from Hurlstone.169

There is little doubt that both Anderson and Board had significant connections with the selection committee that recommended appointing Mackie. The use of a selection committee in the United Kingdom was based upon the longstanding practice for professorial appointments at the University of Sydney. Following this practice to select the principal of the teachers’ college implied that candidates would need to have an academic standing equivalent to a professorial appointee. Francis Anderson probably played a significant role in advising the government – and Board in particular – on the composition of the committee. Anderson and Professor John Adams, the chair of the selection committee, were old friends from their days at university in Glasgow. It is likely that Anderson also suggested John Struthers, the head of the Scottish Department of Education, as a member of the selection panel. Finally, Anderson may have advised Adams to convey to Mackie the possibility that a chair in education might accompany the position of principal of Sydney Teachers’ College.170

54The Australian Journal of Education reflected on the significance of Mackie’s appointment: ‘That gentleman comes to us with the centuries of practical interest in and knowledge of education which Scotch parentage implied, and with several years of experience in Wales, one of the most lively quarters in matters educational to be found in the British Empire.’171 It was beginning to seem that new opportunities – and not the Antipodean reptiles of his aunt’s imagination – were awaiting Mackie in the Empire.

Introducing the new college principal

Before Mackie’s arrival, Anderson and Board had been the main proponents of changes in teacher education. The new principal soon became the subject of major attention from the press and teachers. In the days and weeks after his arrival, Mackie’s introduction to schools, teachers and pupils in New South Wales proceeded apace. In the few weeks before Christmas 1906, Mackie established personal contacts and addressed public meetings. Much can be gleaned from the almost daily letters he sent to his father in Edinburgh.

The day after his arrival, Mackie visited the training college at Blackfriars, where 200 students were enrolled. He returned to the city to lunch with Broughton Barnabas O’Conor, the recently appointed minister for public instruction. A graduate of the University of Sydney, O’Conor was the youngest member in the New South Wales government, aged thirty-six.172 Mackie also met representatives of the Public Service Board, which oversaw the civil service. In the evening, he visited Peter Board’s home to meet members of the Presbyterian community.173

The weekend after Mackie arrived, he and Board travelled by train to Windsor, on the rural fringes of Sydney. A nature study exhibition was being held there, involving thirty to forty schools, with both children and parents examining the

55work sent in from participating schools. Mackie agreed to give a talk, writing to his father ‘So my first public appearance was made at Windsor’.174

Having arrived at the end of the school year, with Christmas approaching, Mackie had to face a number of audiences – particularly from the teaching profession – who were eager to hear his views. The Public School Teachers’ Association invited him to speak at a dinner held in Pitt Street, Sydney, on 27 November. A little overwhelmed and unused to the fuss, Mackie wrote to his father before the event that he was not looking forward to his ‘execution’. He expected it to be the biggest audience he had ever addressed, with over 200 men and women present.175 He had various supporters in the audience, including Peter Board and Professor Anderson. Also present was another Scot, Horatio Scott Carslaw, professor of mathematics at the University of Sydney since 1903. Born in Scotland and educated at the University of Glasgow and University of Cambridge, Carslaw was committed to research and to improving the standards of mathematics in schools. He would play a major part in the debate over reforms to secondary education that Board would implement in the following years.176

The local Evening News provided an extensive report of the dinner under the headline ‘A teacher of teachers’. According to the report, the host of the dinner, P.J. Nelligan, the head of the Public School Teachers’ Association, welcomed Mackie, suggesting that the ‘desire for improvement and reform’ came from the ‘ranks’ of teachers in New South Wales. As director of education, Board proposed a toast to the new principal, stating that Mackie had come to Sydney after an ‘education revolution’ had taken place in New South Wales. There was a ‘certain irony’, Board said, in the fact that Mackie had begun his career as a pupil teacher, a system that was coming to an end in the state. The Evening News report mentioned that Mackie had ‘come from that University which had produced some of the finest scholars in the old land – Edinburgh’. Board stated that ‘the position [Mackie] had come to Sydney to fill was just as important’ as his academic posts in Edinburgh and Wales, ‘for no training college in England, Scotland or Wales would have a greater number of teachers than the splendid college that within eighteen months

56would be ready for Professor Mackie’. Board’s reference to a future professorial title for Mackie was almost confirmed when Professor Anderson, who was also on the stage at the meeting, stated that while the Department of Public Instruction and the University of Sydney were once on ‘different sides of the fence’, that fence had been pulled down and the ‘two sources of learning were now commingled’.177

The press report of this meeting indicated that the college principal was proposing a new era in teacher education in Australia. In his address, Mackie reflected first on the honour he was being accorded. He also discussed his own education and learning and gave indications of possible future directions for teacher education under his supervision as principal. ‘Though he could never forget the 30 years he had spent in Scotland’, Mackie ‘hoped soon to be able to look upon Australia as his second homeland’. According to the Evening News, Mackie described the present as a time of ‘upheaval’, the like of which had not been seen since ‘Socrates pointed out the fallacies of the Sophists’. Mackie believed that there was hope for ‘educational progress’, provided that the educational administration worked with the ‘social and economic structure of the State’. He argued that the pupil teacher system had ‘outlived its usefulness’, not only in the ‘older countries of the world’ but also in Australia. The press report noted that Mackie presented ‘two main points in the training of the teacher’: ‘first, he should receive a thorough general culture in academics and in the techniques of his art’ and ‘secondly, that he should carry the academic training so far as to obtain a degree in arts or sciences’. There should be no differences between primary and secondary teachers, Mackie suggested, and ‘no obstacle placed in the way of obtaining a University education for young teachers’. As such, he held out the prospect of a teaching profession founded on university credentials, rather than the traditional model involving different qualifications for primary and secondary teachers.178

57In the three weeks before his first Christmas in Australia, Mackie spent time with Board and at the Blackfriars college, while continuing to extend his professional and social contacts. In particular, he came to know more of the university and its colleges, telling his father that of the three male colleges ‘as you might expect the Presbyterian (St Andrews) is more vigorous and flourishing than either the RC (St John’s) or Episcopalian (St. Paul’s)’.179 Mackie soon developed a rapport with Harper, the principal of St Andrews, and Prescott, the longstanding head of the Methodist Newington College. He also met Professor Wilson in anatomy, a friend of James Seth.180

Just before Christmas, Mackie addressed two important groups. First, he spoke to the Kindergarten Union, with Anderson present. He suggested that kindergartens had helped to free state elementary schools in Britain from ‘the mechanical precision, deadly monotony and rigidity which had so long characterised them’ – words very similar to the criticisms Anderson had directed against New South Wales public schools in his famous speech in 1901. According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Mackie claimed ‘kindergarten was not a separate form of instruction, but an attitude of the mind towards infant teaching determined by certain well-defined principles of education’.181 As Mackie told his father, over 500 people were present, ‘mostly women of course’; ‘I was rather glad to get it over,’ he added, ‘for this was an appearance before a body outside the sphere of the education department’s influence and it may be useful to keep in touch with them’.182

A few days later, Mackie spoke to the annual public teachers’ conference. He wrote to his father:

A typed copy of the address Mackie had prepared survives in the University of Sydney Archives. It was entitled ‘The training of the teacher’. The substance of this prepared address is given here. It indicated the range of Mackie’s proposals for change. He drew upon his recent experience at Bangor, where he had trained kindergarten, primary and secondary teachers. Emphasising the importance of a ‘professionally trained body of teachers’ for a functioning education system, he outlined what he saw as the ‘leading principles’ for the future operation of Sydney Teachers’ College. The foundation of teacher training would involve ‘more ample professional training’, with more students undertaking university degrees. He expected that the increasing number of matriculants from state secondary schools would mean that more teacher trainees would be qualified to undertake university degrees. This would mean that, in the case of the university students in particular, it would be necessary to make such arrangements as would secure the right balance between university and the practical work of the college.184

In his written address, Mackie also argued that the course of study for teacher education should be ‘wide and liberal, cultural rather than journalistic’. He suggested that many of those entering the college would be more qualified in the humanities and in elementary science, and that undertaking courses in these subjects at the college would be ‘more profitable than language drill or much mathematics’. In specific courses, including history, Mackie proposed incorporating lectures and ‘laboratory work’ so that students could learn ‘the new methods of teaching the school subjects’. In elementary science and nature study, he advocated ‘direct experience and experimental work’.185

In the final part of his prepared address, Mackie noted the need for theoretical and practical work in the study of education. He suggested that theoretical work should include study of ‘the meaning and aims of education as a factor

59in social welfare’ – this contention reflected the influence of his colleague Darroch at Edinburgh. Mackie believed theories of education should involve ethics, psychology and logic, as well as the new field of child study, which would be developed by observing children in schools. He added that ‘some knowledge of the history of educational progress and of the great theorists is most valuable in order to secure breadth of view and permit a due understanding of many current tendencies in educational doctrine and practice’.186

Mackie ended his address to the public teachers’ conference by emphasising the need for teaching students to discuss the practical problems of pedagogy. He stated that the proposed training he outlined would not produce ‘the experienced teacher’, but rather ‘some facility in class management’. It would furnish a teaching student with the required tools and ‘open his mind to the possibilities of his profession’. In the written version of his address, Mackie concluded:

The continuing use of the male pronoun in Mackie’s address was a reflection of his own education. Otherwise, this address illuminated many of his ideas in the emerging world of the New Education. His vision of a teaching profession with close associations to both training colleges and universities was clearly related to the situation in Scotland in the mid- to late nineteenth century. It also reflected developments in Europe and America, including at institutions such as the Teachers’ College, Columbia. Mackie’s references to new methods of preparing teachers that ensured they became child-centred took up some of the ideas

60of ‘progressives’ such as Darroch and Dewey. Overall, his address concentrated on the significance of such ideas for New South Wales.

Mackie managed to find time in his busy schedule to discover the natural environment of Sydney and its surrounding bushland and beaches. On a Sunday in early December, he visited the Andersons at their ‘country house at Pittwater’, crossing the harbour by ferry to Manly and then travelling for an hour and a half to reach the Anderson residence, which he described to his father as ‘beautifully situated on high ground at the head of a sea loch, an arm of the Hawkesbury’. Continuing to use parallels to well-known sites around Glasgow and Edinburgh, he told his father ‘if you think of the view from the head of the Loch Katrine [near Glasgow] you will know the sort of place’. The memories of his homeland were reinforced by ‘Scotland Island’ in Pittwater and ‘Glasgow Park’ on the shoreline.188

When he and Anderson went for a walk in the bushland in the afternoon, Mackie thought he could have been wandering around ‘Corstorphine Hill’ in Edinburgh, except for the ‘unfamiliar appearance of the trees’. Mackie wrote to his father that when they reached the top of a ridge with a view of the coastline and the ‘coastal belt of the flat wooden land’, Francis Anderson even suggested that the view was ‘very similar to the French Riviera and one promontory might very well have been taken for Monte Carlo’. Their comments provide an interesting reflection of two Scots-born academics seeking not just memories of their homeland but also the prospect of a more cosmopolitan Australia.189

Mackie continued to visit the Anderson house over the following years, apparently feeling at home in the villa ‘at the head of the finest west highland loch you know’. There was even a ‘housekeeper from Aberdeen’, who he described to his father as ‘kind but with a manner like Aberdeen granite and a marked Aberdeen accent’.190

Installing the college principal

In February 1907, the minister for public instruction, B.B. O’Conor, opened the new year at Sydney Teachers’ College. He spoke of a new vision for the college,

61suggesting that the ‘mingling of the teachers with the men and women of the university should have a great influence in the public life of the State’. He recognised the ‘manifest interest’ the university had shown in the teaching profession; ‘he felt more and more every day that the University was coming right down into the lives of the people’, a Sydney Morning Herald report stated. O’Conor noted that the college was available to primary and secondary teachers as well as students from all schools.191

Already the new college principal was being recognised as an effective, if quiet, leader. Though he was small in stature, Mackie’s voice had what A.R. Chisholm described as ‘a compelling quality that sufficed to solve all problems of discipline’. He did not raise it much; as a rule, Mackie spoke and moved softly, attracting attention in verse and song:

A crucial test for Mackie was ending the pupil teacher system. Throughout Australia, the nineteenth-century system of pupil teachers was being replaced by college-based professional training associated with the universities. In 1900, the Victorian government had reopened Melbourne Teachers’ Training College, which had been closed during the 1890s depression. In 1902, John Smyth, who Mackie knew from Edinburgh, had been appointed principal. In 1907, Smyth and a group of students visited Sydney to establish a sporting carnival that would bring the two colleges together. Over the following years, this led to intercollegiate competitions with interstate visits and fostered forms of college and student identity.193 Both Mackie and Smyth remained committed to their respective colleges and students, with the aim of creating a corporate life.

Mackie and Smyth were equally determined to establish new practices in teacher training. Given their experiences at Edinburgh, both had a strong attachment to the study of education and professional practice within a college

62and university partnership. But their strategies and opportunities led to different outcomes. At Melbourne, a university-based Diploma of Education was well established by 1905 and Smyth devoted much attention to teaching students in this program. But he gained little support from within the university. Significantly, because of government policy, Smyth was unable to create a college-based profession. Victoria maintained a system of single-teacher rural schools; this led to the continuation of the pupil teacher system, which the creation of the Melbourne Teachers’ Training College had been intended to end.194

In contrast to Smyth’s experience, Mackie received strong support from those in government administration and in parts of the university for at least the first decade and a half of his time in Sydney. Under Board’s oversight as director of education, Mackie’s appointment as principal of the college provided the opportunity to enact a program ending the pupil teacher system and introducing college training as the future of teacher education.

This reform proceeded in stages. Following a competitive examination, former pupil teachers could undertake a one-year course at Sydney Teachers’ College. Until 1910, these ex-pupil teachers, most of whom already held teaching positions in schools, formed the great majority of the college’s intake. Scholarships were introduced to assist those who were forgoing salary to upgrade their qualifications. There was also financial assistance available for some students who were not already in the public school system to enter the college, as it sought to meet the demands of the expanding student populations in public and other schools. As a further recruitment strategy, a probationary student scheme was introduced in 1906, offering allowances for students as young as fifteen who stayed in school with the intention of entering the college. This scheme remained in place for almost a decade, until the introduction of the new Intermediate Certificate in 1911 and the Leaving Certificate in 1916 consolidated formal secondary school credentials as the foundation for teaching careers.195

Sydney Teachers’ College was founded with the aim of producing teachers for primary schools – these schools were a compulsory component of universal education. Initially, the college offered one-year and two-year courses, providing

63different certification. Both courses included theoretical studies and practical experience in classrooms in local demonstration schools, including Blackfriars. Given his academic attainments in Edinburgh, Mackie was initially disappointed in the general education of entrants to the college. He believed the limitations of their prior education imposed a double burden on college students as they sought to improve their academic work while undertaking classroom practice. It was not until the introduction of the state-created Intermediate and Leaving Certificates in secondary schools that the standard of the college’s recruits began to improve.196

There were early advancements in staffing at Sydney Teachers’ College. By 1911, some of the staff had qualifications equivalent to academics within the university. One of the early appointments was L.H. Allen, a classical scholar who had attained his doctorate in Germany. A poet and a student of Virgil, he taught at the University of Sydney and the college until 1918, when he became professor of classics at the Royal Military College at Duntroon. In 1909, Percival Richard Cole arrived at the college. Cole had completed a doctorate at Columbia University in New York and would teach educational psychology and the history of education. He co-authored a number of books on teaching with Mackie. Henry Tasman Lovell lectured at the college in the theory of education and in German and French.197 He held a doctorate and soon became professor of psychology at the University of Tasmania.

The college also provided opportunities for young scholars and teachers. James Fawthrop Bruce was a former pupil teacher who had spent eight years teaching before undertaking four years of study at the college. He graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in English, philosophy and history. Beginning as an assistant lecturer in education, he became a lecturer in history at the university and an assistant to Professor George Arnold Wood. In 1928, he became a professor of history in Punjab.198

There were few women on staff at the college. Mackie sought to assist the career of Martha Margaret Simpson, who was the mistress of infants at Blackfriars.

64She was appointed to the college staff in 1910, after she had developed kindergarten teaching methods in about twenty schools in Sydney. She had difficulty getting recognition and pay for her duties as a lecturer as distinct from her role as infants mistress. As in other cases, such as the role of warden of students, the few women lecturers at the college found that they were discriminated against by the rules and regulations enforced by the bureaucracy.199

Through such early appointments, Mackie attempted to assert that the college was an essential part of the university. As early as 1908, Mackie told a departmental enquiry into salaries at the college that ‘the only comparison is with the University. The Training College is, in spirit, if not in fact, a Department

65of the University’.200 In later years, Mackie pointed out that Peter Board, as director of education, had encouraged this development, providing for the best possible appointments but leaving staff alone.201 This was a reflection of what had occurred in Scotland and England, resulting in the creation of departments of education within many universities. Both Board and Mackie hoped to emulate those trends.

Australia’s first professor of education

Almost a decade after Federation, governments in the individual Australian states were taking an increasing interest in shaping the modern public university. The Labor government founded the University of Queensland in 1909 as part of a program of state-sponsored economic development. By 1913, the University of Western Australia had become a ‘university for the people’, supported by private philanthropy and state grants.202 Around Australia, there were moves towards establishing chairs in fields related to professional occupations.

The reformation of teacher training and qualifications was part of a wider agenda encouraging professional education in universities. In New South Wales, the Liberal governments under Joseph Carruthers (1904–07) and Charles Wade (1908–10) negotiated with the University of Sydney over proposals for rural developments and over the issue of teacher education. These governments took up ideas from the 1880s, when Carruthers had been minister for public instruction. In 1889, William Wallace, professor of agriculture at the University of Edinburgh, had visited Sydney and urged the university to introduce agricultural education based on scientific principles and to create a chair in this area, mirroring the chair that had been established at Edinburgh a century earlier. Taking up this idea, Carruthers had recommended in 1889 that the university implement a comprehensive plan for agricultural education, building upon the proposed introduction of such studies in schools. This plan involved the creation of a chair

66of agriculture.203 Despite a favourable reception at the university, the 1890s depression put paid to the proposal. By 1907–08, these ideas had been revived in the university and the government, with an associated proposal to introduce courses and a chair in veterinary science. The university negotiated with the government for funding. By 1909, Robert Watt, a graduate of the University of Glasgow who had worked in South Africa, was appointed as the foundation professor of agriculture and James Stewart, who had studied at the Royal Veterinary College in Edinburgh and had experience as chief inspector of stock in New South Wales, was appointed professor of veterinary science.204 Once again, this strengthened the influence of Scottish ideas and practices within the University of Sydney.

This pattern of negotiations between the government and the university was repeated in the area of education. The government introduced proposals that, in part, dated back to Carruthers’ tenure as minister for public instruction in the 1880s. In March 1907, Peter Board approached the University of Sydney Senate with a request that the university provide a site on its grounds for a non-residential training college for 400 students. Board and Mackie then met with the chancellor and vice-chancellor, and Professors Anderson and T.W. Edgeworth David, both of whom were known supporters of Mackie. At this conference, Board indicated that his department intended for the majority of college students to be matriculants to the University of Sydney; he believed that those who did not matriculate would profit from attending at least two university courses. Within several years, he expected that ‘practically all the students would be of University rank, the larger number of them being matriculants’.205 The Senate agreed to grant a site of about three and a half acres between the Women’s College and University Oval, on two conditions: that the proposal was endorsed by legislation in the New South Wales parliament and that within five years all college students would be required to attend at least two courses of lectures during each year of their training. Plans for the college building had to be submitted to the university Senate for approval.206 Almost all of the proposals for the college were

67conceived in terms of the partnership between university and teachers’ college that Mackie had known at Edinburgh. However, the actual location of the college within the university remained uncertain for another half-decade.

Related to this agreement between the university and Board’s department were the issues of a proposed chair in education and of the teaching of education as a subject within the university curriculum. In October 1908, the minister for public instruction asked the university to recognise a college course on the theory of education, which Mackie suggested could count towards a BA at the university. The Professorial Board advised against this on the grounds that the course was only offered to college students; no provision was made to teach the course within the university so that it could be listed as a degree course; and the course would be given by a lecturer whose appointment was not controlled by the university Senate. But, on a positive note, the board proposed a solution: the subject of education could be taught by the university as part of the BA degree and offered to both arts and college students.207

Over the next eighteen months, Mackie was gradually integrated into the university. In the wake of the Professorial Board’s report, Peter Board proposed that a chair of education be established by promoting Mackie to professor and assigning him to teach university courses in education. But matters of academic autonomy intervened. At a university Senate meeting, Professor Mungo MacCallum argued that the university should not give the title of professor to someone over whom it could not exercise full control. Instead, he argued that Mackie should become a lecturer at the university – a proposal Board accepted. The Senate also agreed on the grounds that a chair appointment would have to await the allocation of government funds. In 1910, Mackie was appointed as a lecturer in education. But, in effect, his friend Professor Francis Anderson had bypassed this decision by seeking leave during 1909 and having Mackie appointed acting professor of philosophy, with responsibility for teaching courses in the field of education.208

In March 1910, Peter Board again recommended to the university Senate that Mackie be made a professor. The Public Service Board had proposed that Mackie’s position as principal should be made permanent, with a salary of £800.

68Board suggested that the University of Sydney contribute an additional £100 and make provision for a pension that accorded with those granted to other professors. The Senate concurred and agreed to make the appointment, dating from 1 March 1910.209

Mackie had already written to his father in anticipation of this decision. Describing the financial terms of the appointment, he pointed out that the university’s contributions would provide a pension of £400 per year, so that ‘After 20 years I can retire and claim the pension if I wish; at 60 years of age the University can if it desires retire me without any reason being given’.210 It was a prophecy that would come back to haunt him.

Mackie’s appointment as a professor at the University of Sydney was a major step for him personally and for the recognition of education as an academic discipline. He was the first to hold the title of professor of education in an Australian university. In April 1910, when his appointment to the chair was confirmed, Mackie wrote to his father about the progress he had achieved in his career, but also about his uncertain future and growing disillusionment with the central state system of education in New South Wales:

69Mackie’s appointment as professor of education allowed him to manage a close affiliation between the university and the teachers’ college. Three developments between 1910 and 1912 helped to clarify this relationship: the creation of a Diploma of Education for university graduates; the proposed construction of the college within university grounds; and the provision for college students who had matriculated to undertake a degree at the university without paying fees. These developments were closely related.

The Diploma of Education was instituted in 1911 as a one-year postgraduate qualification that was open to graduates in arts and science. Its curriculum emphasised principles in the theory and practice of education, including the history of education, class management and school practice. The diploma was a formal credential; it was taught by Mackie and the senior academics at Sydney Teachers’ College.212

In July 1910, Board and Mackie met with the chancellor, Sir Henry Normand MacLaurin, to again take up the question of the actual site for the proposed college. Born in Scotland, a graduate in medicine from Edinburgh University and the son of a schoolmaster, MacLaurin was also a member of the Legislative Council, CSR (the Colonial Sugar Refining company) and Sydney Grammar. Mackie told his father that with these contacts the chancellor had been able to persuade the state government to provide funds to complete the Fisher Library (which now stood on the eastern side of the University of Sydney Quadrangle). To Mackie, ‘the best plan’ was to build the college within the university grounds; but he wrote to William that ‘Board had always been suspicious of it as he thinks it will mean loss of control by the Department’. After ‘animated discussion’ between Board and the chancellor, the meeting failed to resolve the issue.213

By May 1911, the university Senate was discussing a bill for the construction of the college and for the attendance of college students at university lectures without fees – both matriculated students and those whose attendance at lectures was approved by the minister for public instruction.214 The confirmed site for the college was not in the Quadrangle, as the vice-chancellor had proposed

70and Mackie had preferred, but near University Oval, as envisaged in the original discussions between the university and Peter Board in 1908. The building and land was vested in the minister for public instruction, indicating that Sydney Teachers’ College was a government college, rather than a college of the university. Construction began in 1914. The building was completed by 1920 but not officially opened until 1925.215

The teachers’ college building was part of a new relationship between the government and the university. With the passage of the University (Amendment) Act 1912 (NSW), the location of the college was confirmed in the context of reforms that embraced the University of Sydney as part of the New South Wales public education system. Students at the teachers’ college were a major part of this process. The 1912 Act confirmed the University of Sydney as the public university it had been since 1850 and made it the pinnacle of a public education system involving schools and students. This legislation was introduced by the Labor government that had been elected in 1910, but it arose principally from ideas and proposals that Peter Board brought back from his trip to America in 1909. The Act provided more public endowment to the university and established the state-devised Leaving Certificate examination as the primary basis for matriculation to university. Furthermore, the reforms included 100 free places, known as ‘exhibitions’, to be offered to new university students each year, increasing to 200 by 1915.216

Of specific significance for the future of teacher training, students at Sydney Teachers’ College were offered free tuition if they matriculated to the university. The proposal had its origins in Carruthers’ 1889 scheme. It had been revived in 1902, following the end of the 1890s depression, but its effect was limited to a few students who qualified. Free university tuition for all matriculating college students was then confirmed as part of the arrangements for the construction of Sydney Teachers’ College. Free university education was also included in the state scholarship scheme for intending teachers. When the college opened in 1906, state scholarships had only provided fee relief and a small stipend. By 1912, the scholarship scheme was consolidated into a form of bonded service.

71Student teachers now had the prospect of a university degree, professional training at the college and a career in school teaching.217 With most students at the teachers’ college completing secondary school and matriculating to university, the way was open for a much closer relationship between the university and the college, as Anderson and Mackie had long intended.

This relationship became much clearer after 1912, with the expansion of secondary schools in New South Wales. By 1917, at least one-third of all entrants to the college had attained the Leaving Certificate and half of the students in the college’s two-year ordinary course had matriculated to the university. Mackie now claimed that within the college ‘the change from a mainly academic course to a mainly professional course is complete’.218 The university provided a foundation

72in academic subjects, while the college moulded students as professionals, instructing them in methods of teaching as well as the psychology, philosophy and history of education.

Region and gender became significant issues in the composition of the emerging teaching profession. Country high schools, in particular, became a source of future teachers, while female trainees made up more than half of the entrants to the college. Such trends had been apparent almost from the opening of the college, but they became more pronounced during World War One, beginning in 1914.219 The establishment of Teachers’ College Scholarships opened up new professional opportunities for women. In the two decades after 1920, approximately two-thirds of college entrants were female. Most entrants came from the metropolitan and country high schools that Peter Board had created, but about twelve per cent were from Catholic schools.220

Academic teaching subjects were effectively transplanted into the university, where teacher trainees who had matriculated could pursue a degree. In 1917, 146 females and fifty-five males from the college were studying at the University of Sydney. Of these, forty-four women and twenty-eight men were on the ‘honours list’, having gained a credit, distinction or honours in a specific subject. The number of college students within the university had grown so great that regulations had been prescribed. College students who had matriculated could pursue a degree in arts, science, economics or agriculture. Those who passed their first year with credit or distinction could continue their course at the university. Others would be required to discontinue their university studies and devote a year to professional work at the college – these pupils were soon known as ‘returned university’ students. A similar provision applied at the end of the second year, allowing students who achieved distinction to continue at university and requiring others to return to college. Those who completed a third year at the university would be required to undertake professional training for the Diploma of Education.

These regulations formalised the relationship between professional studies at the college and academic studies at the university. The provisions for continuing a university degree helped to create a future academic elite within the teaching

73profession. This was not so different from the approach that governed teacher training when Mackie was in Edinburgh; ideas of merit and an honours program prevailed. But the relationship between the university and the college was far from settled, as would become clear in future years.

A shining light in the Empire

The creation of Sydney Teachers’ College elicited interest well beyond New South Wales. When Alexander Mackie visited Britain during extended study leave in 1921, he delivered a paper on ‘The universities and the training of school teachers’. His focus was on the University of Sydney, but he also referred to Australian universities in general. Pointing out that public education was the responsibility of each Australian state, he noted in this paper that ‘Professional training for teaching in primary and in secondary schools is provided by the Universities and by the Education departments’, which control ‘Colleges for Teachers’. The universities exercised no ‘direct control’ over the colleges. However, in every state except Western Australia the teachers’ college was on or adjacent to university grounds; staff in the colleges often held positions in the universities.221

By the 1920s, Sydney Teachers’ College was by far the most significant teacher training institution in Australia. The college had over 1,200 students – more than were enrolled in the rest of the colleges in Australia combined. Melbourne Teachers’ College had less than 400 students.222 According to Mackie, particular circumstances had shaped teacher training in Sydney, providing a new engagement between the university and the college. Mackie was professor of education and head of the college; the college’s vice-principal was a lecturer in education at the university. Lecturers from the college were in charge of the university’s evening course in education and its postgraduate course in experimental education. Like other Australian universities, Sydney offered courses in the theory and history of education and a university diploma for graduates, which the Department of Education recognised as a qualification for public school teachers. Mackie believed

74that control of Sydney Teachers’ College should be transferred to the university Senate; in ‘The universities and the training of school teachers’, he noted ‘I am of opinion that the change would be beneficial to the University, to the College, and to the teaching profession in general’.223 In 1920, 389 of the students preparing to teach in New South Wales were undertaking university courses. So ‘the University exercise[d] a strong influence in forming the character of the abler among the future teachers’.224

The benefits of its close association with the university were reflected in the staffing of Sydney Teachers’ College. A number of lecturers appointed during the 1920s had graduated with honours from the University of Sydney. Of particular note were students of George Arnold Wood, the professor of history, including H.L. Harris, who later became director of youth welfare in New South Wales, and Harold Wyndham, the future director-general of education. Wyndham taught education at the college between 1925 and 1927, while researching his Master’s thesis on the Italian Renaissance. He left to undertake doctoral studies at Stanford. As Brian Fletcher has argued, in many ways, in the interwar years Sydney Teachers’ College had more active research scholars than most departments in the university’s Faculty of Arts.225

W.F. Connell has suggested that four main fields of education research emerged in Australia before World War One: child study, history of education, school achievement and mental testing. Dewey and Darroch were international supporters of child study. In New South Wales, the Department of Public Instruction had a strong interest in studying children, particularly in terms of physical development. In 1913, Thomas T. Roberts, a lecturer at Sydney Teachers’ College, initiated surveys and questionnaires to examine children’s development. The college’s vice-principal, Percy Cole, was an international scholar on the ancient and contemporary history of education. By the early 1920s, a number of scholars from the college, including Cameron, Phillips and Roberts, had initiated studies of school and pupil achievement. But the most significant developments arose in the field of mental testing, adapting the work of Binet in France. Research in this

75field at Sydney Teachers’ College began with Cameron in 1908; Sydney researchers followed examples from Melbourne Teachers’ College to carry out testing in the field and the laboratory.226

Formal praise for Mackie’s achievements at Sydney Teachers’ College was a little late in coming. In December 1926, a commissioned portrait of Mackie by the well-known wartime artist George Lambert was unveiled at a formal ceremony. A number of public figures associated with the development of the college were in attendance, including W.A. Holman, the former premier (1912–15) whose government agreed to move the college onto the university grounds, Mungo MacCallum, the vice-chancellor, and Peter Board, who had retired as director of education. Percy Cole pointed out Mackie’s achievements, including the college’s art collection, the ‘country camp’ for students and the advancement of the ‘cause of experimental education’ and the Montessori method in pre-schools. Holman said that teaching in New South Wales had been transformed from a ‘trade’ into a ‘profession’. MacCallum and Board spoke of how Mackie had framed the ‘characters’ of student teachers.227 In reply, Mackie reflected on how he had come to Australia, thanking Sir John Adams and Sir John Struthers for the ‘opportunity’ they had given him and recognising Francis Anderson’s and Peter Board’s support. He concluded:

Keeping the college alive and active

Despite Mackie’s hopes for the future of teacher education, economic and political priorities soon turned in other directions in the postwar world. Australia was still

76tied to the Empire, but through the mantra of ‘men, money and markets’ rather than the ideas and idealism of the prewar period, when educational change had seemed achievable. The Commonwealth and state governments saw the settlement of Australian ex-soldiers and British migrants on the land as providing a basis for economic productivity, borrowing from Britain to fund settlement schemes.229 Expenditure on social services grew, but much of this went to income support measures, such as widows’ pensions and child endowments, that were introduced in New South Wales by the Lang Labor government in the 1920s. State funding for education mainly concentrated on supporting the expanding school population, rather than the university and the teachers’ college.230 Allowing college students to proceed to a four-year degree, rather than qualifying with just two years of training, was increasingly seen as a costly luxury that was delaying the entry of new teachers into the profession.

In this climate of ‘economic restraint’, the University of Sydney and Sydney Teachers’ College were not drawn closer together. If anything, they drew further apart, in spite of Mackie’s efforts. By 1922, Mackie had lost his supporters Francis Anderson and Peter Board, who had both formally retired. Mackie failed to find many academics at the University of Sydney who would support him the way Francis Anderson had. Scots-born John Anderson, who succeeded Francis Anderson as Challis professor of philosophy, became Mackie’s friend. But as a Marxist-influenced materialist, he was opposed to the growth of pragmatism and the emergence of the ‘Deweyites’ in the discipline of education in Scotland.231 As one example of the continuing distance between the university and the college, the Professorial Board refused to recognise college courses in education, while accepting that Mackie and other college staff taught university courses at undergraduate level and as part of the Diploma of Education. This situation was not unique to Sydney. Overall, the distance between Australia’s universities and the newly established teachers’ colleges increased during the interwar years. Financial pressures and a decline in state grants hindered new developments.232

77Peter Board’s retirement was particularly significant for Mackie. The new director of education, S.H. Smith, was a former pupil teacher who did not share Board’s support for university graduates in the teaching profession. Smith insisted on the need for more teachers, rather than graduate teachers, and so refused to support the practice of teacher trainees attending the university. In 1924, he even changed arrangements for teaching students studying at the university. Only those undertaking an honours degree could proceed to graduate; others were required to ‘return’ to the college to qualify with a certificate. Smith also sought to exercise control over Sydney Teachers’ College as part of the New South Wales public education system. Smith and Mackie clashed on issues of authority and independence. As principal, Mackie sought to both protect and promote his staff, who were often frustrated by the rulings of the Public Service Board – their employing agency. In the 1920s, and even into the 1930s, Mackie constantly proposed that the only answer to these dilemmas was for the college to become more independent of the government, perhaps as a college of the university. It was an argument that he was unable to win.233

The growing influence of the bureaucracy and the increasing distance between colleges and universities was not exclusive to Australia. It was occurring in Scotland and throughout Britain. In 1905–06, Alexander Darroch, Mackie’s friend at Edinburgh, responded favourably to the idea that the four universities should associate with training colleges in ‘provincial’ schemes, leading to the possible integration of colleges into the universities, which were expected to play a leading role in teacher education. But the head of the Scottish Department of Education, Struthers – who had been on Mackie’s selection committee – made it clear that the bureaucracy must retain control over the training of elementary teachers, leaving the universities in a subsidiary role. The Scottish universities turned to promoting research, leaving undergraduate pre-service training to the colleges.234 At the Second Congress of the Empire in 1921, there was an emerging view that the university sector in Britain and the Empire could not absorb large numbers of trainee teachers who might prefer a life in a teachers’ college over being on the margins of a university. In 1925, a departmental report of the Board

78of Education for England and Wales reinforced the view that training colleges and university departments of education should operate in separate spheres, with limited scope for co-operation.235

At Sydney, Mackie continued to straddle the roles of college principal and university professor, even while he suffered financially. Under the terms of his appointment as professor of education, Mackie received an annual salary of £800 from the Department of Education, entitling him to state superannuation benefits. The university initially ‘topped up’ his salary with contributions towards a future pension. In early 1927, someone – no doubt S.H. Smith – informed the State Superannuation Board that, as a part ‘employee’ of the university, Mackie was not entitled to state superannuation benefits, and he was removed from the scheme. Legal opinion later indicated that Mackie had been denied justice in this matter, but by then he had accepted the decision. In November 1927, the director of education added further spite by suspending Mackie from his position as principal for a week. Smith informed Sir Mungo MacCallum, the vice-chancellor of the university, that Mackie had been appointed as both principal and professor, and the appointment required the concurrence of the university Senate and the Department of Public Instruction.236 The result was that the department and the university would continue to pay Mackie’s salary, but he would receive no state superannuation in the future – only pension payments from the university. And as principal, Mackie was expected to give due respect to the authority of the director of education. It was another strange twist in Mackie’s academic life.

Despite this financial setback, Mackie continued to impress upon the Department of Education and the Public Service Board that the college was a tertiary institution responsible for the professional training of teachers, comparable to the professional schools of medicine, law, engineering, dentistry and pharmacy at the university. In a series of memoranda written between the late 1920s and mid-1930s, Mackie argued that staff at the college required special qualifications and working conditions. Underlining the views he expressed when he arrived in 1906, he stressed that college staff should be of high standing both scholastically and professionally. He sought to employ ‘the ablest and best qualified’ of the

79younger teachers. The college had been modelled on the teachers’ colleges developed from the late nineteenth century in England, Scotland and America, all of which had connections with universities. College staff therefore required qualifications beyond those necessary to teach in schools. Mackie argued that college lecturers should be given permanent positions on staff and should be considered for future appointments as inspectors of schools.237

A critical issue was the opportunity for leave – an integral part of academic life. Throughout the Empire, study leave had become crucial for university academics to undertake research and develop networks in their discipline. From 1895, the University of Sydney formalised leave arrangements, allowing professors ‘periodic leave’ for the two terms preceding or succeeding the long summer vacation.238 Terms of employment for teachers in public schools and lecturers at the college were increasingly regulated by the Public Service Board, which oversaw the ‘humble and obedient servants’ of the state.239 Mackie argued that academic staff in the college should have access to leave on full salary. There was continuing disagreement between Mackie and the Department of Public Instruction over this issue once Smith became director of education. By the 1920s, staff were no longer permitted to take study leave, despite the fact that it had been partially funded by a reduction in the salaries of those on leave.240

Mackie took up the cause again in 1936, arguing that it was vital for staff to take leave so they could become acquainted with developments overseas, particularly because the college was ‘so isolated by distance’. This call for travel was associated with Mackie’s insistence on ‘personal freedom’ for college staff in terms of their movements. In particular, Mackie objected to the Public Service Board’s requirement that staff sign an attendance book. He had never insisted on the number of hours staff spent at the college, especially in view of the fact that there were no individual staff rooms. Overall, of their thirty hours of official duties each week, no more than one-third was to be devoted to class teaching; the remainder was dedicated to preparation for teaching, individual tutorials and

80supervision in schools. As Cohen has suggested, ‘The business of a College lecturer is to guide the studies and the practice of young people preparing to teach’. Significantly, Mackie always encouraged college lecturers ‘to make contributions to the study of their subject … the stimulus to original thought is most valuable and greatly increases the lecturer’s efficiency as a stimulating teacher’.241

While supporting his staff, Mackie became increasingly concerned about the erosion of the professional standards of students at the college. With the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the numbers of college students who were able to attend university declined as a result of financial cuts imposed by the Department of Education. In his address to students leaving the college in 1934, Mackie strongly criticised this policy. He pointed out that the college had been placed within university grounds so that college students could enjoy the life of undergraduates, but in 1934 only two students were enrolled in the Faculty of Arts. Such a policy, he claimed, was ‘bad for students, for the Education Service, and for the State’. It was also detrimental to teaching as a profession.242

In this address, Mackie reflected on attributes that he saw as essential to all professions and professionals. First, according to Cohen, Mackie noted that professional practice meant acquiring a technique through ‘specialised intellectual training, of a period of systematic or scientific study’. Second, Mackie suggested that members of a profession developed a ‘sense of responsibility for their technique which finds expression in a concern for the competence and honour of the whole body of practitioners’. Third, he contended that professionals needed to develop ‘a sense of responsibility’ to those receiving professional services. This responsibility was especially important in teaching, where Mackie argued that it was possible to ‘waste so much time for so little result, to impair and damage the minds of pupils without being found out’. Mackie believed that those in charge of the administration of education should encourage this sense of responsibility.243 His vision for the professionalisation of teaching was firmly grounded in the principle of freedom for individual teachers working with students. He concluded his 1934 address with the contention that freedom was the basis of responsibility:

81

Mackie had established the college as an institution focused on academic life, rather than the training needs of the state bureaucracy. In spite of the views of Smith and his staff, and of personal and other difficulties in the interwar years, Mackie continued on this path. However, the focus in teacher education shifted from the Empire to North America. Sydney Teachers’ College had emerged out of Scottish ideas on the preparation and training of teachers, and the specific educational context of post-Federation New South Wales. As such, its origins were partly transnational, set within the networks of Empire. But increasingly, attention in the new world of education research was oriented towards the United States. By the 1920s, the most significant model for teacher education was the research-based Teachers’ College, Columbia in New York.

Towards progressivism in teacher education

Trained as a philosopher, Mackie had emerged from his studies in Scotland committed to philosophic idealism. Before World War One, he had even contemplated a new university in New South Wales, funded through annual state grants – an outcome that was achieved, in part, by the 1912 legislative reforms.245 The war undermined the neo-idealism that was once prominent in British universities. Forms of neo-Hegelian thought were tainted by their association with the authoritarian ‘Junker’ German state so dramatically portrayed in the British press during the war.246

82In other ways, German influences in the field of education had begun to fade by the 1920s. Despite prewar recognition of ‘scientific investigation’ in Germany, ‘professional instruction’ was a major weakness of German higher education. While German philosophy and associated models of social science remained influential until World War One, translating these ideas into a professional form to educate teachers was problematic. German universities had developed a reputation for educational research, but there was little commitment to becoming directly associated with educating and training professionals. To enter university, German students had to complete a classical education in a ‘gymnasium’. The universities refused to provide training for engineers and kept scientific and technical study confined to separate institutes. In the 1880s, there was discussion concerning training for secondary teachers. The reformer Friedrich Paulsen delivered lectures on pedagogy at the University of Berlin. But there was still division between those who wanted teacher training confined to small seminars attached to gymnasiums and others, such as Wilhelm Rein of the University of Jena, who wanted professional training integrated with trainee teachers’ scholarly pursuits at university.247 Even this pragmatic model of teacher training soon gave way to more integrated models of teacher education that began to emerge, particularly in North America.

For much of the nineteenth century, teacher training in North America occurred mainly through normal schools, which provided basic instruction on how to teach. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, American universities became more focused on the middle-class culture of professionalism, with its ideals of autonomy and authority in specialist fields or occupations, underpinned by higher education, usually in graduate schools. Professional programs in graduate schools promoted pupils of talent and merit. University graduate school programs expanded to include areas such as theology, law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and veterinary studies.248

By the 1890s, academics in the United States were beginning to embrace teacher training as part of higher education. Colleges began replacing the normal schools, many of which had low statuses and reputations. Here, as in other areas of higher education, many Americans initially looked to Germany but

83sought even better ways to prepare teachers and advance educational research. Significantly, an opportunity arose in New York, not through state action but through the support of American philanthropy. Grace Dodge, the daughter of a wealthy New York merchant, was interested in educating the poor in household management. This movement broadened, leading to the foundation of the Industrial Education Association, which promoted all forms of industrial education. A small college emerged with a focus on educating teachers; by 1898, it had become the Teachers’ College, Columbia, formally affiliated with the University of Columbia, which became the centre for higher education in New York.249

James Earl Russell became the dean of this university-affiliated college, transforming it into a world-leading seat of learning and research. Russell had worked with the Herbartian Wilhelm Rein at Jena before completing a PhD at Leipzig. The college provided new programs for the teaching profession, going well beyond the form of teacher education offered in the North American normal schools. As dean of the college, Russell defined four qualities required of qualified teachers: general knowledge, professional knowledge, special knowledge and technical skills.250 The teachers’ college drew upon the strengths of Columbia, which soon became the largest graduate university in the United States concentrating on the professions. With support from Rockefeller philanthropy, the teachers’ college expanded to occupy an entire city block. By 1912, its enrolment was the fourth highest of any graduate school in America. It provided a clear example of the transformation of teaching into a profession linked to the academic life of a college and a university.251

The establishment of the Teachers’ College, Columbia marked the beginnings of a progressive education movement that focused on studies of the child and the appropriate curriculum for schools. This movement’s methodology was distinct from philosophic idealism, couched in a view of education as an experimental science, rather than in philosophic ideals. Edward Thorndike – who was almost the same age as Mackie – joined the faculty at Columbia in the 1890s. According to Geraldine Clifford, Thorndike saw himself as a ‘scientist’ and believed

84‘science’ was the only ‘sure foundation for social progress’. He soon supplemented experiments with tests; his national reputation grew when he designed intelligence tests that were administered to army recruits during World War One.252

In 1904, Columbia secured the services of John Dewey. Dewey became professor of philosophy at the University of Columbia and taught the philosophy of education at the teachers’ college. Born in Vermont in 1859, Dewey reacted against his early education, which was founded on the traditional Scottish ‘common sense’ philosophy and did not provide any unified understanding. After training as a school teacher, Dewey studied at university to become a teacher of philosophy. Like many late nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, Dewey was attracted to neo-idealism under the influence of Hegel. But he soon moved beyond those views and helped to develop education as a discipline founded on experiment and experience. Arthur Wurth has suggested that the ‘demand for a unifying philosophy’ led Dewey to Hegel ‘and then gradually to the elaboration of experimentalism’, including establishing a laboratory school designed to examine the dynamics between teachers, students and subject content.253

By the early twentieth century, many of Mackie’s colleagues in Scotland were being attracted to the new ideas and ventures in America. Alexander Darroch at Edinburgh and William Boyd at Glasgow had already developed transatlantic contacts and networks.254 In contrast to the philanthropic impulse that catalysed the foundation of the Teachers’ College, Columbia, ‘progressivism’ in Scotland often developed in response to the perceived needs of the state education administration, becoming focused not so much on democratic ends as on issues of control and efficiency.255 On the eve of World War One, Darroch published Education and the new utilitarianism, promoting a perception of knowledge as socially useful. Opposing the idea of an ‘unchangeable and eternal reality’, Darroch presented the view that the ‘universe is dynamic and progressive’ and so ‘evolution may be creative’.256 Knowledge was sought not for its own end but to promote social action.

85Schools were designed to advance the welfare of society – not only ‘to secure the social efficiency of the individual’ in carrying out some particular duty or service but also ‘to educate him so that he aid[s] in the advancement of society’.257

Some elements of prewar thought endured. Faith in the science of education remained prominent, particularly in the views of Thorndike and others in America who promoted tests and testing as a means of classifying students.258 But the progressive education movement that emerged after the war also emphasised the freedom of teachers to guide change. Percy Nunn, who succeeded Sir John Adams as principal of the Institute of Education in London, abandoned the prewar attachment to idealism grounded in state action, instead asserting the primacy of the individual and individualism. Nunn’s colleague Cyril Burt promoted views of individual differences based on intelligence. In America, John Dewey had moved beyond idealism to emphasise individual growth achieved within democratic communities. His Democracy and education, published in 1916, became a statement for many seeking social change through education.259 By 1919, a Progressive Education Association had formed in the United States, stimulated, in part, by Dewey’s ideas.

Increasingly, the progressive education movement focused on the need for a child-centred curriculum. Progressive reforms came to involve the introduction of new subjects into the curricula of the comprehensive secondary schools that were emerging across America. Grounded in the meritocratic values of late nineteenth-century Scottish education, Mackie never accepted the idea of secondary schools succumbing to a curriculum that might displace academic subjects. His support for the role of the university in the preparation of teachers was obviously intended to promote academic studies as part of a liberal education of the kind he had known at Edinburgh. But he was also aware of how progressive education could contribute to teacher training.

During the interwar period, the intellectual status of education changed markedly. There was a new international emphasis on research, pointing the way forward for education as an independent, enquiry-based academic discipline,

86rather than an offshoot of philosophy, psychology, sociology and history. Initially, much of this shift in emphasis was transatlantic, involving America and Britain – particularly Scotland. Before the war, Darroch had proposed a new model for schools in Scotland based on German and American examples of ‘laboratories’ for experiments in education.260 Following Darroch’s early death, William Boyd at the University of Glasgow proposed the establishment of an educational institute that would strengthen teaching as a graduate profession and promote the development of educational expertise through research training and enquiry. Over the next three decades, Scotland became a leader in areas such as educational psychology and testing.261

Progressively, the focus in fields such as educational psychology and the measurement of the intelligence quotient moved to America. By the 1920s, the Teachers’ College, Columbia had a number of prominent academics who had achieved public recognition and international standing. The most significant and influential was Edward Thorndike. Thorndike focused on the field of applied psychology, which was first developed in Scotland in the nineteenth century. In this field, educational theory was believed to provide an understanding of the best methods for social selection and training. Thorndike taught generations of teachers and superintendents at Columbia.262

The public intellectual

Mackie and Australia were on the edge of this new world of education research. As principal of Sydney Teachers’ College, Mackie appealed to a local rather than international audience. In 1920, he contributed to the book Australia: economic and political studies, edited by Meredith Atkinson, formerly at the University of Sydney, then a tutor in adult education in Melbourne. Atkinson claimed that this book was the ‘first comprehensive and authoritative work on the sociological economic conditions of Australia yet to be published’.263 Against the background

87of World War One, Atkinson and most other contributors argued for Australia’s ‘independence’, opposing the ‘imperial loyalists’ who still supported the union of the Empire and even an imperial parliament based in Britain.264

Mackie’s chapter was his first attempt to publish an outline of his views on ‘Education in Australia’. He was highly critical of the role of government in education in all the Australian states. Like American visitors in the 1930s and beyond, Mackie decried the persistent uniformity in state administration and the lack of financial support for non-state schools, noting that ‘The marked similarity in administrative structure is certainly very striking, especially since it departs so widely from that in existence in Great Britain, with its combination of local and central control and support’.265 Mackie also drew comparisons with America, where expenditure per pupil was twice that in New South Wales. While there had been advances in teacher training in Australia over the previous decade, he argued that support for rural teachers was insufficient. There was increasing attention to child welfare, but school buildings and equipment were inadequate. Australia’s new high schools were an advancement, but they could only be compared to American junior high schools, or higher grade or elementary schools in England and Scotland. At that time, they only offered four years of high school education; Mackie wished to see this increased to six years. There was little benefaction for higher education in New South Wales, which meant that the ‘highest institution in the State for teaching and research’ was ‘increasingly dependent on State support for continued development’.266 Equally disturbing was the ‘distinct loss in public interest’ in these educational concerns. Mackie argued that this was a result of communities being ‘given no share in local administration’. Overall, Mackie suggested that ‘public opinion’ in Australia was ‘neither energetic nor well informed’, while in England during the war there was strong support for change.267

Mackie was committed to the view that writers on education should be critics of policy. In 1929, he wrote a foreword to R.W. Gordon Mackay’s Some aspects

88of primary and secondary education.268 Mackay was a solicitor and a lecturer in the tutorial department at the University of Sydney; he had been a lecturer in philosophy at St. Paul’s College at the university. Calling for reform of New South Wales schools, Mackay argued that the system of education in the state was ‘atrociously bad’, the curriculum ‘terribly antiquated’ and teaching methods ‘almost useless’.269 In his foreword, Mackie praised Mackay, describing him as an outsider to the education system who was able to ‘make an independent examination of the evidence and express their opinions freely’. Only with an ‘enlightened body of opinion’ could there be an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the school system.270

Mackie’s experience with the bureaucracy influenced his views on the state’s role in education after World War One. Increasingly, he saw teachers, rather than the state, as agents of change. Mackie’s shift away from centralised state-based reform towards the possibility of teacher initiatives at the local level was seen in a number of ways. Before the war, he had proposed a more flexible curriculum at Sydney Grammar School and encouraged the principal of Grenfell High School to experiment. After the war, students from Sydney Teachers’ College used Glenbrook School, on the outskirts of Sydney, for their practice sessions. But, as in other areas, state bureaucracy frustrated these experiments.271

By the 1920s, state-controlled and government-financed school systems were coming under scrutiny from the new world of education found in teachers’ colleges and associated universities in Britain, America and Australia. There was also a shift in Mackie’s perspective. Rather than concentrating on institutional change alone, he focused more on ideas, comparing the Australian system to the emerging world of education elsewhere. As an academic, principal and professor, Mackie was becoming a critical intellectual, keen to raise issues in the public domain beyond the university and the college.

Stefan Collini has argued that the idea of the ‘intellectual’ emerged in the late nineteenth century. It was sometimes fused with the concept of the academic. But

89while the function of the academic was still tied to higher education institutions, the intellectual was defined by wider public roles. According to Collini, ‘a public role is a constitutive part of the meaning of the term “intellectual” in the cultural sense; being politically active is one form which that public role may frequently, but not necessarily, take’.272

In interwar Australia, a number of intellectuals began to publicise their views on ‘progressive’ ways forward. Like Mackie, they were part of the prewar generation that drew ideas from the contexts of the Empire and Europe. They promoted science, including genetics, and rational social and economic planning. Often coming from backgrounds of influence and privilege, they saw themselves as leaders.273 Mackie did not necessarily fit this profile, but he sympathised with such views. He had thought, when he was appointed as principal and professor, that he would be a leader in education and in the teaching profession. With Peter Board as director of education, Mackie had become an agent of change. After Board, he seemed to be a public servant subject to the bureaucracy.

Mackie’s ‘public’ initially comprised the college students and staff, but extended to include teachers and the wider Australian community. His domains for public dissemination included publications, associations and public enquiries. Mackie’s ideas were not always original; they drew on international debates in education. His intention was to demonstrate the need for change in Australian schools and colleges by highlighting developments elsewhere, particularly in Britain and America.

In 1917, he founded the journal Schooling. Published by Teachers’ College Press, Sydney (establishing a parallel with Teachers’ College Press, Columbia), the journal accepted subscriptions from the general community. Edited by Mackie and the college’s vice-principal, Percy Cole, the new publication had an associated committee made up of the principals of the other Australian teachers’ colleges – John Smyth from Melbourne, A.J. Schulz from Adelaide and Rooney from Perth. The first editorial set the tone:

90

The new publication was designed to encourage ‘free discussion’ to avoid stagnation. Initially, the journal’s developers proposed to release five issues per year, but publication became less frequent. They hoped to have contributions from teachers and other writers from all Australian states and to include developments in ‘schools not under State departments’, for the ‘experience of schools working under freer conditions is of particular value in Australia where the schools are so very centralised’.275 But over the next fifteen years, until Schooling ceased publication in 1931, most of the contributions came from staff at Sydney Teachers’ College, who provided examples of their own work or outlined new developments occurring in Britain and North America.

The articles in the journal formed the basis for more extensive books written or edited by Mackie and Percy Cole. The first of these was The groundwork of teaching, published in 1919. A second edition of this work was released in 1924. Edited by Mackie, the book contained contributions from leading staff at the college and past college staff who had moved elsewhere, including chapters by Percy Cole on the ‘school system’ and the ‘conduct of the lesson’; T.T. Roberts on the ‘nature of the lesson’ and ‘teaching procedure’; H.J. Meldrum on mathematics; R.G. Cameron (soon to become principal of Claremont Teachers’ College in Western Australia) on testing and the idea of the ‘school community; and L.H. Allen (then at the Royal Military College at Duntroon) on the ‘vocation of the teacher’.276

91Mackie wrote the opening chapter of The groundwork of teaching, entitled ‘The aims of schooling’. At the outset, he made it clear that his perception of the purpose of schooling was founded on democratic and social principles: ‘It is here proposed to examine those fundamental purposes which appear to control the work of public education in democratic communities’.277 He rejected the idea being propounded by some educational ‘progressives’ that it was harmful to attempt to shape the character and views of the young. Instead, he ‘proposed to keep to the more common view that schooling should exercise a positive influence upon the pupils, moulding them in mind and body’.278 Mackie argued that schooling should meet the aims of parents and communities and seek ‘to promote the welfare and happiness of the children’. This required attention to both individual ends and social purposes.

In this chapter, Mackie noted that schooling supplements home life, social life and other training. He suggested that schools should both prepare children for adult life and provide a form of social life that is satisfying in itself.279 He also discussed the interests of the state in finding ways to form good citizens, a goal that was achieved by providing and maintaining schools of various kinds.280 Each school must consider the roles their pupils will play in the democratic community, taking governance, civic duties and social manners and responsibilities into account. The school curriculum must therefore include subjects such as physical education. With growing leisure, schools should also cater to tastes such as art, religion, hobbies and sport. Mackie saw schools as a form of social life. The ‘occupations’ of a school were to form the physical, mental and moral character of the young, to fit them for living as useful members of the community and, in so doing, to promote their happiness and welfare.281

In another chapter in The groundwork of teaching, Mackie reflected on ‘The general nature of teaching’, emphasising that the purpose of teaching was to encourage learning, which was the foundation of experience. He drew upon

92a number of recent thinkers, including the Italian Maria Montessori, who used toys in her kindergartens to help children learn by experience. This gave new meaning to the role of the teacher – teachers should not so much ask questions of the child as answer questions the child posed from their experiences. Mackie also touched upon what would soon become a major issue: how to group students into classes while also recognising individual differences.282

Mackie’s views on schools and teaching reflected his academic journey. Seeming to abandon his earlier support for the notion of a Platonic idealised state, he moved towards ideals of democratic communities, which had obvious Scottish associations but also reflected the progressivism of Dewey and others. However, Mackie had not abandoned the view that schools formed citizens. He had little sympathy with some of the more radical educational views of the interwar years, which often led to education outside the public sector preaching the ‘freedoms’ of pupils and warning of the dangers of too much teacher intervention.283 Mackie was too committed to teaching as a profession to accept that there could be too much teacher intervention.

What then was Mackie’s relationship to the transnational progressive education movement and to the view that schools should be child-centred, rather than subject-oriented? One historian has argued that progressivism in American schools and teachers’ colleges failed in the interwar years because of conservatism in curriculum planning.284 But Mackie’s views on teaching show a commitment to student-centred learning; his emphasis on classification and individual differences reveals a dedication to experimentation and a general acceptance of intelligence testing.

By the mid-1920s, Mackie was increasingly supportive of the new field of educational psychology. The growth of this field in the interwar years led to the measurement of student abilities and new forms of classification based on an intelligence quotient. Aware of the pioneering work of Cyril Burt in London, at the end of the war Mackie recruited Gilbert Phillips, a graduate from Melbourne who had worked at the University of London under Professor Spearman – the

93inventor of the idea of ‘general intelligence’ as a marker of difference between students. Phillips had graduated from London with a doctorate of science. With encouragement from Mackie, he developed a course on educational and psychological testing at Sydney Teachers’ College. In 1928, Phillips became principal of the Glenfield School for Special Education, which soon became a site for understanding of children deemed to be of low intelligence.285 In this way, the college helped to spread the intelligence testing movement, which was already prominent in Britain, influenced by Burt and supported by the battery of tests developed at Moray House in Edinburgh. Psychology had come to prominence as the foundational discipline for education, promising a new view of merit grounded in intelligence testing.286

When The groundwork of teaching was republished in 1924, Mackie wrote a new chapter on ‘The study of education’, where he proposed that education was becoming a science based on experimentation. Like many others in this period, he believed that testing students’ mental abilities was the way of the future. Testing identified innate abilities and provided statistical distributions that divided the school population into the most and least able. In this way, merit was identified through intelligence tests, rather than just through ‘scholastic’ exams, as in Mackie’s own schooling. The significance for teaching was that most class groups would be heterogeneous. Successful teaching, Mackie suggested, required teachers to know more about their class in terms of the ‘psychological nature of scholastic abilities’.287

Mackie and his deputy, Percy Cole, were joint authors of two further publications that examined many of the issues first taken up in The groundwork of teaching. In Studies in contemporary education, Mackie discussed the elements of physical and other forms of welfare for students. He emphasised the significance of education for work and leisure and provided a study of psychoanalysis in education. But most of his attention was focused on ‘Studies in experimental

94education’, giving specific consideration to pathways towards intelligence testing and the implications for the organisation of schools.288

In Studies in the theory of education, published in 1925, Mackie commented on ‘The school system and the formation of class groups’, while Cole attempted to synthesise the theories of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Herbart and Froebel.289 Teachers’ College Press, Sydney published both of these books in association with commercial publisher Angus & Robertson, which was based in Sydney – an indication that they were intended for a public that extended beyond the college.

Other education academics followed in Mackie’s wake, establishing themselves as public intellectuals. Before becoming the third professor of education at the University of Melbourne in 1934, G.S. Browne had edited the major publication Education in Australia, which surveyed developments in all the Australian states and was published in London by Macmillan.290 From the 1930s, he used radio and other media to inform the public about new ideas in education and teaching. Like Mackie, Browne did not hesitate to criticise the government’s approach to education when he saw it as necessary to do so.291

Australian education and American philanthropy

By the late 1920s, Mackie’s role within and outside Sydney Teachers’ College was developing a transnational focus. Although his ideas had arisen from Scottish influences and the needs of the Empire, Mackie and other Australian academics began to turn to America for inspiration and support. Even before World War One, some Australian scholars had been attracted to North America. Sydney-born Percy Cole had gone to the Teachers’ College, Columbia in 1905 to complete a doctorate in the history of education (graduating with a PhD in 1907) before returning to Sydney Teachers’ College in 1910.292 In 1925, K.S. Cunningham

95departed Melbourne for Columbia to undertake a PhD in educational measurement.293 Others would travel to different research centres in the United States, including Mackie’s best student, Harold Wyndham, who went to Stanford.

In the 1920s, American philanthropy began to discover Australian higher education institutions. The Rockefeller Foundation in New York supported medical research and anthropology at the University of Sydney, establishing a professorial chair and an academic department in anthropology. In this way, American philanthropy funded research in an Australian university in ways not even attempted by Australian governments.294

The Carnegie Corporation had been established in 1911 to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding within the United States. In 1917, funds were set aside for similar purposes in ‘Canada or the British Colonies’.295 A decade later, James Russell, recently retired as head of the Teachers’ College, Columbia, visited Australia on behalf of the Carnegie Corporation. Stopping in Sydney, he met with Mackie and H.T. Lovell, professor of psychology at the university and formerly on the staff of the teachers’ college. Russell then travelled to Melbourne for a meeting with Frank Tate, the director of education in Victoria. Russell wanted to stimulate the creation of a body concerned with educational research, which would be staffed and controlled by Australians. He was sceptical of what had been achieved at Sydney Teachers’ College but suggested that in the context of New South Wales’ conservative system of education the college ‘must be kept alive and alert’.296 Within a week of Russell’s departure from Sydney, a National Institute of Education had been formed, with Mackie as president and Cole as secretary.297

After further discussions with Russell, Frank Tate took the initiative and sought support for a national body for educational research. In December 1928, an executive group, including Tate as president, Lovell as vice-president and Mackie as secretary, was established for what would become the Australian Council of

96Educational Research (ACER). Cunningham later became the executive officer. This quartet decided much of the direction of the new council, which was composed of delegates from research institutes in the Australian states. Over the next decade, the ACER provided numerous scholarships for Australians to study in the United States. In 1932, Harold Wyndham, who had worked with Mackie for over a decade, was granted a doctoral scholarship to research the abilities of gifted and talented students.298

The establishment of the ACER had major consequences for the future of education research in Australia. It gave a clear indication that research was an important part of the endeavours of teachers’ colleges as well as universities. Most of all, the ACER provided an agency for the publication of research. As executive officer, Cunningham was responsible for organising much of the dissemination of research. He became the author of a number of publications and offered grants to encourage established and younger scholars to publish their work. In 1930, the council began producing its Educational Research Series. By 1940, the series included sixty publications, mainly book length; their main focus was on Australia, but often set against developments overseas.299 Within a decade, and based on research output, education had become the main social science in Australia.

The establishment of the ACER provided an opportunity for Australian education to show itself to the world. The New Education Fellowship (NEF), a principally European organisation, had been formed in 1921 to press for progressive education. During the 1920s, the NEF held a number of conferences in European cities. In 1934, a conference was held in South Africa. Cunningham attended this event and lobbied for the NEF to come to Australia. The ACER executive backed the proposal, gaining support from Australia’s universities and vice-chancellors, and eventually the Commonwealth and state governments. The Carnegie Corporation provided a grant and encouraged the Australian conference, which brought twenty-one overseas speakers to deliver over 300 papers. Most of these overseas visitors were established figures in universities or education administration, and many were well-known proponents of the progressive

97education movement. The NEF conference was held on the campuses of Australian universities in August and September 1937. The total audience at seven sessions was 87,718.300

Many of the papers presented at the Australian conference were published in 1938, in a collection entitled Education for complete living, which provided a catalogue of worldwide developments in education and suggestions for change. Many of the overseas visitors, particularly the well-known scholar Isaac Kandel from the Teachers’ College, Columbia, were critical of the heavy reliance on centralisation in Australian education and the accompanying rules and regulations, which hindered the development of teachers, students and schools.301 They echoed and provided further justification for many of the views that Mackie had expressed for over two decades. The conference, and the publication of the papers, was also a way of stimulating a movement for education reform that continued into World War Two and beyond.302

When Tate died in 1939, Lovell succeeded him as ACER president and Mackie briefly became vice-president. In 1964, the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science bestowed the Mackie Medal on the ACER, recognising the council’s ‘notable contribution to education in Australia’.303

Towards the end

For most of the interwar years, Mackie was locked out of government decision making in New South Wales because of the antipathy of S.H. Smith. In 1930, Mackie welcomed the appointment of G. Ross Thomas as the new director of education in New South Wales. Thomas came from much the same mould as Smith, but he was less abrasive. He was a former pupil teacher and his entire career had been spent in the New South Wales teaching service. Unlike Smith, Thomas had experience in secondary schools. He became the head of Bathurst High School and, after graduating in arts from the University of Sydney, was

98promoted to the inspectorate.304 Mackie wrote to Thomas with the hope that ‘The attitude of the past five years would be replaced by one of co-operation with the Principal of the College instead of a constant thwarting of his efforts to secure the best possible preparation for teachers of New South Wales’.305

Relations between Mackie and the department remained tense, in part because of deteriorating economic conditions. The Great Depression in the 1930s had a major effect on Sydney Teachers’ College. With state finances in decline, there were significant cuts to public expenditure on education. The association between the university and the college was eroded further when enrolments in the Diploma of Education declined from 383 in 1921 to 189 in 1927 and only ninety-three in 1931, when the course was abandoned. The diploma was briefly restored in 1936 to address an anticipated teacher shortage, only to disappear again by 1938. For much of the 1930s, the college concentrated on primary education, providing a reduced two-year course.306

Mackie continued to criticise the Department of Education on grounds that went beyond the teachers’ college. In August 1932, he reviewed education in New South Wales, arguing that public policy was marked by ‘narrowness and insulation’, lack of experience among teachers and lack of public interest in education, which remained in the ‘hands of a hierarchy of officials’.307 Despite this critique, or perhaps because of it, Thomas and David Drummond, the new minister for education, seemed willing to listen to Mackie’s views on matters such as the secondary school curriculum and proposed examination reform.

Mackie had a longstanding interest in the secondary school curriculum. He was a member of the Board of Examiners, which was set up in 1912 to administer the Intermediate and Leaving Certificate examinations that Peter Board had established as part of the prewar secondary school system. He was also associated with W.J. Elliott, who was appointed by Board as chief inspector of secondary schools, but who, like Mackie, had been frustrated by inertia and opposition to reform from S.H. Smith and others brought up in the pupil teacher tradition.

99Elliott and others at the University of Sydney, including Professor Carslaw in mathematics, were highly critical of the secondary school system, particularly the academic standards set by the Intermediate Certificate, which examined candidates after three years of schooling.308

In 1933, David Drummond established a Committee of Inquiry into Post Primary Education under Sir Robert Wallace, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney. Thirty-two committee members were appointed, including Mackie – an indication of the range of interests involved. Throughout the proceedings, Mackie kept in touch with Carslaw and Elliott, who was now retired from his role as chief inspector. According to Mark Askew, the main historian of the Wallace Committee, the minutes showed that Mackie led a ‘reformist group’ that included Carslaw and L.C. Robson, the head of Sydney Church of England Grammar School and a former student of Carslaw. Opposition to major change came from Thomas, the director of education, and McKenzie, the assistant undersecretary of education. Mackie chaired one of three sub-committees: the sub-committee appointed to investigate and report upon general problems in secondary education. Askew’s research revealed that the records of their meetings contained many suggestions for reform.

Mackie was convinced that final decisions about the courses students would take should not be made until the end of their first year. In that first year, he believed, children should be exposed to a wide variety of subjects, and their aptitudes in these subjects should be considered when determining their placement in each stream. Mackie advocated the abandonment of the external Intermediate Certificate examination. He suggested an internal examination would be more economical and more effective because school principals would be in a position to consider other work completed by each child before deciding whether or not to award a certificate. Mackie also proposed the introduction of a Lower School Certificate examination, which would be completed at the end of the four-year secondary course, and a Higher School Certificate examination, which would be taken after a further two years of more specialised study. This suggestion was included in the sub-committee’s final report; however, the two-year period of specialised study was reduced to one year.309

100In the short term, the formal recommendations of the Wallace Committee achieved little. The minister for education established an Advisory Council on Education, but this council only met twice. He also agreed to disestablish the Board of Examiners in mid-1936, replacing it with the Board of Secondary School Studies, which had an expanded membership extending beyond just delegates from the department and the university. Mackie was the longest serving member of the Board of Examiners, having been appointed on its establishment, when Peter Board was director of education. His formal association with the government agency that supervised exams was now ended, although some of his ideas for change would be revived when his former student Harold Wyndham became director-general of education.

Many of the Wallace Committee’s proposals formed the basis for postwar reform of secondary education. In particular, Mackie’s suggestions, supported by others on the Wallace Committee, laid the foundations for the committee that Wyndham chaired in the 1950s. The Wyndham Committee’s report provided the basis for New South Wales’ comprehensive secondary school system.310

In July 1939, Mackie requested long service leave so that he and his wife, Annie, could visit their children, Margaret and John, who were studying in Oxford. After Oxford, they visited the Midlands. In Leicester, Mackie came down to breakfast with paralysis in one side of his face and distorted speech. A doctor in Cambridge diagnosed him with Bell’s palsy, but it was soon clear that he had suffered a stroke. He and his wife returned to Sydney Teachers’ College in late 1939, just after the outbreak of World War Two. When he was greeted by his long-time friend and colleague Miss Skillen, Mackie replied, ‘It’s not Professor Mackie. It’s only a shell’.311

101

Mackie’s stroke had neurological and emotional effects. In February 1940, he resigned his chair at the University of Sydney. His wife told Selle, the university registrar, that her husband was ‘still unfit for the strain of work and I feel his depression is very much accentuated by anxiety (undue I think) about his financial problems’.312 Mackie’s financial concerns were related to his university pension, which had become his main source of retirement income since he had been denied a state superannuation pension following the government’s decision in 1929. In 1935, he had again contested that decision. When he reached the age of sixty, Mackie had also become entitled to the interest from an annuity policy that the university had taken out.313 In April 1940, the university indicated that Mackie would receive a pension of £400 per annum, plus a lump sum from his

102own contributions.314 The sum of £400 per year was equivalent to a professorial salary in the 1930s. While this was a reasonable amount, there was no allowance for changes in the cost of living. Financial concerns continued to plague Mackie in his retirement, particularly due to inflation during World War Two and in the postwar years. In 1952, the university Senate agree to raise the professors’ pension to £600 per year.315

Beyond the Mackie era

When Alexander Mackie died in October 1955, he left a legacy that was celebrated in words and memorials. In April 1956, the University of Sydney Senate named the Alexander Mackie building – a home for education tutorials – in his honour. That month, a special conference was held at Sydney Teachers’ College – an appreciation of Mackie’s life, reviewing his ideas and influence and outlining his contributions to teacher training. It was announced that the college library would become the Mackie Library.316 Ivan Turner, then principal of Sydney Teachers’ College, told the conference:

103

104Almost all the speakers at the conference acknowledged that Mackie had two main aims: to develop teaching as a profession and to establish education as an academic discipline informed by liberal studies and research. Central to these aims was a close relationship between the college and the university. When Mackie retired as principal and professor of education, this goal became even more difficult to achieve. In Britain, the 1944 McNair Report signalled an end to autonomous teachers’ colleges and a move towards ‘a coherent teaching service’, leading to the creation of Area Training Organisations involving colleges and universities.318 In New South Wales, the Department of Education established new colleges to meet the demand for teachers. Some colleges in rural areas were residential. By the mid-1960s, there were eight teachers’ colleges in the state, all under the department’s control and most without any association with a university.319

At Sydney, relations between the college and the university grew more distant and competition developed. The New South Wales government determined that Mackie’s successor would be a public servant under the control of the Public Service Board. Chris McRae was appointed at age forty. The son of a future director of education in Victoria, he was a graduate in Latin and French from the University of Melbourne and had a Diploma of Education and an MA. He had completed a PhD at the University of London before returning to lecture at Melbourne Teachers’ College and then joining Sydney Teachers’ College in 1928. McCrae had published a number of books on psychology, and his age, qualifications and experience virtually guaranteed his selection. He was given the title of professor by the University of Sydney upon his appointment as college principal in 1940. Remaining at the college until 1947, McCrae participated in government plans for educational reconstruction after World War Two, becoming superintendent of teachers’ colleges. In 1947, he accepted a full-time appointment as professor of education at the University of Sydney, resigning his post as principal of the college. The move initiated the development of a separate Department of Education within the university, but also ended the idea of the college principal being a professor at the university.320

From the late 1940s until the mid-1970s, the college and the university continued to co-operate in teaching the Diploma of Education that had been

105established in 1911. But their partnership was under strain. Dr Ivan Turner, the principal of the college for much of this period, remained a strong supporter of the involvement of universities in teacher education and was even prepared to see the university take over teacher training on the understanding that the college would retain a role. In this way, Turner followed Mackie’s long-held views; he had studied under Mackie and had become a staff member at the college during Mackie’s principalship. Turner had started as a science student at the University of Sydney in 1920. After graduating with honours, he had completed a Diploma of Education and a Master of Science. He then won a graduate scholarship to Cambridge, where he completed a BA in mathematics – graduating with honours – and an MA. In 1927–28, he was appointed to lectureships in mathematics at the University of Sydney and Sydney Teachers’ College. By the 1930s, he had completed a PhD at Columbia and won Carnegie Travelling Scholarships that took him to London and across the world. He was exactly the type of academic scholar Mackie wanted at the college.321

Turner may have provided a way forward in the new era, but he was constrained in two ways: first, by the state Department of Education’s attempts to extend teachers’ colleges under its supervision, and second, by the emergence of the academic Department of Education at the University of Sydney. In 1955, Professor W.F. Connell was appointed to the chair of education at the university. With degrees in history and education from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in the history of education from the University of London, Connell had strong international qualifications, links to Britain and Europe and connections to the University of Illinois. He was interested in the ways that education could contribute to the study of social change. He wanted to create a university department of high academic standing that would not be seen as simply serving the interests of the state government.322

By the mid-1970s, Sydney Teachers’ College was pursuing independence from the state government. It elected to become a College of Advanced Education, accepting funding from the Commonwealth as part of the ‘binary system’ of higher education that had emerged from the 1960s, creating separate roles for colleges

106and universities.323 In 1981, the college merged with the Teachers’ Guild – which provided non-government teacher education – and became part of the multi-function Sydney College of Advanced Education. By the end of the 1980s, the federal government was replacing the binary system with a unified national system of higher education, encouraging mergers between universities and colleges. The University of Sydney saw an opportunity to ‘take over’ the buildings, assets and staff of the former Sydney Teachers’ College. The former college was amalgamated with the university’s Faculty of Education, which had been established in 1986.324

More than three-quarters of a century after Alexander Mackie arrived in Sydney to take up his appointment as the inaugural principal of Sydney Teachers’ College, the college was absorbed into the University of Sydney, where he had been the foundation professor of education. It was not quite as he might have expected; but given all his efforts to establish teaching as a university-based profession, it was – in part, at least – what Mackie had sought when he arrived in Australia in 1906.