Curriculum History and Progressive Education in Australia: A Prolegomenon

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the curriculum history of Australian education. First, the chapter provides a reflexive account of curriculum history in Australia, proposing that curriculum-historical inquiry is an important but under-developed aspect of Australian curriculum inquiry, but that nonetheless there is some indication that a focus on (post-)linguistic and discourse-theoretical perspectives provides new opportunities for work in this area. What are the possibilities for ‘complicated conversation’ with and within the emerging field of transnational curriculum inquiry? Second, the chapter provides a brief introduction to and overview of the role and the significance, and also the distinctiveness, of so-called progressive education in Australia. Focusing on key moments in the twentieth century, and briefly reviewing existing Australian scholarship in this area, it argues that the ‘progressive’ element in Australian education has been one of its longest and most enduring features, although often misrepresented in public and professional debate. How might a curriculum history of ‘progressive education’ in Australia proceed?