Schooling Adolescence: The Student Subject of Post-Primary Education in Early Twentieth Century South Australia.

For full text: http://www.aare.edu.au/01pap/cor01086.htm.

N

21

Adolescents; Educational History; Educational Research; English Curriculum; Foreign Countries; Literacy; Public Schools; Secondary Education

This paper reports on an aspect of a larger curriculum historical inquiry into the links between adolescence, schooling, and the English/literacy subjects in South Australian government schools. Another interest in the paper is how the "problem" of the care and control of the adolescent could be linked to issues of (il)literacy. The paper focuses on its author's historical investigations into the education of adolescents before they were generally known by that label and before the term literacy had strong currency. It examines adolescence as an artifact of various projects and technologies at different times and places. The practices and techniques which are the focus of the study reported in the paper are those connected with the human technologies of schooling and the English/literacy curriculum. The paper provides a brief survey of the practices in relation to the first of the five investigation pathways suggested by N. Rose--considering how the adolescent in the first decades of the 20th century in South Australia came to be seen as "problematic." It concentrates on the field of education as the site for these practices and the discourses that constitute adolescence in relation to that field. The paper states that the main data source was the "Education Gazette" published between 1900 and 1920. (NKA)

2003

ED467649