Educational Reform and Environmental Concern: A History of School Nature Study in Australia

Citation

Campbell, C. (2018), "Educational Reform and Environmental Concern: A History of School Nature Study in Australia", History of Education Review, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 103-105. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-01-2018-0002

What does this book do? It examines the history of nature study and environmental education in Australian schools. It relates that history to the more general history of conservation and appreciation of the Australian environment. It also expands our knowledge of the neglected history of the Australian primary school in the early twentieth century. In so doing, it contributes to the history of the educational reforms associated with the New Education in Australia and beyond. It also provides an exemplary study of a curriculum area that should help educational historians write better histories of school curricula, and pedagogy in the future.

This history of nature study has even broader significance. It may be read as an episode in the historical alienation of humankind and its societies from the rest of the natural world, where humanity is imagined as separate from nature, with superior, exploitative rights over all other animals, indeed all living things. Redress of this destructive process is very slow. “Educational Reform and Environmental Concern” charts an important part of that redress, when schools and school curricula were attached to new understandings of the relationships between the natural world and human society.

The author situates her story in the broader intellectual history of such developments. She does not underestimate the post-Enlightenment emergence of romanticism. Wordsworth looked at the English countryside, shuddering at the impact of the first industrial revolution, in a way that was in part nostalgic. He wrote about the beauty of the natural world, as a force for life and good. Of course, in Australia, the non-Indigenous population from the late eighteenth century had a hard time imagining Australian landscapes and bush in the Wordsworthian, romantic style. Arguably this did not really occur until the 1890s. We have artists such as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts among others to thank for this. Also, as John Hirst has so usefully argued, even the move toward federation contributed. There could be a new love of bush, flora and fauna—country, as a “sentimental” nation came into being (Hirst, 2000).

This book tells us how schools contributed to the changed thinking about nature. The new nature study curriculum certainly owed much to the New Education, progressivism in education, that had its recent origins in the USA and the UK. Kass is the first of the historians to give due weight to the Australian origins; and how nature could be studied in the elementary school curriculum. We have been bedevilled in Australia, in interpreting our intellectual and educational history through the lenses of words like “imitation” and “adaptation.” More recent historiography gives greater weight to the “transnational” exchanges of persons and ideas. This provides a far more useful way of thinking about how ideas arrive, are formed, are adapted and influence others elsewhere. Centers and peripheries become fluid, there are occasional reversals in the assumed relationships. Sometimes the idea of center and periphery breaks down all together.

There is a much stronger place in this approach for what Australian thinkers, publicists, journalists, university and college academics, and writers of school magazines, syllabuses and curricula thought, wrote and invented for local circumstances. The founders and exponents of an Australian nature study were adaptors, and original thinkers. The Australian school curricula for nature study were original, and distinctive as a result. They contributed to Australia’s distinctive intellectual history. A monograph such as this also makes us realize what we do not have. There are no parallel texts exploring the history of literacy, numeracy, the physical sciences, English and the languages, history and the social sciences as they emerged over the centuries in Australian schools.

“Educational Reform and Environmental Concern” guides its readers through the virtues and deficiencies of the existing historiography. It links us to the debate swirling about the New Education and nature study transnationally. It identifies the key intellectuals, the scientists and others, who framed the debate in Australia. Kass outlines the struggles that occurred in order to make this nature study curriculum a legitimate part of the elementary school curriculum. She identifies the volunteers, voluntary organizations and education department employees who sustained the subject for decades through their writing and publishing for children and teachers.

A great virtue of this book is that Kass gives a highly credible account of what happened when this new subject arrived in schools. The wonderful photographs help tell the story. The book tells us more than we previously knew about the writing and experience of ordinary teachers—and the children who believed they were seeing the world differently as a result of this curriculum. This book is highly recommended for those interested in school and curriculum history, in New South Wales, Australia and beyond—and those interested in the fraught question of how to reconcile our planet’s environmental survival with the too often rapacious demands of economic development and population explosion.