Papers by Denis Arthy
Australian journal of career development, Nov 1, 1998
Keys to success: How to acbieve your goals comprises 11 chapters focused on study and learning te... more Keys to success: How to acbieve your goals comprises 11 chapters focused on study and learning techniques, writing and other skills plus cooperative learning presented in a self-discovery style. The authors, Carol Carter and Sarah Lyman Kravits, are co-directors ofLifeskil!s Inc, an organisation to assist high school students with their career and personal development. The initial impression is one of a mLxture of textual information combined with a generous amount of questionnaires and activities presented in a colourful magazine-style layout. An interesting feature is the tear-out perforations for each page. I never did discover the purpose for this. An introductory section a number of "supplements" to the book. These include: • Instructor's Resource Kit (including course outlines and syllabi, exercises, articles, lecture anecdotes, evaluation techniques, tests etc.); • Overhead Transparencies (lecture materials); • Job Search Folder (resume preparation, company research and networking);
Journal of Career Development
Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 1995
Vocational guidance emerged in Queensland in the early 1910s as part of a governmental plan to tr... more Vocational guidance emerged in Queensland in the early 1910s as part of a governmental plan to transform the colonial educational ladder to provide an efficient distribution and coordinated range of vocational outcomes. The central feature of this new educational ladder was the New Scholarship which would provide significantly expanded opportunities for children who had the talent for an education higher than the compulsory level of primary school to participate in secondary, university, agricultural, technical and continuing levels of education. A governmental strategy was formulated to improve the efficiency of these vocational distributions, to facilitate ambition in the family for this New Scholarship and to avoid talent wastage. The guiding strategy was first proposed from within the Department of Public Instruction under the heading of “Sagax, Capax and Efficax’ prior to the First World War. While it was first proposed to be trialled by the Department of Public Instruction at ...
Journal of Career Development
Australia Dreaming: A Tribute to Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi - 7th Edition - EXTRACT, 2020
The first edition of the publication Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai... more The first edition of the publication Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi was formally published for presentation at Dr Paul Lam’s Tai Chi for Health Workshop in South Hadley in Massachusetts held in June 2008. This publication and the group performance of Elva’s Australia Dreaming 15 Form Qigong were shared with a diverse group of international participants enjoying a week long Tai Chi for Health workshop.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi was thus something very special, it blew the minds of those participating, especially to those familiar with the history of Sun Lutang, a famous Chinese martial artist who had rejected the powerful patriarchal Confucian tradition by establishing the first ever female martial arts course in the 1930s in China. Elva’s Australia Dreaming Tai Chi Qigong thus demonstrated the healing power of Tai Chi Qigong in being able to transcend cultural boundaries, to transform the mystical imagery and practices of Confucian, Daoist and patriarchal cosmology into something familiar and accessible, thus paradoxically belonging to the world and to common humanity.
The very first performance by Elva of Australia Dreaming 15 Form Qigong was at an earlier Tai Chi for Health Conference at Connecticut in the USA in June 2003, where it was received with rapturous applause and appreciation. The Australian imagery and respectful cultural references to the First Australians affirmed a cross cultural appreciation and a rejection of specious claims of cultural appropriation from Chinese imagery and ownership, as well as a rejection of a safe and secure Terra Nullius Qigong set.
The fact that Elva as a white Caucasian woman, a gweipo from the “Land-down-Under” could create a beautiful Tai Chi Qigong Form from Sun Style Tai Chi that was not driven by Chinese, Taoist and Confucian patriarchal cosmology suggested that everyone in this world could enjoy the magic and power of Tai Chi Qigong referencing images of Nature through their own cultural landscape, cosmology and their own personal Dreaming.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors is offered as our tribute to ancestors of all Australians, regardless of their ethnic, clan, tribal and cultural origins, and also to a global community of people striving for a more peaceful, happy, healthy and harmonious co-existence through a secular, safe and scientific approach to the magic and beauty of Tai Chi Qigong.
Australia Dreaming: A Tribute to Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi - 7th Edition - EXTRACT, 2020
The first edition of the publication Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai... more The first edition of the publication Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi was formally published for presentation at Dr Paul Lam’s Tai Chi for Health Workshop in South Hadley in Massachusetts held in June 2008. This publication and the group performance of Elva’s Australia Dreaming 15 Form Qigong were shared with a diverse group of international participants enjoying a week long Tai Chi for Health workshop.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi was thus something very special, it blew the minds of those participating, especially to those familiar with the history of Sun Lutang, a famous Chinese martial artist who had rejected the powerful patriarchal Confucian tradition by establishing the first ever female martial arts course in the 1930s in China. Elva’s Australia Dreaming Tai Chi Qigong thus demonstrated the healing power of Tai Chi Qigong in being able to transcend cultural boundaries, to transform the mystical imagery and practices of Confucian, Daoist and patriarchal cosmology into something familiar and accessible, thus paradoxically belonging to the world and to common humanity.
The very first performance by Elva of Australia Dreaming 15 Form Qigong was at an earlier Tai Chi for Health Conference at Connecticut in the USA in June 2003, where it was received with rapturous applause and appreciation. The Australian imagery and respectful cultural references to the First Australians affirmed a cross cultural appreciation and a rejection of specious claims of cultural appropriation from Chinese imagery and ownership, as well as a rejection of a safe and secure Terra Nullius Qigong set.
The fact that Elva as a white Caucasian woman, a gweipo from the “Land-down-Under” could create a beautiful Tai Chi Qigong Form from Sun Style Tai Chi that was not driven by Chinese, Taoist and Confucian patriarchal cosmology suggested that everyone in this world could enjoy the magic and power of Tai Chi Qigong referencing images of Nature through their own cultural landscape, cosmology and their own personal Dreaming.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors is offered as our tribute to ancestors of all Australians, regardless of their ethnic, clan, tribal and cultural origins, and also to a global community of people striving for a more peaceful, happy, healthy and harmonious co-existence through a secular, safe and scientific approach to the magic and beauty of Tai Chi Qigong.
Gentle Way of Tai Chi Mirror Chi Kung, 2019
This article outlines the Gentle Way as the efficient use of energy combined with an effective wa... more This article outlines the Gentle Way as the efficient use of energy combined with an effective way of learning any martial form, movement, sequence or application whether for health, relaxation or self-defence. The heuristic mirror-method of learning, teaching and practicing generally is examined and provides the rationale for what is described here as Tai Chi Kung Freestyle Form, as a non-standard form or sequence of movements as a means to create an awareness that focused practice does not have to rely on remembering a specific choreographed sequence such as the standard form, kata, pattern or routine in any martial art.
It is important to understand that the standard martial form, kata, pattern or routine represents a curriculum of movements choreographed or strung together in an arbitrary sequence as a means of remembering specific techniques. The standard form or kata is thus essentially a memory device, a mnemonic that is visual and kinaesthetic, that historically has assisted the “oral transmission” of martial knowledge and skill without the need for literacy, a written language or other recording device. Learning a standard form, kata or pattern for its own sake may be the goal for many who practice a martial art such as Tai Chi only for health, but even this goal can also be more efficiently achieved by the method of teaching and learning as outlined here and can be very creative, enjoyable, immensely satisfying in developing powerful mind-body co-ordination techniques to significantly enhance health, wellbeing and an efficient use of energy.
Also, the analytical method of practicing specific techniques from a standard form or kata is very clearly articulated in the Japanese martial arts with the term – Bunkai - referring to a process of analysing kata and extracting fighting techniques from the movements of a form or kata. Reference here to the mirror aspect of any movement in the kata, form or sequence thus highlights the presence of two players – what the Japanese call Tori (one who demonstrates technique) and Uke (receiver of technique). When practising a solo form, the mirror-method of training thus enhances the visualisation by Tori of the presence of Uke, the imagined opponent. The mirrored intention of the technique as interpreted by Tori is thus reflected in the performance of the solo form or kata which demonstrates mind-body coordination, connection of upper and lower body, controlled transfer or weight, the direction of the gaze reflecting the intention of the movement, the rhythm of opening and closing movements, all consistent and flowing with Chi Kung (or Qigong) being coordinated breathing techniques central to Chojun Miyagi’s Goju Ryu Karate-do – “the way of inhaling and exhaling is hardness and softness” (see Bubishi: The Classic Manual of Combat, 1995, by Patrick McCarthy)
With the Tai Chi Kung Freestyle Form, as outlined in this article, students can develop the confidence to practice by themselves, practicing what they can remember, being analytical about the shape to simplify, the upper or lower body, left and or right, in any sequence, standing or seated, physically or only in the mind, keeping it simple. Any simplified part of a standard form or sequence can be thus practiced without feeling remorse at not remembering what comes next. As the teacher, as the coach you are assisting the student with methods of learning, teaching and practicing for and by themselves, to move and exercise in a safe and confident manner.
This paper has been drawn from a larger project undertaken to develop an historical account of vo... more This paper has been drawn from a larger project undertaken to develop an historical account of vocational guidance practices in Queensland through a genealogy of the vocational personality, a particular form of the useful and good citizen. The genealogy is examined in relation to bureaucratic-pastoral techniques of government, techniques which shape the technical (useful) and ethical (good) threads of the vocational personality. Vocationally oriented skills are inseparable from basic skills in ethical self regulation. The modern citizen is not just expected to develop these technical skills but also must develop and manage a "self" able to negotiate a range of statuses and duties associated with personal and professional relationships, parenthood, health, sexuality and the role of the democratic citizen.
Contrary to progressivist histories of vocational guidance built around the presence of great men and women and its origins in the psychological trait-and-factor" theory, these early practices had nothing to do with individual psychology, a particular technical expertise which did not emerge in Australia as the science of vocational guidance until after the Second World War.
This paper thus focuses on a genealogy, on an historical analysis of the vocational personality in post-colonial Queensland, drawing mostly from archival material at the level of official discourses.
This paper will examine the emergence of vocational guidance in Queensland not as a theoretical b... more This paper will examine the emergence of vocational guidance in Queensland not as a theoretical breakthrough in psychology, but as a governmental practice and technology addressing the social problem of youth unemployment and enforced idleness. Set against the background of the Great Depression, the main target for governmental intervention was identified as the Boy Problem. In the early 1930s, the problem for government was how to guide rather than coerce, how to provide the necessary vocational guidance in accordance with labour market priorities, not through means of compulsion, but through techniques of persuasion, sound reasoning and common-sense. Matching and placement activities for juvenile employment would provide the impetus for the migration of the cultural technology of the whole personality from the Opportunity school for backward children into the governmental reconstruction of vocational and educational distributions of the general population. It was this Boy Problem which would re-position the roles of the family and community agencies as central to the governance of juvenile employment through the implementation of vocational training, guidance and placement activities and thus to the governmental reconstruction of the useful and good citizen. Vocational guidance at the institutional nexus of education, juvenile employment and the family represented a strategic technology adapted to the pedagogic and ethical shaping of the useful and good citizen. This governmental intervention into the family, the school and the local community was formalised in the establishment of the State government's Juvenile Employment Bureau (JEB) in 1935 as an independent agency within the complex statewide network of State Employment Exchanges, schools and community organisations. The new science of vocational guidance would re-emerge invigorated as part of the post-Second World War governmental reconstruction of the useful and good citizen. The guidance practice would serve as conduit for the migration of a child-centred pedagogy and related technology of the whole personality into the school and classroom. With the 2 Commonwealth takeover of the State's Employment Exchanges, which had been established nearly fifty years earlier, the JEB was closed in the early 1950s with the vocational guidance practitioner, the psychological consultant, being redeployed in both State and Commonwealth agencies.
This paper aims to formulate an anthropological understanding of some of the key cultural imperat... more This paper aims to formulate an anthropological understanding of some of the key cultural imperatives operating in the traditional career counselling practice with the objective of increasing flexibility and diversity in career planning. A particular case study that is typical of careers indecision experienced at university level illustrates these cultural imperatives, including the self-matching "parachute process". It also serves as a launching pad for a helicopter or "reasoned" strategy in careers planning. This anthropological approach places great importance on understanding the key relationship between cultural literacy and a reasoned process of decision-making in the modern democratic state, and highlights the impact of this relationship on a viable careers planning strategy. This helicopter strategy incorporates multiple forms of knowledge as well as taking account of both ethical and technical considerations in the career decision-making process. A case study has been selected to illustrate the combined effects of the traditional counselling practice and a contemporary educational culture in Australia, which are geared to pragmatic and "quickfix" career solutions. This case study will show that within the traditional careers counselling practice the human condition is narrowed away from cultural and ethical considerations towards a technical fix of "personality profiles". It is the counselling practice based on the quick technical fix that has been described in a different context as "the politics of anti-politics" (Halmos, 1973, pp. 7-8). Moreover, when combined with the non-theoretical "parachute process" and its 'Journey of personal and spiritual growth" (Bolles, 1986, p. xvi), this practice significantly limits the complexity, richness and variability of the human condition that in practice is reduced to a technical inscription of nature or God's plan. This case study also confirms that the counselling interview represents the central locus of power-knowledge relations within the counselling practice. The interview typically focuses on the psychology of the client, utilising the collective power of not only psychometric reasoning and the parachute process but confessional techniques that combine to inscribe a specific knowledge of the social world and the client. The prescribed method within the orthodox counselling interview operates on the basis of the traditions of the confession, wherein the confession is a ritual discourse in which the client as the speaking subject is the subject of discussion. The confession is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship in the presence of the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile. The confession exonerates, redeems and purifies. It unburdens wrongs, liberates, and promises salvation (Foucault, 1979a). The complexity of choices about life and career options is thus liberated by the confession and reconciled to various cultural imperatives encoded into a technical self-matching register of a simple psychological "personality profile" of the client matched to a simple profile of the world of careers. We will now turn to our selected case study of Paul j., who was a client of the writer, a career counsellor at a Queensland university in 1996. In 1992, Paul was a student at school who was advised by his school counsellor and his teachers to follow his interests and look to a career based upon his scholastic strengths. He had performed well at English, Economics and Accounting, The suggestion was made to look towards a career somewhere in business and choose a business course at university. Being somewhat unsure of the options, his parents,
Discusses two types of vocational guidance practices: ethical--reasoned match strategy (Frank Par... more Discusses two types of vocational guidance practices: ethical--reasoned match strategy (Frank Parsons); and technical--square pegs and round holes (Cyril Burt). Suggests that the technical, psychological trait-and-factor matching approach ignores the significance of cultural literacy and general education in shaping a competent vocational personality.
Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 1995
This is Chapter 4 of a book now titled - SHAPING THE GOOD CITIZEN: Beyond Phrenology to a Child-C... more This is Chapter 4 of a book now titled - SHAPING THE GOOD CITIZEN: Beyond Phrenology to a Child-Centred Classroom and which was published as a paper in the Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling I - Vol 5 Nr 1 1995. All other chapters in this book will eventually be included on Academia.com.
In this paper we examine both the yin and yang of the question: How to Teach Tai Chi for Health E... more In this paper we examine both the yin and yang of the question: How to Teach Tai Chi for Health Effectively. On the one hand, the technology, or the “how” of teaching represents the ”Text”, a script, a theory, a set of guidelines or prescriptions of what is needed to explain what is meant by “teaching effectively”. On the other hand, different cultural, historical, social and legal frameworks provide multiple contexts within which “effective teaching” could be evaluated, judged, compared and contrasted. Any meaningful analysis on what is the "how of effective teaching" needs to consider this relationship between the "text and "context".
To simplify for our purposes, this relational analysis between "Text" and "Context" begins with differentiating between two different “contexts” of tai chi, between how Tai Chi historically has been practised as a Martial Art and how Tai Chi is practised as a Health Art. What constitutes the “texts of effective teaching” in the martial arts through traditional contexts of lineage, secret transmission protocols, metaphysical and combative orientations (see Cartmell, 2003, Wong, 1996; Wile, 1993; Miller, 2000) are thus qualitatively different to the “texts of effective teaching” for Tai Chi for Health (TCH) within the secular context of evidence based research and the modern duty of care that operates within a scientific approach to the health and fitness industries (see Arthy, 2006).
Accordingly, the main focus of the discussion will be within the "context" of TCH wherein we will formulate "Effective Teaching Texts" as three specific and interrelated concepts of representing the comprehensive framework of effective teaching for TCH:
• Knowledge of Tai Chi, Fitness and Health
• Technical Skills of Teaching
• Connections between Teacher and Student
While the main practical “context” of TCH will be examined as the community based class, our discussion will also examine the need to expand the focus and support network that exists at present within the modern and secular concept of TCH. We will examine the need for the development of a comprehensive framework of "effective teaching" within the context of "training-the-trainer" of TCH.
This need for a comprehensive framework for TCH has its historical and philosophical beginnings with the “open mind” concept of learning and teaching of “Tai Chi as a Health Art” first radically promulgated by Sun Lutang in the world’s first publication of Tai Chi, in his book titled Study of Taijiquan (Sun Lutang 1921; and Arthy, 2006). We know today that specific TCH Instructor Training has already expanded from the base level and short course workshop concept focussed on specific health issues as pioneered by Dr Paul Lam and developed further in Australia by Alice Liping Yuan through Exercise Medicine Australia. This needs to be extended even further into the contexts of professional health and fitness education and training programs, to provide resources and skills necessary to gain effective teaching expertise as an essential part of the accreditation of the different levels of the TCH Instructor. Teaching expertise needs to be an equal player and should parallel the development of the practical skills and research focus and outcomes of TCH.
In order to be effective in the broader “context” of the delivery of TCH, serious consideration should be given to the expansion of the concept of TCH Instructor Training into a multiplicity of other contexts, to make TCH teaching expertise both accessible and comprehensive. The “Effective Teaching Texts” of TCH could and perhaps should be written into the curriculum, to be inserted into the pedagogy of “training-the-trainer” modules of a range of health, exercise and educational professionals including – Medical Doctors, Community Nurses, Fitness Instructors, Therapists, School Teachers, Home Carers, Social Workers, Aged Care and Hospice Workers.
In the short-term, however, there needs to be a valid pathway and graded levels of opportunities for the TCH Instructor. This would involve accreditation and recognition independent from the pathway for accreditation for Tai Chi as a Martial Art. This accreditation for TCH would thus include an ongoing commitment to developing teaching expertise of TCH, to “how to teach TCH effectively”, based on a comprehensive curriculum of "Effective Teaching Texts" which are fundamental to a secular and science based approach to TCH from beginners to advanced levels.
The original motivation for this project was based on a single premise. Over years of researchin... more The original motivation for this project was based on a single premise. Over years of researching the histories of the Asian martial arts, and in particular, the various myths and histories written about Tai Chi, I came to the conclusion that Sun Lutang has clearly not been given the proper credit for the genius that he was. As recognised by Tim Cartmell (2003), Sun Lutang was the creator of a different style of Tai Chi, which is both, an effective fighting style, and a style very suitable for promoting Tai Chi for Health. Unlike other styles of Tai Chi, Sun style Tai Chi does not rely on exceptional physicality as a prerequisite for fighting ability and it contains stances and combat techniques that are both practical and highly effective as a Martial Art suitable for people of all ages not just the young. The style also contains a basic footwork pattern, which makes it relatively safe and simple for the beginner to establish the correct whole body rhythm and alignment that is the signature of all Tai Chi styles and thus is more readily accessible to a broader range of people, men and women, old and young.
This paper has been written to enhance the application of Tai Chi for Health promotion in the twenty-first century through an examination of the radical contribution that Sun Lutang made almost one hundred years ago to the promotion of Tai Chi for Health and to the subsequent transformations of Tai Chi as a Health Art from Tai Chi practised as a vigorous and combative form of Chinese Boxing in the early part of the twentieth century in China (see Wong, 1996; Wile, 1993; Miller, 2000).
This examination outlines a snapshot history of the emergence of Tai Chi for Health based on various facts, evidence and respected published accounts of the historical emergence of Tai Chi for Health and the roles played by Sun Lutang, Chen Wei Ming and Yang Cheng Fu. It is the juxtaposition of facts and evidence, grounded within a consistent and coherent chronology, which questions and challenges the pervasive views that Yang family style of "Taijiquan" was the original Tai Chi health art and that Tai Chi is a Taoist art advocating harmony with Nature, and characterising conflict with Nature as contributing to illness, poverty and disease. More significantly for our purposes, is that Sun Lutang was the first Tai Chi Master to break with the patriarchal Confucian tradition by publicly offering Tai Chi to women, and he was the first to write about and publish Tai Chi for Health and personal development and was thus the first Tai Chi Master to promote to the public Tai Chi as a Health Art (see Miller, 2000).
However, the main focus of the paper is on analysing contributions to Tai Chi for Health as specific concepts and principles of Tai Chi which were published by Sun Lutang and by Chen Wei Ming. This examination highlights both the insights and genius of Sun Lutang and the historical significance of Chen Wei Ming in the subsequent motivations to transform the vigorous and combative Yang family style of Tai Chi to the slow and graceful Yang style Tai Chi as it is practised and recognised today (see Wile, 1993). These contributions are articulated in the paper in a language that is accessible and suitable for the general reader and student interested in Tai Chi as a contemporary secular Health Art.
In regards to research methodology for this paper, an understanding of Tai Chi for Health epistemologically and historically cannot be gained through the academic paradigms of the scientifically controlled experiment, epidemiology or medical research (see Popper, 1974; Kuhn 1970; Lakatos et al 1980). Social and cultural historiography driven by a semiotic analysis (see Barthes, 2001; Eco 1976; Foucault 1977; Hirst et al, 1984; Levi-Strauss, 1977; Rose and Rose 1977; Ryan, 1973; Turner, 1975) has informed the intellectual engine of the research methodology for this paper in an evaluation of myths of Tai Chi often presented as history and in the presentation of concepts and principles of Tai Chi for Health. Semiotics and Tai Chi philosophy of the Yin and the Yang are tarred to the same East and West brush of paradoxical logic, an unusual but legitimate nexus of intellectual endeavour within a qualitative approach to the social sciences.
In the context of Tai Chi as a contemporary secular Health Art, the paper identifies the radical contribution to Tai Chi for Health made by Dr Paul Lam in the international arena of the latter part of the twentieth century and spearheading the way into the twenty-first century. In addition, the paper outlines the rationale and the necessity for Tai Chi for Health Instructor Training and for public policy development of Tai Chi for Health to be formulated, promoted and practised, not as a metaphysical journey or as a martial art, but as a secular Health Art (see Cheryl, 2001) which is based on evidence based, scientific research and on the modern duty-of-care principle (see Arthy, 2005).
Thesis Chapters by Denis Arthy
As a "History of Present", this book provides an historical examination of not simply how the cla... more As a "History of Present", this book provides an historical examination of not simply how the classroom has been instrumental in the “shaping of the good citizen” but how this history is crucial to understanding a key aspect of the National Curriculum debate – the dismal failure by the Australian classroom to meet educational standards and the needs of a competitive, global economy.
This book has identified how the child-centred classroom is convenient and pivotal to meeting the powerful interests and desires of a wider anti-intellectual culture which characterises a non-vocational, general education and a liberal-arts education as the “Mickey Mouse” option in the pursuit of finding a worthwhile career. This examination provides the rationale to understand how the heresy of a subject centred curriculum and the abandonment of failure in a child-centred classroom have been driven and given credibility by an anti-intellectual positivist psychology and associated, secularised white-European and Christian cultural mores alive and thriving in the twenty first century classroom. Problems of the contemporary dysfunctional “student-in-crisis” are revealed through this history of the present as being compounded by a failure of the child-centred classroom to provide the intellectual capital necessary to process the knowledge of the world of people outside the classroom, essential to facilitate wise and well-informed educational and vocational choices in a complex consumer society and educational marketplace in a liberal democracy. The question of “failure” for the “student-in-crisis” is thus shown to be an outcome, not of the dysfunction of the individual student diagnostically mapped by a positivist psychology, but of the failure of a child-centred classroom to prescribe a content saturated curriculum visible, graded into levels of competency and publically accountable necessary for the good citizen to survive and thrive in a competitive yet ethical consumer culture, in a modern liberal democracy.
The historical "Cultural Theme of Civilising and Christianising" maps the genealogy of the shaping of the “good citizen” to the civilising and Christianising practices central to the classroom in the Queensland colonial era through the absorption of these practices and cultural norms into the new matching psychometric science as central to the pedagogic, ethical and vocational shaping of the good citizen in the contemporary child-centred classroom..
The historical "Technology Themes from Phrenology to Eugenics to Positivist Psychology" identify the migration of child-centred technologies into the classroom, with new problems for government emerging in the form of pastoral governance of failure, retardation and the problem child, and in managing the distributions of the good citizens ambitious for a higher education. In the absence of graded methods of achievement and the abandonment of failure previously made visible through the subject centred classroom and public examinations, new child centred technologies pioneered by the new psychological consultant, the vocational guidance officer, would become reliant almost exclusively on the "square pegs in round holes", the so-called trait-and-factor psychological model, pioneered by Sir Cyril Burt, the world’s first official psychologist.
Foucault’s "Genealogical Method" of analysis is used in this book to reveal a specific history of the good citizen in a liberal democracy. In particular, it, documents, analyses and describes through primary source material, historical records and discourse analysis, how the cultural identity, the ethical and vocational attributes of the modern “good citizen” in Queensland and Australia have been shaped historically through powerful institutional and government policies, practices and strategies. The temporal and cultural framework is from the mid nineteenth century with the subject centred British colonial classroom driven by the cultural technologies of phrenology and eugenics, through to the north American child centred classroom in the modern era utilising the secular pseudo-science of a positivist psychology. The genealogy of the good citizen maps multiple threads into the school and classroom as being saturated with white-European and Christian cultural mores of vocational and social performance, conduct, capacity and ability to the present day.
Finally, as an illustration of the failure of the child-centred classroom, we will re-examine the case study of Paul J as illustrative of the impact of the Radford child-centred classroom on the question of cultural literacy, that is, on the question as to how does any student begin to make informed choices and decisions on the basis of little or no knowledge of the complex world of people, of history, culture and society, and lacks the necessary skills to research and process that knowledge. The “reasoned” approach to careers counselling first articulated by Frank Parsons will be examined as a practical alternative to the dominant and pervasive psychological matching technology embedded in the Radford’s child-centred classroom of personal suitability.
The various case studies have generated and are consistent with an anthropological understanding of some of the key cultural imperatives operating in the traditional career counselling practice with the objective of increasing flexibility and diversity in career planning. The particular case study of Paul typical of careers indecision experienced at university level highlights these cultural imperatives, including the self matching "parachute process". It also serves as a launching pad for a helicopter or "reasoned" strategy in careers planning. This anthropological approach places great importance on understanding the key relationship between cultural literacy and a reasoned process of decision making in the modern democratic state, and highlights the impact of this relationship on a viable careers planning strategy. This helicopter strategy incorporates multiple forms of knowledge as well as taking account of both ethical and technical considerations in the career decision making process.
The traditional individualism of the American finds reflection in the American high school. The ... more The traditional individualism of the American finds reflection in the American high school. The desire to develop the individual to his fullest capacity, to find his needs and abilities and special talents, his interests and aptitudes, is illustrated throughout the school. The Australian system tends rather to set up a standard to which it is desirable to make the individual conform, the type rather than the individual is stressed.... School uniforms, which are very attractive on small boys and girls and become increasingly less attractive as the individuals grow older, are outward evidences of the same desire to stress conformity rather than individuality. Neither American pupils nor their parents would tolerate any prescribed uniform. (Cramer, 1936, p.41)
According to this conventional wisdom, the best schools are those where the subjects and activities offered match the individual student's temperament. On a cursory glance, that might seem sensible. But what it really is, unfortunately, is yet another instance of the "exams and tests are bad" mentality that has permeated the education systems of many developed countries, ours included. It is not socially correct, under this pernicious dictum, to make such comparisons between students or anyone. Everyone is equal.... Now-days, of course, it is viewed with disfavour to talk about failure. In this Age of Euphemisms, under the thumb of those who know best, there are only different success levels. The fact that this misguided scale starts from rank failure apparently is beside the point. (Courier Mail, 1993a)
Throughout this book, we have examined historical threads of bureaucratic-pastoral practices within the fields of education and employment in Queensland, practices which have calculated, measured, inscribed, guided and shaped the competent good citizen. This genealogy of the good citizen has not been examined in terms of theory, philosophy or ideology, but as having been shaped through a complex of governmental and community practices, techniques and agencies. The examination has extended to a review of those progressivist histories of education and guidance which have supported the norms, values and technologies of a North American child-centred educational culture and which, in Australia, have unwaveringly condemned the centralised State governmental administration of the traditional subject-centred classroom.
In this chapter, we will extend our examination of the genealogy of the good citizen, focussing on the migration of individual psychology and a child-centred pedagogy into the school, classroom and curriculum through the governmental guidance strategy of post-war reconstruction of the good citizen. It is the Radford Scheme which provides the pivot around which this the concluding chapter is organised. The Radford Scheme heralded both the psychological self-matching technology of vocational guidance and the progressive child-centred pedagogy at secondary level as a devolution of curriculum decision-making towards the school and classroom and away from the centralised bureaucratic structure of the State education apparatus. The Radford Scheme also transformed the distributional technology of the good citizen which now entered the university through the devolution of the bureaucratic techniques of measurement, calculation and inscription away from the subject-centred classroom towards the bureaucratic-pastoral technology of individual psychology. It is the theme of the whole personality, however, which provides an historical continuity for our review of the migration of a child-centred pedagogy into the Queensland classroom at primary and secondary levels through the guidance strategy. Upon the implementation of the Radford Scheme in the early 1970s, the technologies of measuring, calculating and inscribing this whole personality may well have shifted away from psychometric testing towards a self-matching technology. However, the success of the guidance strategy can be measured, not in terms of a humanistic condemnation of psychometric testing, but in terms of its significant influence in facilitating the migration of the persona of the whole personality into the educational fabric. Moreover, this success is a measure of the adaptive capacity of individual psychology as a cultural technology to measure, calculate and inscribe the whole personality of the student in relation to cultural fields and institutional practices, the whole personality, however, being the raison d'etre of a child-centred pedagogy.
The early 1960s witnessed a general revival of a child-centred pedagogy. This was a revival of the progressive pedagogy of the New Education invigorated by the successes of individual psychology during the Second World War and of the guidance strategy being applied to the post-war reconstruction of the good citizen. This revival took the form of a series of conferences facilitated by the ACER, the R&G Branch and the Faculty of Education at the University of Queensland (see Bassett, 1962, 1964, 1971) held in Melbourne and Brisbane which converged on the theme of individual differences in the primary school. Consistent with the ambitions of this progressive pedagogy, the subject-centred classroom was targeted as being a major obstacle in locating the unique individual - the pupil - and not the subject matter of the curriculum as the central pedagogic and ethical focus of the classroom (see Wood, 1962; Newling, 1962; Bassett, 1962a; and Radford, 1962). The revival of child-centeredness as the pedagogic principle was specifically linked to the influence of the guidance movement, a movement that was now recommending the trialling and the introduction of new child-centred techniques such as programmed instruction and project work suitable for individualised learning. The secondary school classroom, however, was to remain within the firm grip of the subject-centred curriculum and related forms of assessment for at least another decade until the radical implementation of the Radford Scheme.
We will re-trace some of those genealogical threads of the good citizen to the New Education movement which proselytised a progressive child-centred pedagogy through the “germination” strategy of individual psychology. This examination will show how this child-centred pedagogy and supporting psychological technologies subsequently migrated into the Queensland classroom to shape the cultural norms of the good citizen (1) through the germination strategy of individual psychology, through the post-war guidance strategy, though the agencies of the ACER and the R&G Branch enabling the teacher to establish, in the words of McCulloch (1964, p.60), a relationship with the pupil based on the concepts of the guidance movement.
As Sir Winston (then Mr.) (sic) Churchill, said in February 1910, when he was announcing the sett... more As Sir Winston (then Mr.) (sic) Churchill, said in February 1910, when he was announcing the setting up of a National Employment Service in Britain: he said "I believe that as a piece of social mechanism an employment service is absolutely essential to any well ordered community". (Australian Archives, Qld, 1957, p.10)
As the earlier sections have shown, the educational wastage is greater among females than males. A major function of the guidance programme would be to break down the prejudice that secondary education is less necessary for girls and to spread information on the wide variety of professional and semi professional occupations now open to females. Such changes in public attitudes will be affected by the printed word; but the individual will be more strongly influenced by the information and advice on her own problems conveyed in the personal interview with a guidance officer. (R&G Bulletin, 1957)
The focus in this chapter will be on the emergence of post-war vocational guidance and careers counselling activities at both the State and Commonwealth levels of government directed at education higher than post-compulsory levels. A previous chapter has already examined the establishment of vocational guidance practices in State Education Department's R&G Branch from the late 1940s for children at the primary school level. The Branch also provided limited vocational guidance at the State secondary level from the beginnings of its operations. By the end of the 1950s, however, the State was beginning to rapidly expand the provision of vocational guidance at the secondary level when, in 1963 with the abolition of the Scholarship examination, vocational guidance at the primary school level was no longer considered relevant. Following the transfer of the grade eight students from primary to high schools in 1964, educational and vocational guidance services were provided by the State government only in the State high schools (R&G, 1965).
Vocational guidance had also been available at the secondary level for school children and government assisted scholars at the university level by the Commonwealth government from the beginnings of the Commonwealth-based employment services (CES) until the early 1950s. Through agreements made between the State and Commonwealth governments, the State Employment Exchanges including the JEB was closed and the responsibility for the administration of the CSS was transferred to the State government from 1952. The purpose of the CSS was to lessen inequalities of educational opportunity at the tertiary level with 3000 entrance Scholarships being available each year for open competition by boys and girls who had completed a normal secondary school course. A limited number, not exceeding two percent, of the 3000 Scholarships awarded each year were made available for competition by applicants of Mature Age. Applications for Mature Age Scholarships were accepted from students who were not under twenty five and in general not over thirty years of age at the date of application and who had matriculated (Australian Archives, Qld, 1950).
It was not until the implementation of the Murray Report (1957) that the Commonwealth government again became directly involved in the provision of vocational guidance and careers counselling services to school children, particularly to those attending private and independent schools. This renewed interest by the Commonwealth in vocational guidance for school children was in response to the guidance problem wherein wastage of scholastic talent from the educational ladder leading towards the university level was identified as a national extravagance.
This chapter will focus on the implementation of a post-war guidance strategy by both the Commonwealth and the State governments in addressing educational and employment problems of reconstructing the post-war economy towards Full Employment and the rehabilitation of ex-Service personnel and civilian war workers. Vocational guidance represented a new cultural technology of efficiency which was considered capable of facilitating governmental policy of equality of educational opportunity and avoidance of talent wastage through selecting the most suitable material available to be trained for the professions.
It was found, as a rule, that the important duty of classification by the head teacher had been ... more It was found, as a rule, that the important duty of classification by the head teacher had been discharged with care and good judgement. In one State school there were far too many drafts, and in another, after detailed examination, a process of grading up was recommended. It was occasionally necessary to alter some of the details of classification in a newly established Provisional school. It will be now possible to classify more scientifically, and so to reduce to a minimum the sacrifice of the interests of the individual pupil inevitable where children are instructed in classes. ("Report of the District Inspector Brown", reported in QDPI, v.8, Jan, 1906, p.6)
There has been, too a swing away from passive reception and the mere memorising of facts to the encouragement of each child to develop by his own activity all those gifts and aptitudes he possesses and those virtues which he is capable of achieving. Allied to this swing is the idea of the pupil as a member of the school community where he receives a training in citizenship. (L.D. Edwards, "Report of the Director General of Education", in QPP, 1948 49, v.1, p.601)
The governance of retardation within the State primary school classroom, as we will recall from previous chapters, emerged directly from the problems of classification of scholastic performance of white European pupils in the early part of this century. The subject centred curriculum within the primary school classroom determined the external, pedagogic standard by which these pupils would be classified as needing to be advanced or retarded, which in turn depended upon the results of periodic examinations held by the classroom teacher. The introduction of compulsory education, the influence of the School hygiene movement and medical inspections within primary schools, and governmental concerns for efficiency and productivity in the public sector all contributed towards making visible the problem of retardation within the classroom. In the early 1920s, a policy of segregation of mental defectives from the general State primary school population was implemented which resulted in the establishment of the Backward School, subsequently renamed the Opportunity School. New technologies of individual psychology were soon deployed in assisting in the ascertainment of pupil retardation, essentially for the purpose of confirming the primary school teacher's classification of pupil retardation which continued to be based on the external standards of a subject centred curriculum. It appears that the external, curriculum centred testing contained in the Grade levels of primary school continued to provide the principle standard for the classification of retardation until at least the establishment of the R&G Branch in the late 1940s.
However, although public instruction of backward children had adopted new techniques of a child centred pedagogy, compulsory attendance at a such schools had not solved the problem of backwardness. By the late 1930s, as the extent of the problem was not sufficiently visible to government, a review of the problem of backward persons was undertaken. Accordingly in November 1938, as a result of this review, legislation was introduced to the Queensland parliament as the Backward Persons Bill:
The Bill deals with those persons who are either born without the normal or usual standard of intelligence or whose mental development becomes arrested or retarded. These persons are generally referred to as mental deficients. They are a class distinct altogether from those people who were referred to previously as insane persons. (Hon. E.M. Hanlon, Secretary for Health and Home Affairs, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 1938, v.173, p.1726)
Backwardness had now become a very difficult problem for government, where the greatest difficulty was stated as the lack of knowledge as to its extent. A board was appointed under this legislation consisting of the Director General of Health and Medical Services, the Director of Education, and the Superintendent of Mental Hygiene to collect information as to the number of children and the various degrees of their backwardness. The board was given the powers of a royal commission to demand replies to any request for information in order to establish the magnitude of the problem. Proclamation of the rest of the Bill was to take place after the board had completed its investigation.
"And the right of a man to labour,
And his right to labour in joy
Not all your laws can str... more "And the right of a man to labour,
And his right to labour in joy
Not all your laws can strangle that right;
Nor the gates of hell destroy;
For it came with the making of man,
And was kneaded into his bones,
And it will stand at the last of things,
On the dust of crumbled thrones."
(Eldwin Markham, quoted by the Hon. T.A. Foley, Secretary for Labour and Industry, in QPD, 1941, v.178, p.1657)
Guidance is not something new, foisted on to our system from without. As long as there have been teachers, there have been guides, and this state of affairs will ever remain, for the school teacher is to his pupils guide, philosopher, and friend. (QTU, 1941, p.1)
Vocational guidance first emerged as a practice in Queensland, not in the State primary school classroom as was envisaged by L.D. Edwards, nor as a theoretical breakthrough in psychology, but in the State's technical colleges as a direct outcome of governmental intervention into the Boy Problem, a particular aspect of the very serious problem of unemployment which had been accumulating in Queensland in the late 1920s. Governmental action resulted in plans to remedy the unemployment problem of youth and the enforced idleness of unemployed lads. All of these plans would necessitate the active involvement and participation of a mixed personnel, various community, charity and religious organisations as well as State government Officers teachers, head teachers and police officers - serving in an official capacity at the local community level. It was the boy problem which would subsequently come to highlight the central role of the family in the governance of juvenile employment through the implementation of vocational training, guidance and placement activities. The boy problem represented the State government's acceptance of its responsibility to find employment for youths and young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty, and particularly in respect of those in the metropolitan and city areas. According to the government, at least 8,000 boys were leaving school each year, and the question of securing employment for such lads was so vital that it concerned all classes of the community (W.H. Austin, "Third Annual Report of the Under Secretary, Department of Labour and Industry for Year ended 30th June 1933", in QPP, 1933, p.1031).
During this period of the Great Depression, the governmental problem emerged as how to guide rather than coerce, how to provide the necessary vocational guidance in accordance with labour market priorities, not through means of compulsion, but through techniques of persuasion, sound reasoning and common sense. New technologies were demanded to address the boy problem, to be implanted in the bureaucratic-pastoral space at the institutional nexus of education, juvenile employment and the family. Out of this nexus between the public and private and converging areas of governmental attention, the practice of vocational guidance emerged as a part of the matching and placement activities deemed necessary to alleviate problems of juvenile unemployment and to assist in the re distribution of juvenile labour away from the city to the country. From this governmental intervention into the local community with vocational training programmes and rural placement training schemes was formed the State government's JEB in 1935.
The practice of vocational guidance was well established by the late 1930s within the JEB but had not been taken up within the primary school system as had been anticipated by Edwards over a decade earlier. The increasing complexity of the educational ladder, the demands upon government to remedy the dysfunctions of the juvenile labour markets caused by the Great Depression, the beginnings of a highly focussed campaign by advocates of a progressive child-centred pedagogy through the ACER calling for a scientific approach to a New Education, however, were all combining to generate a need for new technologies for shaping, calculating, measuring, inscribing and guiding the natural bent of whole personality. Psychological techniques of testing and inscription trialled in the ascertainment and management of backwardness were trickling through from the opportunity schools, germinating to shape the whole personality of not only the backward child but also the primary school pupil and the juvenile seeking employment. As we will see in subsequent chapters, however, this whole personality would not become fully formed until the abandonment of the subject-centred pedagogy and the full scale migration of a child-centred pedagogy from the 1960s through to the implementation of the Radford Scheme in the early 1970s. By the end of the 1930s, the germination strategy of individual psychology was set to transform the primary school classroom with a systemic guidance programme to be introduced under the direction of Mr J.J. Pratt, a primary school teacher who had been specially trained at the headquarters of the ACER in Melbourne for two years (see Cunningham and Pratt, 1940). The advent of war with Japan, however, forestalled the implementation of this guidance programme aimed at governmental efficiency through matching the right good citizen “pegs” in the right vocational holes.
Meanwhile, the JEB and its vocational guidance and placement function had continued under the control of the Department of Public Instruction until the beginning of the war years when it was taken over by the Commonwealth government through emergency legislation at the Commonwealth level in order to control the Australian labour market during the war. Towards the end of the war the JEB was returned to the State government's control, continuing to provide a vocational guidance and placement service for juveniles from 14 years to 21 years of age. It was eventually disbanded in the early 1950s with the Commonwealth taking over the comprehensive function of the State Employment Exchanges which had been in operation in Queensland for nearly a half a century. Through the White Paper, Full Employment in Australia, the Commonwealth had thus entered the fields of education and employment for the first time in peace-time Australia in an endeavour to address the massive problems of post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction and had incorporated the guidance strategy into its arsenal of technical solutions. By the end of the war, vocational guidance as a practice was thus well established in both spheres of government, with the State's JEB in the Department of Labour and Industry and with the newly formed Commonwealth-based employment services (CES) in the Department of Labour and National Service. Vocational guidance, however, had been substantially transformed by those psychological technologies of testing and inscription which had been initially developed from those pedagogic practices of the ascertainment, segregation and management of backwardness and subsequently trialled during the war on the civilian and service personnel populations to assist in the efficiencies of the war-effort.
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Papers by Denis Arthy
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi was thus something very special, it blew the minds of those participating, especially to those familiar with the history of Sun Lutang, a famous Chinese martial artist who had rejected the powerful patriarchal Confucian tradition by establishing the first ever female martial arts course in the 1930s in China. Elva’s Australia Dreaming Tai Chi Qigong thus demonstrated the healing power of Tai Chi Qigong in being able to transcend cultural boundaries, to transform the mystical imagery and practices of Confucian, Daoist and patriarchal cosmology into something familiar and accessible, thus paradoxically belonging to the world and to common humanity.
The very first performance by Elva of Australia Dreaming 15 Form Qigong was at an earlier Tai Chi for Health Conference at Connecticut in the USA in June 2003, where it was received with rapturous applause and appreciation. The Australian imagery and respectful cultural references to the First Australians affirmed a cross cultural appreciation and a rejection of specious claims of cultural appropriation from Chinese imagery and ownership, as well as a rejection of a safe and secure Terra Nullius Qigong set.
The fact that Elva as a white Caucasian woman, a gweipo from the “Land-down-Under” could create a beautiful Tai Chi Qigong Form from Sun Style Tai Chi that was not driven by Chinese, Taoist and Confucian patriarchal cosmology suggested that everyone in this world could enjoy the magic and power of Tai Chi Qigong referencing images of Nature through their own cultural landscape, cosmology and their own personal Dreaming.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors is offered as our tribute to ancestors of all Australians, regardless of their ethnic, clan, tribal and cultural origins, and also to a global community of people striving for a more peaceful, happy, healthy and harmonious co-existence through a secular, safe and scientific approach to the magic and beauty of Tai Chi Qigong.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi was thus something very special, it blew the minds of those participating, especially to those familiar with the history of Sun Lutang, a famous Chinese martial artist who had rejected the powerful patriarchal Confucian tradition by establishing the first ever female martial arts course in the 1930s in China. Elva’s Australia Dreaming Tai Chi Qigong thus demonstrated the healing power of Tai Chi Qigong in being able to transcend cultural boundaries, to transform the mystical imagery and practices of Confucian, Daoist and patriarchal cosmology into something familiar and accessible, thus paradoxically belonging to the world and to common humanity.
The very first performance by Elva of Australia Dreaming 15 Form Qigong was at an earlier Tai Chi for Health Conference at Connecticut in the USA in June 2003, where it was received with rapturous applause and appreciation. The Australian imagery and respectful cultural references to the First Australians affirmed a cross cultural appreciation and a rejection of specious claims of cultural appropriation from Chinese imagery and ownership, as well as a rejection of a safe and secure Terra Nullius Qigong set.
The fact that Elva as a white Caucasian woman, a gweipo from the “Land-down-Under” could create a beautiful Tai Chi Qigong Form from Sun Style Tai Chi that was not driven by Chinese, Taoist and Confucian patriarchal cosmology suggested that everyone in this world could enjoy the magic and power of Tai Chi Qigong referencing images of Nature through their own cultural landscape, cosmology and their own personal Dreaming.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors is offered as our tribute to ancestors of all Australians, regardless of their ethnic, clan, tribal and cultural origins, and also to a global community of people striving for a more peaceful, happy, healthy and harmonious co-existence through a secular, safe and scientific approach to the magic and beauty of Tai Chi Qigong.
It is important to understand that the standard martial form, kata, pattern or routine represents a curriculum of movements choreographed or strung together in an arbitrary sequence as a means of remembering specific techniques. The standard form or kata is thus essentially a memory device, a mnemonic that is visual and kinaesthetic, that historically has assisted the “oral transmission” of martial knowledge and skill without the need for literacy, a written language or other recording device. Learning a standard form, kata or pattern for its own sake may be the goal for many who practice a martial art such as Tai Chi only for health, but even this goal can also be more efficiently achieved by the method of teaching and learning as outlined here and can be very creative, enjoyable, immensely satisfying in developing powerful mind-body co-ordination techniques to significantly enhance health, wellbeing and an efficient use of energy.
Also, the analytical method of practicing specific techniques from a standard form or kata is very clearly articulated in the Japanese martial arts with the term – Bunkai - referring to a process of analysing kata and extracting fighting techniques from the movements of a form or kata. Reference here to the mirror aspect of any movement in the kata, form or sequence thus highlights the presence of two players – what the Japanese call Tori (one who demonstrates technique) and Uke (receiver of technique). When practising a solo form, the mirror-method of training thus enhances the visualisation by Tori of the presence of Uke, the imagined opponent. The mirrored intention of the technique as interpreted by Tori is thus reflected in the performance of the solo form or kata which demonstrates mind-body coordination, connection of upper and lower body, controlled transfer or weight, the direction of the gaze reflecting the intention of the movement, the rhythm of opening and closing movements, all consistent and flowing with Chi Kung (or Qigong) being coordinated breathing techniques central to Chojun Miyagi’s Goju Ryu Karate-do – “the way of inhaling and exhaling is hardness and softness” (see Bubishi: The Classic Manual of Combat, 1995, by Patrick McCarthy)
With the Tai Chi Kung Freestyle Form, as outlined in this article, students can develop the confidence to practice by themselves, practicing what they can remember, being analytical about the shape to simplify, the upper or lower body, left and or right, in any sequence, standing or seated, physically or only in the mind, keeping it simple. Any simplified part of a standard form or sequence can be thus practiced without feeling remorse at not remembering what comes next. As the teacher, as the coach you are assisting the student with methods of learning, teaching and practicing for and by themselves, to move and exercise in a safe and confident manner.
Contrary to progressivist histories of vocational guidance built around the presence of great men and women and its origins in the psychological trait-and-factor" theory, these early practices had nothing to do with individual psychology, a particular technical expertise which did not emerge in Australia as the science of vocational guidance until after the Second World War.
This paper thus focuses on a genealogy, on an historical analysis of the vocational personality in post-colonial Queensland, drawing mostly from archival material at the level of official discourses.
To simplify for our purposes, this relational analysis between "Text" and "Context" begins with differentiating between two different “contexts” of tai chi, between how Tai Chi historically has been practised as a Martial Art and how Tai Chi is practised as a Health Art. What constitutes the “texts of effective teaching” in the martial arts through traditional contexts of lineage, secret transmission protocols, metaphysical and combative orientations (see Cartmell, 2003, Wong, 1996; Wile, 1993; Miller, 2000) are thus qualitatively different to the “texts of effective teaching” for Tai Chi for Health (TCH) within the secular context of evidence based research and the modern duty of care that operates within a scientific approach to the health and fitness industries (see Arthy, 2006).
Accordingly, the main focus of the discussion will be within the "context" of TCH wherein we will formulate "Effective Teaching Texts" as three specific and interrelated concepts of representing the comprehensive framework of effective teaching for TCH:
• Knowledge of Tai Chi, Fitness and Health
• Technical Skills of Teaching
• Connections between Teacher and Student
While the main practical “context” of TCH will be examined as the community based class, our discussion will also examine the need to expand the focus and support network that exists at present within the modern and secular concept of TCH. We will examine the need for the development of a comprehensive framework of "effective teaching" within the context of "training-the-trainer" of TCH.
This need for a comprehensive framework for TCH has its historical and philosophical beginnings with the “open mind” concept of learning and teaching of “Tai Chi as a Health Art” first radically promulgated by Sun Lutang in the world’s first publication of Tai Chi, in his book titled Study of Taijiquan (Sun Lutang 1921; and Arthy, 2006). We know today that specific TCH Instructor Training has already expanded from the base level and short course workshop concept focussed on specific health issues as pioneered by Dr Paul Lam and developed further in Australia by Alice Liping Yuan through Exercise Medicine Australia. This needs to be extended even further into the contexts of professional health and fitness education and training programs, to provide resources and skills necessary to gain effective teaching expertise as an essential part of the accreditation of the different levels of the TCH Instructor. Teaching expertise needs to be an equal player and should parallel the development of the practical skills and research focus and outcomes of TCH.
In order to be effective in the broader “context” of the delivery of TCH, serious consideration should be given to the expansion of the concept of TCH Instructor Training into a multiplicity of other contexts, to make TCH teaching expertise both accessible and comprehensive. The “Effective Teaching Texts” of TCH could and perhaps should be written into the curriculum, to be inserted into the pedagogy of “training-the-trainer” modules of a range of health, exercise and educational professionals including – Medical Doctors, Community Nurses, Fitness Instructors, Therapists, School Teachers, Home Carers, Social Workers, Aged Care and Hospice Workers.
In the short-term, however, there needs to be a valid pathway and graded levels of opportunities for the TCH Instructor. This would involve accreditation and recognition independent from the pathway for accreditation for Tai Chi as a Martial Art. This accreditation for TCH would thus include an ongoing commitment to developing teaching expertise of TCH, to “how to teach TCH effectively”, based on a comprehensive curriculum of "Effective Teaching Texts" which are fundamental to a secular and science based approach to TCH from beginners to advanced levels.
This paper has been written to enhance the application of Tai Chi for Health promotion in the twenty-first century through an examination of the radical contribution that Sun Lutang made almost one hundred years ago to the promotion of Tai Chi for Health and to the subsequent transformations of Tai Chi as a Health Art from Tai Chi practised as a vigorous and combative form of Chinese Boxing in the early part of the twentieth century in China (see Wong, 1996; Wile, 1993; Miller, 2000).
This examination outlines a snapshot history of the emergence of Tai Chi for Health based on various facts, evidence and respected published accounts of the historical emergence of Tai Chi for Health and the roles played by Sun Lutang, Chen Wei Ming and Yang Cheng Fu. It is the juxtaposition of facts and evidence, grounded within a consistent and coherent chronology, which questions and challenges the pervasive views that Yang family style of "Taijiquan" was the original Tai Chi health art and that Tai Chi is a Taoist art advocating harmony with Nature, and characterising conflict with Nature as contributing to illness, poverty and disease. More significantly for our purposes, is that Sun Lutang was the first Tai Chi Master to break with the patriarchal Confucian tradition by publicly offering Tai Chi to women, and he was the first to write about and publish Tai Chi for Health and personal development and was thus the first Tai Chi Master to promote to the public Tai Chi as a Health Art (see Miller, 2000).
However, the main focus of the paper is on analysing contributions to Tai Chi for Health as specific concepts and principles of Tai Chi which were published by Sun Lutang and by Chen Wei Ming. This examination highlights both the insights and genius of Sun Lutang and the historical significance of Chen Wei Ming in the subsequent motivations to transform the vigorous and combative Yang family style of Tai Chi to the slow and graceful Yang style Tai Chi as it is practised and recognised today (see Wile, 1993). These contributions are articulated in the paper in a language that is accessible and suitable for the general reader and student interested in Tai Chi as a contemporary secular Health Art.
In regards to research methodology for this paper, an understanding of Tai Chi for Health epistemologically and historically cannot be gained through the academic paradigms of the scientifically controlled experiment, epidemiology or medical research (see Popper, 1974; Kuhn 1970; Lakatos et al 1980). Social and cultural historiography driven by a semiotic analysis (see Barthes, 2001; Eco 1976; Foucault 1977; Hirst et al, 1984; Levi-Strauss, 1977; Rose and Rose 1977; Ryan, 1973; Turner, 1975) has informed the intellectual engine of the research methodology for this paper in an evaluation of myths of Tai Chi often presented as history and in the presentation of concepts and principles of Tai Chi for Health. Semiotics and Tai Chi philosophy of the Yin and the Yang are tarred to the same East and West brush of paradoxical logic, an unusual but legitimate nexus of intellectual endeavour within a qualitative approach to the social sciences.
In the context of Tai Chi as a contemporary secular Health Art, the paper identifies the radical contribution to Tai Chi for Health made by Dr Paul Lam in the international arena of the latter part of the twentieth century and spearheading the way into the twenty-first century. In addition, the paper outlines the rationale and the necessity for Tai Chi for Health Instructor Training and for public policy development of Tai Chi for Health to be formulated, promoted and practised, not as a metaphysical journey or as a martial art, but as a secular Health Art (see Cheryl, 2001) which is based on evidence based, scientific research and on the modern duty-of-care principle (see Arthy, 2005).
Thesis Chapters by Denis Arthy
This book has identified how the child-centred classroom is convenient and pivotal to meeting the powerful interests and desires of a wider anti-intellectual culture which characterises a non-vocational, general education and a liberal-arts education as the “Mickey Mouse” option in the pursuit of finding a worthwhile career. This examination provides the rationale to understand how the heresy of a subject centred curriculum and the abandonment of failure in a child-centred classroom have been driven and given credibility by an anti-intellectual positivist psychology and associated, secularised white-European and Christian cultural mores alive and thriving in the twenty first century classroom. Problems of the contemporary dysfunctional “student-in-crisis” are revealed through this history of the present as being compounded by a failure of the child-centred classroom to provide the intellectual capital necessary to process the knowledge of the world of people outside the classroom, essential to facilitate wise and well-informed educational and vocational choices in a complex consumer society and educational marketplace in a liberal democracy. The question of “failure” for the “student-in-crisis” is thus shown to be an outcome, not of the dysfunction of the individual student diagnostically mapped by a positivist psychology, but of the failure of a child-centred classroom to prescribe a content saturated curriculum visible, graded into levels of competency and publically accountable necessary for the good citizen to survive and thrive in a competitive yet ethical consumer culture, in a modern liberal democracy.
The historical "Cultural Theme of Civilising and Christianising" maps the genealogy of the shaping of the “good citizen” to the civilising and Christianising practices central to the classroom in the Queensland colonial era through the absorption of these practices and cultural norms into the new matching psychometric science as central to the pedagogic, ethical and vocational shaping of the good citizen in the contemporary child-centred classroom..
The historical "Technology Themes from Phrenology to Eugenics to Positivist Psychology" identify the migration of child-centred technologies into the classroom, with new problems for government emerging in the form of pastoral governance of failure, retardation and the problem child, and in managing the distributions of the good citizens ambitious for a higher education. In the absence of graded methods of achievement and the abandonment of failure previously made visible through the subject centred classroom and public examinations, new child centred technologies pioneered by the new psychological consultant, the vocational guidance officer, would become reliant almost exclusively on the "square pegs in round holes", the so-called trait-and-factor psychological model, pioneered by Sir Cyril Burt, the world’s first official psychologist.
Foucault’s "Genealogical Method" of analysis is used in this book to reveal a specific history of the good citizen in a liberal democracy. In particular, it, documents, analyses and describes through primary source material, historical records and discourse analysis, how the cultural identity, the ethical and vocational attributes of the modern “good citizen” in Queensland and Australia have been shaped historically through powerful institutional and government policies, practices and strategies. The temporal and cultural framework is from the mid nineteenth century with the subject centred British colonial classroom driven by the cultural technologies of phrenology and eugenics, through to the north American child centred classroom in the modern era utilising the secular pseudo-science of a positivist psychology. The genealogy of the good citizen maps multiple threads into the school and classroom as being saturated with white-European and Christian cultural mores of vocational and social performance, conduct, capacity and ability to the present day.
Finally, as an illustration of the failure of the child-centred classroom, we will re-examine the case study of Paul J as illustrative of the impact of the Radford child-centred classroom on the question of cultural literacy, that is, on the question as to how does any student begin to make informed choices and decisions on the basis of little or no knowledge of the complex world of people, of history, culture and society, and lacks the necessary skills to research and process that knowledge. The “reasoned” approach to careers counselling first articulated by Frank Parsons will be examined as a practical alternative to the dominant and pervasive psychological matching technology embedded in the Radford’s child-centred classroom of personal suitability.
The various case studies have generated and are consistent with an anthropological understanding of some of the key cultural imperatives operating in the traditional career counselling practice with the objective of increasing flexibility and diversity in career planning. The particular case study of Paul typical of careers indecision experienced at university level highlights these cultural imperatives, including the self matching "parachute process". It also serves as a launching pad for a helicopter or "reasoned" strategy in careers planning. This anthropological approach places great importance on understanding the key relationship between cultural literacy and a reasoned process of decision making in the modern democratic state, and highlights the impact of this relationship on a viable careers planning strategy. This helicopter strategy incorporates multiple forms of knowledge as well as taking account of both ethical and technical considerations in the career decision making process.
According to this conventional wisdom, the best schools are those where the subjects and activities offered match the individual student's temperament. On a cursory glance, that might seem sensible. But what it really is, unfortunately, is yet another instance of the "exams and tests are bad" mentality that has permeated the education systems of many developed countries, ours included. It is not socially correct, under this pernicious dictum, to make such comparisons between students or anyone. Everyone is equal.... Now-days, of course, it is viewed with disfavour to talk about failure. In this Age of Euphemisms, under the thumb of those who know best, there are only different success levels. The fact that this misguided scale starts from rank failure apparently is beside the point. (Courier Mail, 1993a)
Throughout this book, we have examined historical threads of bureaucratic-pastoral practices within the fields of education and employment in Queensland, practices which have calculated, measured, inscribed, guided and shaped the competent good citizen. This genealogy of the good citizen has not been examined in terms of theory, philosophy or ideology, but as having been shaped through a complex of governmental and community practices, techniques and agencies. The examination has extended to a review of those progressivist histories of education and guidance which have supported the norms, values and technologies of a North American child-centred educational culture and which, in Australia, have unwaveringly condemned the centralised State governmental administration of the traditional subject-centred classroom.
In this chapter, we will extend our examination of the genealogy of the good citizen, focussing on the migration of individual psychology and a child-centred pedagogy into the school, classroom and curriculum through the governmental guidance strategy of post-war reconstruction of the good citizen. It is the Radford Scheme which provides the pivot around which this the concluding chapter is organised. The Radford Scheme heralded both the psychological self-matching technology of vocational guidance and the progressive child-centred pedagogy at secondary level as a devolution of curriculum decision-making towards the school and classroom and away from the centralised bureaucratic structure of the State education apparatus. The Radford Scheme also transformed the distributional technology of the good citizen which now entered the university through the devolution of the bureaucratic techniques of measurement, calculation and inscription away from the subject-centred classroom towards the bureaucratic-pastoral technology of individual psychology. It is the theme of the whole personality, however, which provides an historical continuity for our review of the migration of a child-centred pedagogy into the Queensland classroom at primary and secondary levels through the guidance strategy. Upon the implementation of the Radford Scheme in the early 1970s, the technologies of measuring, calculating and inscribing this whole personality may well have shifted away from psychometric testing towards a self-matching technology. However, the success of the guidance strategy can be measured, not in terms of a humanistic condemnation of psychometric testing, but in terms of its significant influence in facilitating the migration of the persona of the whole personality into the educational fabric. Moreover, this success is a measure of the adaptive capacity of individual psychology as a cultural technology to measure, calculate and inscribe the whole personality of the student in relation to cultural fields and institutional practices, the whole personality, however, being the raison d'etre of a child-centred pedagogy.
The early 1960s witnessed a general revival of a child-centred pedagogy. This was a revival of the progressive pedagogy of the New Education invigorated by the successes of individual psychology during the Second World War and of the guidance strategy being applied to the post-war reconstruction of the good citizen. This revival took the form of a series of conferences facilitated by the ACER, the R&G Branch and the Faculty of Education at the University of Queensland (see Bassett, 1962, 1964, 1971) held in Melbourne and Brisbane which converged on the theme of individual differences in the primary school. Consistent with the ambitions of this progressive pedagogy, the subject-centred classroom was targeted as being a major obstacle in locating the unique individual - the pupil - and not the subject matter of the curriculum as the central pedagogic and ethical focus of the classroom (see Wood, 1962; Newling, 1962; Bassett, 1962a; and Radford, 1962). The revival of child-centeredness as the pedagogic principle was specifically linked to the influence of the guidance movement, a movement that was now recommending the trialling and the introduction of new child-centred techniques such as programmed instruction and project work suitable for individualised learning. The secondary school classroom, however, was to remain within the firm grip of the subject-centred curriculum and related forms of assessment for at least another decade until the radical implementation of the Radford Scheme.
We will re-trace some of those genealogical threads of the good citizen to the New Education movement which proselytised a progressive child-centred pedagogy through the “germination” strategy of individual psychology. This examination will show how this child-centred pedagogy and supporting psychological technologies subsequently migrated into the Queensland classroom to shape the cultural norms of the good citizen (1) through the germination strategy of individual psychology, through the post-war guidance strategy, though the agencies of the ACER and the R&G Branch enabling the teacher to establish, in the words of McCulloch (1964, p.60), a relationship with the pupil based on the concepts of the guidance movement.
As the earlier sections have shown, the educational wastage is greater among females than males. A major function of the guidance programme would be to break down the prejudice that secondary education is less necessary for girls and to spread information on the wide variety of professional and semi professional occupations now open to females. Such changes in public attitudes will be affected by the printed word; but the individual will be more strongly influenced by the information and advice on her own problems conveyed in the personal interview with a guidance officer. (R&G Bulletin, 1957)
The focus in this chapter will be on the emergence of post-war vocational guidance and careers counselling activities at both the State and Commonwealth levels of government directed at education higher than post-compulsory levels. A previous chapter has already examined the establishment of vocational guidance practices in State Education Department's R&G Branch from the late 1940s for children at the primary school level. The Branch also provided limited vocational guidance at the State secondary level from the beginnings of its operations. By the end of the 1950s, however, the State was beginning to rapidly expand the provision of vocational guidance at the secondary level when, in 1963 with the abolition of the Scholarship examination, vocational guidance at the primary school level was no longer considered relevant. Following the transfer of the grade eight students from primary to high schools in 1964, educational and vocational guidance services were provided by the State government only in the State high schools (R&G, 1965).
Vocational guidance had also been available at the secondary level for school children and government assisted scholars at the university level by the Commonwealth government from the beginnings of the Commonwealth-based employment services (CES) until the early 1950s. Through agreements made between the State and Commonwealth governments, the State Employment Exchanges including the JEB was closed and the responsibility for the administration of the CSS was transferred to the State government from 1952. The purpose of the CSS was to lessen inequalities of educational opportunity at the tertiary level with 3000 entrance Scholarships being available each year for open competition by boys and girls who had completed a normal secondary school course. A limited number, not exceeding two percent, of the 3000 Scholarships awarded each year were made available for competition by applicants of Mature Age. Applications for Mature Age Scholarships were accepted from students who were not under twenty five and in general not over thirty years of age at the date of application and who had matriculated (Australian Archives, Qld, 1950).
It was not until the implementation of the Murray Report (1957) that the Commonwealth government again became directly involved in the provision of vocational guidance and careers counselling services to school children, particularly to those attending private and independent schools. This renewed interest by the Commonwealth in vocational guidance for school children was in response to the guidance problem wherein wastage of scholastic talent from the educational ladder leading towards the university level was identified as a national extravagance.
This chapter will focus on the implementation of a post-war guidance strategy by both the Commonwealth and the State governments in addressing educational and employment problems of reconstructing the post-war economy towards Full Employment and the rehabilitation of ex-Service personnel and civilian war workers. Vocational guidance represented a new cultural technology of efficiency which was considered capable of facilitating governmental policy of equality of educational opportunity and avoidance of talent wastage through selecting the most suitable material available to be trained for the professions.
There has been, too a swing away from passive reception and the mere memorising of facts to the encouragement of each child to develop by his own activity all those gifts and aptitudes he possesses and those virtues which he is capable of achieving. Allied to this swing is the idea of the pupil as a member of the school community where he receives a training in citizenship. (L.D. Edwards, "Report of the Director General of Education", in QPP, 1948 49, v.1, p.601)
The governance of retardation within the State primary school classroom, as we will recall from previous chapters, emerged directly from the problems of classification of scholastic performance of white European pupils in the early part of this century. The subject centred curriculum within the primary school classroom determined the external, pedagogic standard by which these pupils would be classified as needing to be advanced or retarded, which in turn depended upon the results of periodic examinations held by the classroom teacher. The introduction of compulsory education, the influence of the School hygiene movement and medical inspections within primary schools, and governmental concerns for efficiency and productivity in the public sector all contributed towards making visible the problem of retardation within the classroom. In the early 1920s, a policy of segregation of mental defectives from the general State primary school population was implemented which resulted in the establishment of the Backward School, subsequently renamed the Opportunity School. New technologies of individual psychology were soon deployed in assisting in the ascertainment of pupil retardation, essentially for the purpose of confirming the primary school teacher's classification of pupil retardation which continued to be based on the external standards of a subject centred curriculum. It appears that the external, curriculum centred testing contained in the Grade levels of primary school continued to provide the principle standard for the classification of retardation until at least the establishment of the R&G Branch in the late 1940s.
However, although public instruction of backward children had adopted new techniques of a child centred pedagogy, compulsory attendance at a such schools had not solved the problem of backwardness. By the late 1930s, as the extent of the problem was not sufficiently visible to government, a review of the problem of backward persons was undertaken. Accordingly in November 1938, as a result of this review, legislation was introduced to the Queensland parliament as the Backward Persons Bill:
The Bill deals with those persons who are either born without the normal or usual standard of intelligence or whose mental development becomes arrested or retarded. These persons are generally referred to as mental deficients. They are a class distinct altogether from those people who were referred to previously as insane persons. (Hon. E.M. Hanlon, Secretary for Health and Home Affairs, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 1938, v.173, p.1726)
Backwardness had now become a very difficult problem for government, where the greatest difficulty was stated as the lack of knowledge as to its extent. A board was appointed under this legislation consisting of the Director General of Health and Medical Services, the Director of Education, and the Superintendent of Mental Hygiene to collect information as to the number of children and the various degrees of their backwardness. The board was given the powers of a royal commission to demand replies to any request for information in order to establish the magnitude of the problem. Proclamation of the rest of the Bill was to take place after the board had completed its investigation.
And his right to labour in joy
Not all your laws can strangle that right;
Nor the gates of hell destroy;
For it came with the making of man,
And was kneaded into his bones,
And it will stand at the last of things,
On the dust of crumbled thrones."
(Eldwin Markham, quoted by the Hon. T.A. Foley, Secretary for Labour and Industry, in QPD, 1941, v.178, p.1657)
Guidance is not something new, foisted on to our system from without. As long as there have been teachers, there have been guides, and this state of affairs will ever remain, for the school teacher is to his pupils guide, philosopher, and friend. (QTU, 1941, p.1)
Vocational guidance first emerged as a practice in Queensland, not in the State primary school classroom as was envisaged by L.D. Edwards, nor as a theoretical breakthrough in psychology, but in the State's technical colleges as a direct outcome of governmental intervention into the Boy Problem, a particular aspect of the very serious problem of unemployment which had been accumulating in Queensland in the late 1920s. Governmental action resulted in plans to remedy the unemployment problem of youth and the enforced idleness of unemployed lads. All of these plans would necessitate the active involvement and participation of a mixed personnel, various community, charity and religious organisations as well as State government Officers teachers, head teachers and police officers - serving in an official capacity at the local community level. It was the boy problem which would subsequently come to highlight the central role of the family in the governance of juvenile employment through the implementation of vocational training, guidance and placement activities. The boy problem represented the State government's acceptance of its responsibility to find employment for youths and young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty, and particularly in respect of those in the metropolitan and city areas. According to the government, at least 8,000 boys were leaving school each year, and the question of securing employment for such lads was so vital that it concerned all classes of the community (W.H. Austin, "Third Annual Report of the Under Secretary, Department of Labour and Industry for Year ended 30th June 1933", in QPP, 1933, p.1031).
During this period of the Great Depression, the governmental problem emerged as how to guide rather than coerce, how to provide the necessary vocational guidance in accordance with labour market priorities, not through means of compulsion, but through techniques of persuasion, sound reasoning and common sense. New technologies were demanded to address the boy problem, to be implanted in the bureaucratic-pastoral space at the institutional nexus of education, juvenile employment and the family. Out of this nexus between the public and private and converging areas of governmental attention, the practice of vocational guidance emerged as a part of the matching and placement activities deemed necessary to alleviate problems of juvenile unemployment and to assist in the re distribution of juvenile labour away from the city to the country. From this governmental intervention into the local community with vocational training programmes and rural placement training schemes was formed the State government's JEB in 1935.
The practice of vocational guidance was well established by the late 1930s within the JEB but had not been taken up within the primary school system as had been anticipated by Edwards over a decade earlier. The increasing complexity of the educational ladder, the demands upon government to remedy the dysfunctions of the juvenile labour markets caused by the Great Depression, the beginnings of a highly focussed campaign by advocates of a progressive child-centred pedagogy through the ACER calling for a scientific approach to a New Education, however, were all combining to generate a need for new technologies for shaping, calculating, measuring, inscribing and guiding the natural bent of whole personality. Psychological techniques of testing and inscription trialled in the ascertainment and management of backwardness were trickling through from the opportunity schools, germinating to shape the whole personality of not only the backward child but also the primary school pupil and the juvenile seeking employment. As we will see in subsequent chapters, however, this whole personality would not become fully formed until the abandonment of the subject-centred pedagogy and the full scale migration of a child-centred pedagogy from the 1960s through to the implementation of the Radford Scheme in the early 1970s. By the end of the 1930s, the germination strategy of individual psychology was set to transform the primary school classroom with a systemic guidance programme to be introduced under the direction of Mr J.J. Pratt, a primary school teacher who had been specially trained at the headquarters of the ACER in Melbourne for two years (see Cunningham and Pratt, 1940). The advent of war with Japan, however, forestalled the implementation of this guidance programme aimed at governmental efficiency through matching the right good citizen “pegs” in the right vocational holes.
Meanwhile, the JEB and its vocational guidance and placement function had continued under the control of the Department of Public Instruction until the beginning of the war years when it was taken over by the Commonwealth government through emergency legislation at the Commonwealth level in order to control the Australian labour market during the war. Towards the end of the war the JEB was returned to the State government's control, continuing to provide a vocational guidance and placement service for juveniles from 14 years to 21 years of age. It was eventually disbanded in the early 1950s with the Commonwealth taking over the comprehensive function of the State Employment Exchanges which had been in operation in Queensland for nearly a half a century. Through the White Paper, Full Employment in Australia, the Commonwealth had thus entered the fields of education and employment for the first time in peace-time Australia in an endeavour to address the massive problems of post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction and had incorporated the guidance strategy into its arsenal of technical solutions. By the end of the war, vocational guidance as a practice was thus well established in both spheres of government, with the State's JEB in the Department of Labour and Industry and with the newly formed Commonwealth-based employment services (CES) in the Department of Labour and National Service. Vocational guidance, however, had been substantially transformed by those psychological technologies of testing and inscription which had been initially developed from those pedagogic practices of the ascertainment, segregation and management of backwardness and subsequently trialled during the war on the civilian and service personnel populations to assist in the efficiencies of the war-effort.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi was thus something very special, it blew the minds of those participating, especially to those familiar with the history of Sun Lutang, a famous Chinese martial artist who had rejected the powerful patriarchal Confucian tradition by establishing the first ever female martial arts course in the 1930s in China. Elva’s Australia Dreaming Tai Chi Qigong thus demonstrated the healing power of Tai Chi Qigong in being able to transcend cultural boundaries, to transform the mystical imagery and practices of Confucian, Daoist and patriarchal cosmology into something familiar and accessible, thus paradoxically belonging to the world and to common humanity.
The very first performance by Elva of Australia Dreaming 15 Form Qigong was at an earlier Tai Chi for Health Conference at Connecticut in the USA in June 2003, where it was received with rapturous applause and appreciation. The Australian imagery and respectful cultural references to the First Australians affirmed a cross cultural appreciation and a rejection of specious claims of cultural appropriation from Chinese imagery and ownership, as well as a rejection of a safe and secure Terra Nullius Qigong set.
The fact that Elva as a white Caucasian woman, a gweipo from the “Land-down-Under” could create a beautiful Tai Chi Qigong Form from Sun Style Tai Chi that was not driven by Chinese, Taoist and Confucian patriarchal cosmology suggested that everyone in this world could enjoy the magic and power of Tai Chi Qigong referencing images of Nature through their own cultural landscape, cosmology and their own personal Dreaming.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors is offered as our tribute to ancestors of all Australians, regardless of their ethnic, clan, tribal and cultural origins, and also to a global community of people striving for a more peaceful, happy, healthy and harmonious co-existence through a secular, safe and scientific approach to the magic and beauty of Tai Chi Qigong.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors – Sun Style Tai Chi was thus something very special, it blew the minds of those participating, especially to those familiar with the history of Sun Lutang, a famous Chinese martial artist who had rejected the powerful patriarchal Confucian tradition by establishing the first ever female martial arts course in the 1930s in China. Elva’s Australia Dreaming Tai Chi Qigong thus demonstrated the healing power of Tai Chi Qigong in being able to transcend cultural boundaries, to transform the mystical imagery and practices of Confucian, Daoist and patriarchal cosmology into something familiar and accessible, thus paradoxically belonging to the world and to common humanity.
The very first performance by Elva of Australia Dreaming 15 Form Qigong was at an earlier Tai Chi for Health Conference at Connecticut in the USA in June 2003, where it was received with rapturous applause and appreciation. The Australian imagery and respectful cultural references to the First Australians affirmed a cross cultural appreciation and a rejection of specious claims of cultural appropriation from Chinese imagery and ownership, as well as a rejection of a safe and secure Terra Nullius Qigong set.
The fact that Elva as a white Caucasian woman, a gweipo from the “Land-down-Under” could create a beautiful Tai Chi Qigong Form from Sun Style Tai Chi that was not driven by Chinese, Taoist and Confucian patriarchal cosmology suggested that everyone in this world could enjoy the magic and power of Tai Chi Qigong referencing images of Nature through their own cultural landscape, cosmology and their own personal Dreaming.
Australia Dreaming: Tribute to the Ancestors is offered as our tribute to ancestors of all Australians, regardless of their ethnic, clan, tribal and cultural origins, and also to a global community of people striving for a more peaceful, happy, healthy and harmonious co-existence through a secular, safe and scientific approach to the magic and beauty of Tai Chi Qigong.
It is important to understand that the standard martial form, kata, pattern or routine represents a curriculum of movements choreographed or strung together in an arbitrary sequence as a means of remembering specific techniques. The standard form or kata is thus essentially a memory device, a mnemonic that is visual and kinaesthetic, that historically has assisted the “oral transmission” of martial knowledge and skill without the need for literacy, a written language or other recording device. Learning a standard form, kata or pattern for its own sake may be the goal for many who practice a martial art such as Tai Chi only for health, but even this goal can also be more efficiently achieved by the method of teaching and learning as outlined here and can be very creative, enjoyable, immensely satisfying in developing powerful mind-body co-ordination techniques to significantly enhance health, wellbeing and an efficient use of energy.
Also, the analytical method of practicing specific techniques from a standard form or kata is very clearly articulated in the Japanese martial arts with the term – Bunkai - referring to a process of analysing kata and extracting fighting techniques from the movements of a form or kata. Reference here to the mirror aspect of any movement in the kata, form or sequence thus highlights the presence of two players – what the Japanese call Tori (one who demonstrates technique) and Uke (receiver of technique). When practising a solo form, the mirror-method of training thus enhances the visualisation by Tori of the presence of Uke, the imagined opponent. The mirrored intention of the technique as interpreted by Tori is thus reflected in the performance of the solo form or kata which demonstrates mind-body coordination, connection of upper and lower body, controlled transfer or weight, the direction of the gaze reflecting the intention of the movement, the rhythm of opening and closing movements, all consistent and flowing with Chi Kung (or Qigong) being coordinated breathing techniques central to Chojun Miyagi’s Goju Ryu Karate-do – “the way of inhaling and exhaling is hardness and softness” (see Bubishi: The Classic Manual of Combat, 1995, by Patrick McCarthy)
With the Tai Chi Kung Freestyle Form, as outlined in this article, students can develop the confidence to practice by themselves, practicing what they can remember, being analytical about the shape to simplify, the upper or lower body, left and or right, in any sequence, standing or seated, physically or only in the mind, keeping it simple. Any simplified part of a standard form or sequence can be thus practiced without feeling remorse at not remembering what comes next. As the teacher, as the coach you are assisting the student with methods of learning, teaching and practicing for and by themselves, to move and exercise in a safe and confident manner.
Contrary to progressivist histories of vocational guidance built around the presence of great men and women and its origins in the psychological trait-and-factor" theory, these early practices had nothing to do with individual psychology, a particular technical expertise which did not emerge in Australia as the science of vocational guidance until after the Second World War.
This paper thus focuses on a genealogy, on an historical analysis of the vocational personality in post-colonial Queensland, drawing mostly from archival material at the level of official discourses.
To simplify for our purposes, this relational analysis between "Text" and "Context" begins with differentiating between two different “contexts” of tai chi, between how Tai Chi historically has been practised as a Martial Art and how Tai Chi is practised as a Health Art. What constitutes the “texts of effective teaching” in the martial arts through traditional contexts of lineage, secret transmission protocols, metaphysical and combative orientations (see Cartmell, 2003, Wong, 1996; Wile, 1993; Miller, 2000) are thus qualitatively different to the “texts of effective teaching” for Tai Chi for Health (TCH) within the secular context of evidence based research and the modern duty of care that operates within a scientific approach to the health and fitness industries (see Arthy, 2006).
Accordingly, the main focus of the discussion will be within the "context" of TCH wherein we will formulate "Effective Teaching Texts" as three specific and interrelated concepts of representing the comprehensive framework of effective teaching for TCH:
• Knowledge of Tai Chi, Fitness and Health
• Technical Skills of Teaching
• Connections between Teacher and Student
While the main practical “context” of TCH will be examined as the community based class, our discussion will also examine the need to expand the focus and support network that exists at present within the modern and secular concept of TCH. We will examine the need for the development of a comprehensive framework of "effective teaching" within the context of "training-the-trainer" of TCH.
This need for a comprehensive framework for TCH has its historical and philosophical beginnings with the “open mind” concept of learning and teaching of “Tai Chi as a Health Art” first radically promulgated by Sun Lutang in the world’s first publication of Tai Chi, in his book titled Study of Taijiquan (Sun Lutang 1921; and Arthy, 2006). We know today that specific TCH Instructor Training has already expanded from the base level and short course workshop concept focussed on specific health issues as pioneered by Dr Paul Lam and developed further in Australia by Alice Liping Yuan through Exercise Medicine Australia. This needs to be extended even further into the contexts of professional health and fitness education and training programs, to provide resources and skills necessary to gain effective teaching expertise as an essential part of the accreditation of the different levels of the TCH Instructor. Teaching expertise needs to be an equal player and should parallel the development of the practical skills and research focus and outcomes of TCH.
In order to be effective in the broader “context” of the delivery of TCH, serious consideration should be given to the expansion of the concept of TCH Instructor Training into a multiplicity of other contexts, to make TCH teaching expertise both accessible and comprehensive. The “Effective Teaching Texts” of TCH could and perhaps should be written into the curriculum, to be inserted into the pedagogy of “training-the-trainer” modules of a range of health, exercise and educational professionals including – Medical Doctors, Community Nurses, Fitness Instructors, Therapists, School Teachers, Home Carers, Social Workers, Aged Care and Hospice Workers.
In the short-term, however, there needs to be a valid pathway and graded levels of opportunities for the TCH Instructor. This would involve accreditation and recognition independent from the pathway for accreditation for Tai Chi as a Martial Art. This accreditation for TCH would thus include an ongoing commitment to developing teaching expertise of TCH, to “how to teach TCH effectively”, based on a comprehensive curriculum of "Effective Teaching Texts" which are fundamental to a secular and science based approach to TCH from beginners to advanced levels.
This paper has been written to enhance the application of Tai Chi for Health promotion in the twenty-first century through an examination of the radical contribution that Sun Lutang made almost one hundred years ago to the promotion of Tai Chi for Health and to the subsequent transformations of Tai Chi as a Health Art from Tai Chi practised as a vigorous and combative form of Chinese Boxing in the early part of the twentieth century in China (see Wong, 1996; Wile, 1993; Miller, 2000).
This examination outlines a snapshot history of the emergence of Tai Chi for Health based on various facts, evidence and respected published accounts of the historical emergence of Tai Chi for Health and the roles played by Sun Lutang, Chen Wei Ming and Yang Cheng Fu. It is the juxtaposition of facts and evidence, grounded within a consistent and coherent chronology, which questions and challenges the pervasive views that Yang family style of "Taijiquan" was the original Tai Chi health art and that Tai Chi is a Taoist art advocating harmony with Nature, and characterising conflict with Nature as contributing to illness, poverty and disease. More significantly for our purposes, is that Sun Lutang was the first Tai Chi Master to break with the patriarchal Confucian tradition by publicly offering Tai Chi to women, and he was the first to write about and publish Tai Chi for Health and personal development and was thus the first Tai Chi Master to promote to the public Tai Chi as a Health Art (see Miller, 2000).
However, the main focus of the paper is on analysing contributions to Tai Chi for Health as specific concepts and principles of Tai Chi which were published by Sun Lutang and by Chen Wei Ming. This examination highlights both the insights and genius of Sun Lutang and the historical significance of Chen Wei Ming in the subsequent motivations to transform the vigorous and combative Yang family style of Tai Chi to the slow and graceful Yang style Tai Chi as it is practised and recognised today (see Wile, 1993). These contributions are articulated in the paper in a language that is accessible and suitable for the general reader and student interested in Tai Chi as a contemporary secular Health Art.
In regards to research methodology for this paper, an understanding of Tai Chi for Health epistemologically and historically cannot be gained through the academic paradigms of the scientifically controlled experiment, epidemiology or medical research (see Popper, 1974; Kuhn 1970; Lakatos et al 1980). Social and cultural historiography driven by a semiotic analysis (see Barthes, 2001; Eco 1976; Foucault 1977; Hirst et al, 1984; Levi-Strauss, 1977; Rose and Rose 1977; Ryan, 1973; Turner, 1975) has informed the intellectual engine of the research methodology for this paper in an evaluation of myths of Tai Chi often presented as history and in the presentation of concepts and principles of Tai Chi for Health. Semiotics and Tai Chi philosophy of the Yin and the Yang are tarred to the same East and West brush of paradoxical logic, an unusual but legitimate nexus of intellectual endeavour within a qualitative approach to the social sciences.
In the context of Tai Chi as a contemporary secular Health Art, the paper identifies the radical contribution to Tai Chi for Health made by Dr Paul Lam in the international arena of the latter part of the twentieth century and spearheading the way into the twenty-first century. In addition, the paper outlines the rationale and the necessity for Tai Chi for Health Instructor Training and for public policy development of Tai Chi for Health to be formulated, promoted and practised, not as a metaphysical journey or as a martial art, but as a secular Health Art (see Cheryl, 2001) which is based on evidence based, scientific research and on the modern duty-of-care principle (see Arthy, 2005).
This book has identified how the child-centred classroom is convenient and pivotal to meeting the powerful interests and desires of a wider anti-intellectual culture which characterises a non-vocational, general education and a liberal-arts education as the “Mickey Mouse” option in the pursuit of finding a worthwhile career. This examination provides the rationale to understand how the heresy of a subject centred curriculum and the abandonment of failure in a child-centred classroom have been driven and given credibility by an anti-intellectual positivist psychology and associated, secularised white-European and Christian cultural mores alive and thriving in the twenty first century classroom. Problems of the contemporary dysfunctional “student-in-crisis” are revealed through this history of the present as being compounded by a failure of the child-centred classroom to provide the intellectual capital necessary to process the knowledge of the world of people outside the classroom, essential to facilitate wise and well-informed educational and vocational choices in a complex consumer society and educational marketplace in a liberal democracy. The question of “failure” for the “student-in-crisis” is thus shown to be an outcome, not of the dysfunction of the individual student diagnostically mapped by a positivist psychology, but of the failure of a child-centred classroom to prescribe a content saturated curriculum visible, graded into levels of competency and publically accountable necessary for the good citizen to survive and thrive in a competitive yet ethical consumer culture, in a modern liberal democracy.
The historical "Cultural Theme of Civilising and Christianising" maps the genealogy of the shaping of the “good citizen” to the civilising and Christianising practices central to the classroom in the Queensland colonial era through the absorption of these practices and cultural norms into the new matching psychometric science as central to the pedagogic, ethical and vocational shaping of the good citizen in the contemporary child-centred classroom..
The historical "Technology Themes from Phrenology to Eugenics to Positivist Psychology" identify the migration of child-centred technologies into the classroom, with new problems for government emerging in the form of pastoral governance of failure, retardation and the problem child, and in managing the distributions of the good citizens ambitious for a higher education. In the absence of graded methods of achievement and the abandonment of failure previously made visible through the subject centred classroom and public examinations, new child centred technologies pioneered by the new psychological consultant, the vocational guidance officer, would become reliant almost exclusively on the "square pegs in round holes", the so-called trait-and-factor psychological model, pioneered by Sir Cyril Burt, the world’s first official psychologist.
Foucault’s "Genealogical Method" of analysis is used in this book to reveal a specific history of the good citizen in a liberal democracy. In particular, it, documents, analyses and describes through primary source material, historical records and discourse analysis, how the cultural identity, the ethical and vocational attributes of the modern “good citizen” in Queensland and Australia have been shaped historically through powerful institutional and government policies, practices and strategies. The temporal and cultural framework is from the mid nineteenth century with the subject centred British colonial classroom driven by the cultural technologies of phrenology and eugenics, through to the north American child centred classroom in the modern era utilising the secular pseudo-science of a positivist psychology. The genealogy of the good citizen maps multiple threads into the school and classroom as being saturated with white-European and Christian cultural mores of vocational and social performance, conduct, capacity and ability to the present day.
Finally, as an illustration of the failure of the child-centred classroom, we will re-examine the case study of Paul J as illustrative of the impact of the Radford child-centred classroom on the question of cultural literacy, that is, on the question as to how does any student begin to make informed choices and decisions on the basis of little or no knowledge of the complex world of people, of history, culture and society, and lacks the necessary skills to research and process that knowledge. The “reasoned” approach to careers counselling first articulated by Frank Parsons will be examined as a practical alternative to the dominant and pervasive psychological matching technology embedded in the Radford’s child-centred classroom of personal suitability.
The various case studies have generated and are consistent with an anthropological understanding of some of the key cultural imperatives operating in the traditional career counselling practice with the objective of increasing flexibility and diversity in career planning. The particular case study of Paul typical of careers indecision experienced at university level highlights these cultural imperatives, including the self matching "parachute process". It also serves as a launching pad for a helicopter or "reasoned" strategy in careers planning. This anthropological approach places great importance on understanding the key relationship between cultural literacy and a reasoned process of decision making in the modern democratic state, and highlights the impact of this relationship on a viable careers planning strategy. This helicopter strategy incorporates multiple forms of knowledge as well as taking account of both ethical and technical considerations in the career decision making process.
According to this conventional wisdom, the best schools are those where the subjects and activities offered match the individual student's temperament. On a cursory glance, that might seem sensible. But what it really is, unfortunately, is yet another instance of the "exams and tests are bad" mentality that has permeated the education systems of many developed countries, ours included. It is not socially correct, under this pernicious dictum, to make such comparisons between students or anyone. Everyone is equal.... Now-days, of course, it is viewed with disfavour to talk about failure. In this Age of Euphemisms, under the thumb of those who know best, there are only different success levels. The fact that this misguided scale starts from rank failure apparently is beside the point. (Courier Mail, 1993a)
Throughout this book, we have examined historical threads of bureaucratic-pastoral practices within the fields of education and employment in Queensland, practices which have calculated, measured, inscribed, guided and shaped the competent good citizen. This genealogy of the good citizen has not been examined in terms of theory, philosophy or ideology, but as having been shaped through a complex of governmental and community practices, techniques and agencies. The examination has extended to a review of those progressivist histories of education and guidance which have supported the norms, values and technologies of a North American child-centred educational culture and which, in Australia, have unwaveringly condemned the centralised State governmental administration of the traditional subject-centred classroom.
In this chapter, we will extend our examination of the genealogy of the good citizen, focussing on the migration of individual psychology and a child-centred pedagogy into the school, classroom and curriculum through the governmental guidance strategy of post-war reconstruction of the good citizen. It is the Radford Scheme which provides the pivot around which this the concluding chapter is organised. The Radford Scheme heralded both the psychological self-matching technology of vocational guidance and the progressive child-centred pedagogy at secondary level as a devolution of curriculum decision-making towards the school and classroom and away from the centralised bureaucratic structure of the State education apparatus. The Radford Scheme also transformed the distributional technology of the good citizen which now entered the university through the devolution of the bureaucratic techniques of measurement, calculation and inscription away from the subject-centred classroom towards the bureaucratic-pastoral technology of individual psychology. It is the theme of the whole personality, however, which provides an historical continuity for our review of the migration of a child-centred pedagogy into the Queensland classroom at primary and secondary levels through the guidance strategy. Upon the implementation of the Radford Scheme in the early 1970s, the technologies of measuring, calculating and inscribing this whole personality may well have shifted away from psychometric testing towards a self-matching technology. However, the success of the guidance strategy can be measured, not in terms of a humanistic condemnation of psychometric testing, but in terms of its significant influence in facilitating the migration of the persona of the whole personality into the educational fabric. Moreover, this success is a measure of the adaptive capacity of individual psychology as a cultural technology to measure, calculate and inscribe the whole personality of the student in relation to cultural fields and institutional practices, the whole personality, however, being the raison d'etre of a child-centred pedagogy.
The early 1960s witnessed a general revival of a child-centred pedagogy. This was a revival of the progressive pedagogy of the New Education invigorated by the successes of individual psychology during the Second World War and of the guidance strategy being applied to the post-war reconstruction of the good citizen. This revival took the form of a series of conferences facilitated by the ACER, the R&G Branch and the Faculty of Education at the University of Queensland (see Bassett, 1962, 1964, 1971) held in Melbourne and Brisbane which converged on the theme of individual differences in the primary school. Consistent with the ambitions of this progressive pedagogy, the subject-centred classroom was targeted as being a major obstacle in locating the unique individual - the pupil - and not the subject matter of the curriculum as the central pedagogic and ethical focus of the classroom (see Wood, 1962; Newling, 1962; Bassett, 1962a; and Radford, 1962). The revival of child-centeredness as the pedagogic principle was specifically linked to the influence of the guidance movement, a movement that was now recommending the trialling and the introduction of new child-centred techniques such as programmed instruction and project work suitable for individualised learning. The secondary school classroom, however, was to remain within the firm grip of the subject-centred curriculum and related forms of assessment for at least another decade until the radical implementation of the Radford Scheme.
We will re-trace some of those genealogical threads of the good citizen to the New Education movement which proselytised a progressive child-centred pedagogy through the “germination” strategy of individual psychology. This examination will show how this child-centred pedagogy and supporting psychological technologies subsequently migrated into the Queensland classroom to shape the cultural norms of the good citizen (1) through the germination strategy of individual psychology, through the post-war guidance strategy, though the agencies of the ACER and the R&G Branch enabling the teacher to establish, in the words of McCulloch (1964, p.60), a relationship with the pupil based on the concepts of the guidance movement.
As the earlier sections have shown, the educational wastage is greater among females than males. A major function of the guidance programme would be to break down the prejudice that secondary education is less necessary for girls and to spread information on the wide variety of professional and semi professional occupations now open to females. Such changes in public attitudes will be affected by the printed word; but the individual will be more strongly influenced by the information and advice on her own problems conveyed in the personal interview with a guidance officer. (R&G Bulletin, 1957)
The focus in this chapter will be on the emergence of post-war vocational guidance and careers counselling activities at both the State and Commonwealth levels of government directed at education higher than post-compulsory levels. A previous chapter has already examined the establishment of vocational guidance practices in State Education Department's R&G Branch from the late 1940s for children at the primary school level. The Branch also provided limited vocational guidance at the State secondary level from the beginnings of its operations. By the end of the 1950s, however, the State was beginning to rapidly expand the provision of vocational guidance at the secondary level when, in 1963 with the abolition of the Scholarship examination, vocational guidance at the primary school level was no longer considered relevant. Following the transfer of the grade eight students from primary to high schools in 1964, educational and vocational guidance services were provided by the State government only in the State high schools (R&G, 1965).
Vocational guidance had also been available at the secondary level for school children and government assisted scholars at the university level by the Commonwealth government from the beginnings of the Commonwealth-based employment services (CES) until the early 1950s. Through agreements made between the State and Commonwealth governments, the State Employment Exchanges including the JEB was closed and the responsibility for the administration of the CSS was transferred to the State government from 1952. The purpose of the CSS was to lessen inequalities of educational opportunity at the tertiary level with 3000 entrance Scholarships being available each year for open competition by boys and girls who had completed a normal secondary school course. A limited number, not exceeding two percent, of the 3000 Scholarships awarded each year were made available for competition by applicants of Mature Age. Applications for Mature Age Scholarships were accepted from students who were not under twenty five and in general not over thirty years of age at the date of application and who had matriculated (Australian Archives, Qld, 1950).
It was not until the implementation of the Murray Report (1957) that the Commonwealth government again became directly involved in the provision of vocational guidance and careers counselling services to school children, particularly to those attending private and independent schools. This renewed interest by the Commonwealth in vocational guidance for school children was in response to the guidance problem wherein wastage of scholastic talent from the educational ladder leading towards the university level was identified as a national extravagance.
This chapter will focus on the implementation of a post-war guidance strategy by both the Commonwealth and the State governments in addressing educational and employment problems of reconstructing the post-war economy towards Full Employment and the rehabilitation of ex-Service personnel and civilian war workers. Vocational guidance represented a new cultural technology of efficiency which was considered capable of facilitating governmental policy of equality of educational opportunity and avoidance of talent wastage through selecting the most suitable material available to be trained for the professions.
There has been, too a swing away from passive reception and the mere memorising of facts to the encouragement of each child to develop by his own activity all those gifts and aptitudes he possesses and those virtues which he is capable of achieving. Allied to this swing is the idea of the pupil as a member of the school community where he receives a training in citizenship. (L.D. Edwards, "Report of the Director General of Education", in QPP, 1948 49, v.1, p.601)
The governance of retardation within the State primary school classroom, as we will recall from previous chapters, emerged directly from the problems of classification of scholastic performance of white European pupils in the early part of this century. The subject centred curriculum within the primary school classroom determined the external, pedagogic standard by which these pupils would be classified as needing to be advanced or retarded, which in turn depended upon the results of periodic examinations held by the classroom teacher. The introduction of compulsory education, the influence of the School hygiene movement and medical inspections within primary schools, and governmental concerns for efficiency and productivity in the public sector all contributed towards making visible the problem of retardation within the classroom. In the early 1920s, a policy of segregation of mental defectives from the general State primary school population was implemented which resulted in the establishment of the Backward School, subsequently renamed the Opportunity School. New technologies of individual psychology were soon deployed in assisting in the ascertainment of pupil retardation, essentially for the purpose of confirming the primary school teacher's classification of pupil retardation which continued to be based on the external standards of a subject centred curriculum. It appears that the external, curriculum centred testing contained in the Grade levels of primary school continued to provide the principle standard for the classification of retardation until at least the establishment of the R&G Branch in the late 1940s.
However, although public instruction of backward children had adopted new techniques of a child centred pedagogy, compulsory attendance at a such schools had not solved the problem of backwardness. By the late 1930s, as the extent of the problem was not sufficiently visible to government, a review of the problem of backward persons was undertaken. Accordingly in November 1938, as a result of this review, legislation was introduced to the Queensland parliament as the Backward Persons Bill:
The Bill deals with those persons who are either born without the normal or usual standard of intelligence or whose mental development becomes arrested or retarded. These persons are generally referred to as mental deficients. They are a class distinct altogether from those people who were referred to previously as insane persons. (Hon. E.M. Hanlon, Secretary for Health and Home Affairs, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 1938, v.173, p.1726)
Backwardness had now become a very difficult problem for government, where the greatest difficulty was stated as the lack of knowledge as to its extent. A board was appointed under this legislation consisting of the Director General of Health and Medical Services, the Director of Education, and the Superintendent of Mental Hygiene to collect information as to the number of children and the various degrees of their backwardness. The board was given the powers of a royal commission to demand replies to any request for information in order to establish the magnitude of the problem. Proclamation of the rest of the Bill was to take place after the board had completed its investigation.
And his right to labour in joy
Not all your laws can strangle that right;
Nor the gates of hell destroy;
For it came with the making of man,
And was kneaded into his bones,
And it will stand at the last of things,
On the dust of crumbled thrones."
(Eldwin Markham, quoted by the Hon. T.A. Foley, Secretary for Labour and Industry, in QPD, 1941, v.178, p.1657)
Guidance is not something new, foisted on to our system from without. As long as there have been teachers, there have been guides, and this state of affairs will ever remain, for the school teacher is to his pupils guide, philosopher, and friend. (QTU, 1941, p.1)
Vocational guidance first emerged as a practice in Queensland, not in the State primary school classroom as was envisaged by L.D. Edwards, nor as a theoretical breakthrough in psychology, but in the State's technical colleges as a direct outcome of governmental intervention into the Boy Problem, a particular aspect of the very serious problem of unemployment which had been accumulating in Queensland in the late 1920s. Governmental action resulted in plans to remedy the unemployment problem of youth and the enforced idleness of unemployed lads. All of these plans would necessitate the active involvement and participation of a mixed personnel, various community, charity and religious organisations as well as State government Officers teachers, head teachers and police officers - serving in an official capacity at the local community level. It was the boy problem which would subsequently come to highlight the central role of the family in the governance of juvenile employment through the implementation of vocational training, guidance and placement activities. The boy problem represented the State government's acceptance of its responsibility to find employment for youths and young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty, and particularly in respect of those in the metropolitan and city areas. According to the government, at least 8,000 boys were leaving school each year, and the question of securing employment for such lads was so vital that it concerned all classes of the community (W.H. Austin, "Third Annual Report of the Under Secretary, Department of Labour and Industry for Year ended 30th June 1933", in QPP, 1933, p.1031).
During this period of the Great Depression, the governmental problem emerged as how to guide rather than coerce, how to provide the necessary vocational guidance in accordance with labour market priorities, not through means of compulsion, but through techniques of persuasion, sound reasoning and common sense. New technologies were demanded to address the boy problem, to be implanted in the bureaucratic-pastoral space at the institutional nexus of education, juvenile employment and the family. Out of this nexus between the public and private and converging areas of governmental attention, the practice of vocational guidance emerged as a part of the matching and placement activities deemed necessary to alleviate problems of juvenile unemployment and to assist in the re distribution of juvenile labour away from the city to the country. From this governmental intervention into the local community with vocational training programmes and rural placement training schemes was formed the State government's JEB in 1935.
The practice of vocational guidance was well established by the late 1930s within the JEB but had not been taken up within the primary school system as had been anticipated by Edwards over a decade earlier. The increasing complexity of the educational ladder, the demands upon government to remedy the dysfunctions of the juvenile labour markets caused by the Great Depression, the beginnings of a highly focussed campaign by advocates of a progressive child-centred pedagogy through the ACER calling for a scientific approach to a New Education, however, were all combining to generate a need for new technologies for shaping, calculating, measuring, inscribing and guiding the natural bent of whole personality. Psychological techniques of testing and inscription trialled in the ascertainment and management of backwardness were trickling through from the opportunity schools, germinating to shape the whole personality of not only the backward child but also the primary school pupil and the juvenile seeking employment. As we will see in subsequent chapters, however, this whole personality would not become fully formed until the abandonment of the subject-centred pedagogy and the full scale migration of a child-centred pedagogy from the 1960s through to the implementation of the Radford Scheme in the early 1970s. By the end of the 1930s, the germination strategy of individual psychology was set to transform the primary school classroom with a systemic guidance programme to be introduced under the direction of Mr J.J. Pratt, a primary school teacher who had been specially trained at the headquarters of the ACER in Melbourne for two years (see Cunningham and Pratt, 1940). The advent of war with Japan, however, forestalled the implementation of this guidance programme aimed at governmental efficiency through matching the right good citizen “pegs” in the right vocational holes.
Meanwhile, the JEB and its vocational guidance and placement function had continued under the control of the Department of Public Instruction until the beginning of the war years when it was taken over by the Commonwealth government through emergency legislation at the Commonwealth level in order to control the Australian labour market during the war. Towards the end of the war the JEB was returned to the State government's control, continuing to provide a vocational guidance and placement service for juveniles from 14 years to 21 years of age. It was eventually disbanded in the early 1950s with the Commonwealth taking over the comprehensive function of the State Employment Exchanges which had been in operation in Queensland for nearly a half a century. Through the White Paper, Full Employment in Australia, the Commonwealth had thus entered the fields of education and employment for the first time in peace-time Australia in an endeavour to address the massive problems of post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction and had incorporated the guidance strategy into its arsenal of technical solutions. By the end of the war, vocational guidance as a practice was thus well established in both spheres of government, with the State's JEB in the Department of Labour and Industry and with the newly formed Commonwealth-based employment services (CES) in the Department of Labour and National Service. Vocational guidance, however, had been substantially transformed by those psychological technologies of testing and inscription which had been initially developed from those pedagogic practices of the ascertainment, segregation and management of backwardness and subsequently trialled during the war on the civilian and service personnel populations to assist in the efficiencies of the war-effort.
Very often the child of one talent is treated the same as the child with 10 talents, and, like its prototype in the Bible, its talent is hid, buried, or lost. If a child of one or two talents was taught a few subjects it would be better able to master these and become more efficient and thorough. Teachers should understand more fully the nature of the child they are expected to train. Teachers and children should be classified accordingly, some children learn rapidly, others are dull, phlegmatic, and slow. (S.T. Julian, "Letter to Editor", Courier Mail, 6th April, 1922)
This chapter will examine the beginnings of vocational guidance in Queensland as a bureaucratic-pastoral activity of the primary school teacher in identifying the natural-bent and vocational talents of the good citizen and in generating ambition in the family for a higher education. The focus will be on the re-structuring of the colonial educational system from the turn of the century through to the early 1930s towards a complex range of vocational outcomes progressively coming under the direct control of the Queensland Department of Public Instruction throughout this period. The restructured educational ladder was to represent significantly expanded opportunities for children and adults to participate in secondary, university, agricultural, technical and continuing education (1) in ways that previously had not existed within Queensland. A vocational guidance scheme was first formulated from within the Department of Public Instruction under the heading of "Sagax, Capax, and Efficax" prior to the First World War in response to governmental imperatives for national efficiency. Although it was a scheme which was articulated as necessitating co operation between the State primary school and the family, it was first proposed to be trialled by the Department of Public Instruction at the Central Technical College in Brisbane.
However, as the words of S.T. Julian ("Letter to Editor", Courier Mail, 6th April, 1922) at the beginning of the chapter would suggest, vocational guidance had previously been available in Australia through private consultation during the colonial era and well into the twentieth century through the application of the mental sciences of phrenology and physiognomy. These mental sciences had operated within the moral space of an innate and fixed nature of the human condition, the visibility of which could be ascertained by the outward physical signs or the language of the body that specifically included a taxonomy regarding notions of character and abilities as being central to scholastic performance within school.
In a properly arranged society, a proponent for phrenology argued (S.T. Julian, "Letter to Editor", Courier Mail, 6th April, 1922), men, women and young people would be placed in positions for which they were naturally best adapted. If the Government were to lay the right foundation with children on phrenological lines then they could be taught subjects suited to their mental capacity. The average child had to learn far too many subjects.
The practising Phrenologist in Australia had been able to provide a vocational guidance service to the public "By Authority of the Education Department as a Visitor to State Schools of Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland". It was claimed that this Phrenologist could ascertain the vocational nature of the child, that is, determine the occupation best adapted for the child through the visibility of physical features:
The body is simply the instrument through which the mind manifests itself while on earth. The mind is manifested through forty or more organs. Each is primary and independent in its functions, doing its own work, and not doing the work of any other. Each of these powers is manifested by or through a particular nerve, organ, or portion of the brain. The power of each organ all other things being equal is in exact proportion to the size and quality of that portion of the brain through which it is manifested. The mental powers are possessed originally in different degrees by different individuals, and also by the same individual. One possesses ten talents, another five, another one. Each mental power grows stronger and becomes more skilful by proper exercise. Our accountability is just in proportion as we make good or bad use of talents. Each mental power was created for the purpose of doing good, and was intended to be so used. (Blumenthal, 1896)
In October, 1896, a letter (Blumenthal, 1896a) was received by the Queensland Department of Public Instruction from G.A. de Blumenthal who identified himself as Professor and Lecturer on Mental Science, as Practical Delineator of Character by the late Rev. Dr de Blumenthal's "Swiss System of Craniology, Physiognomy, and Physiology". He requested from the Minister for Education the following:
I take the liberty of arguing permission to visit the state schools of Queensland after school hours for the purpose of examining phrenologically according to the Swiss system any schoolchildren, who may desire to submit themselves to such an examination. (Blumenthal, 1896a)
Although a similar request had been made three years earlier and was refused by Mr J.G. Anderson, Under Secretary for Public Instruction, this particular request was this time accepted by Anderson with the comment appearing on the letter as follows:
I think no objection need be raised to the writer examining the heads of school children, so after school hours if they are willing with the approval of their parents organisations to submit to the process; but school work should not be interfered with. (Reply to Letter from Blumenthal, 1896a)
These particular mental sciences were never formally included or became part of the institutional fabric of government in Queensland. It was the science of individual psychology, as we have seen in previous chapters, that emerged within the early 1920s in the government of retardation as a technology capable of making visible and ascertaining the level of mental deficiency as a pedagogic classification of retardation.
This chapter will examine aspects of those organisational changes and initiatives taken within the Department of Public Instruction, in particular the first official vocational guidance experiment titled "Sagax, Capax and Efficax", technical education and the New Scholarship. Together, these initiatives represented the transformation of the colonial educational system which now included a complex range of vocational alternatives. By the end of the 1920s, these alternatives were broadly categorised by Mr L.D. Edwards as the dichotomy of academic or practical.
In this post-colonial era with government seeking new nation status among the enlightened and civilised nations of the world, higher levels of education at secondary and university levels were no longer to be the province of ambitious parents able to pay tuition fees at the State Grammar, technical and private schools. A higher education would now be provided for those capable of perceiving the value of such education, capable of receiving formal instruction and having the power to make practical use of this knowledge. Such an education thus was to be for those with the natural-bent and the scholastic talent. It was to be an education for the mentally fit (J. Story, "Educational Pioneering in Queensland", Under-Secretary for Public Instruction, in QDPI, 1914, p.443). The governmental imperative of efficiency now presented a need to generate new parental ambitions and to provide a significantly expanded number of scholarships and financial assistance so as to fill the greatly expanded capacity of the educational system after the implementation of the New Scholarship. More importantly, however, was the need for new bureaucratic-pastoral techniques for identifying the natural talent of children for higher education.
By way of introducing the New Scholarship to the public through parliament, the guiding scheme of "sagax, capax and efficax" was presented in 1913 by J.W. Blair, Secretary for Public Instruction, as facilitating the bureaucratic-pastoral objectives of generating parental ambition and reducing the wastage of square pegs in round holes. While the governmental focus of this vocational guiding scheme of "sagax, capax and efficax" was interrupted by the onset of the First World War and dissipated within a period of government inactivity, it would re emerge in the late 1920s as a result of a new problem for government failed parental ambition to seek new educational and vocational opportunities provided by the New Scholarship. This time vocational guidance was formulated as an experiment for small number of State primary schools, an experiment which lasted only a relatively short period. The vocational guidance experiment had by this time absorbed new techniques from the embryonic science of individual psychology and from the North American progressive child-centred pedagogy. As discussed in the previous chapter, these psychological techniques of calculation, measurement and inscription had been trialled in the governance of retardation at the primary school level. Within a few years, vocational guidance was again taken up, not within the primary school but in the Manpower model of the JEB to address the Boy Problem.
The training of the mentally defective, while hardly a popular form of welfare work, is one which is of great value. Not only is it a means of increasing the commercial value of the defective's work, it is the key to his happiness. Work with the mentally defective is an invaluable experience to anyone interested in genetic psychology, for here mental processes are slowed down and tendencies and impulses can be studied in their simplest and starkest forms. A rich field of research lies open to the investigator who would discover the best ways to help those mentally handicapped to make the most of their lives. ("From Mr. Bevington's Report", in QPP, 1930, p.789)
This chapter traces the historical transformation of the governmental problem of retardation in order to help gather the significant threads in the genealogies of both the mentally defective child and the modern good citizen. The problem of retardation emerges historically from the broad problems of governing the colonial primary school classroom through the joint bureaucratic-pastoral objectives of establishing both commonality and differentiation within the general primary school population. In other words, retardation will be examined as emerging as a governmental problem in relation to both the ethical and vocational formation of the modern good citizen and the classification of the pupil within the graded subject-centred classroom in the State primary school system.
This chapter also traces the early beginnings of individual psychology as applied to the governance of retardation in the early 1920s in the technical classification of unfitness for the normal, graded and subject-centred classroom. The technology of individual psychology would subsequently become absorbed into primary school pedagogic practices to address the bureaucratic-pastoral objectives of shaping the mentally defective child into the ethically and vocationally competent good citizen, through such pedagogic practices as individualised instruction and segregation. This same technology trialled at the opportunity schools in the ascertainment of mental deficiency would from the late 1940s begin to migrate into both State and Commonwealth governmental arenas to address the problems of post-war reconstruction, ethical formation and distributions of the modern good citizen.
As will be examined in Part Two of this book, guidance was thus transformed into a visible and scientific practice used in both the determination of fitness of the good citizen for higher education and the governance of the mentally and physically handicapped child. Within the colonial period and for many years beyond, retardation was generally characterised in the governmental reports of District Inspectors as the outcome of a defective administration on the part of the classroom teacher. It was not necessarily viewed as arising from an intellectual pathology of the child-body, that is, a physical illness, disorder or disease. The specific need to find new ways to govern the slow or retarded white European child within the Queensland State primary school system appears to have been precipitated during the early 1910s as a direct result of the transformation of educational distribution through the post-colonial governmental imperative to minimise wastage and promote efficiency. This transformation will be examined in the next chapter entitled the New Scholarship.
The existence of an intellectual pathology of the child-body within educational practices in colonial Queensland was commented upon in the early 1950s in an historical review of the State education system by William Wood (1951) who was the first secondment from the Department of Public Instruction for psychological training with the ACER in the early 1930s. Wood was the first Head of the R&G Branch established in 1949 in the Queensland State Education Department and he came to play a key role in the implementation of the current Radford Scheme in the late 1960s. As the first quotation at the beginning of this chapter indicates, Wood (1951) suggested that retarded and in-educable children had been reported to have been in the schools since the early days of the colony. However, this book is not concerned with the existence of intellectual pathology but its beginnings and development as a problem of government within the State primary school. Accordingly, this chapter examines intellectual pathology as emerging from already established classroom practices of classification which graded the pupil's scholastic performance in terms of advancement and retardation in relation to a common State wide curriculum based standard.
The beginnings of individual psychology in the early 1920s in the Queensland State primary school system will also be examined as a technical response to the administrative problems of retardation and of classifying the visible features of the defective child-body (1), particularly in relation to a demonstrated capacity for scholastic performance. These administrative problems first made an appearance more than a decade earlier due to significant governmental policy changes with the child-body becoming the focus of attention of an increasing network of expertise. The key elements here include compulsory attendance of school aged children for all school days during the year; the raising of the school age to 14 years; the policy shift towards a New Scholarship to the secondary school for the average pupil; and the new administrative demands associated with the introduction of School Hygiene arising from the Hygienist movement.
Wood's (1951) history of the beginnings of psychological services in Opportunity Schools for backward children was represented as the result of an initiative taken in 1923 by District Inspector Bevington who prepared a formal plan for the treatment of those children who were not making normal progress in school. Special classes in Backward Schools, as they were originally called, were formed with pupils being divided into two groups of backward children. It was not until some years later that the revised Stanford Binet Intelligence test was used to measure the IQ of the pupil (Wood, 1951, p.31).
The segregation and treatment of backward children was characterised by Wood's history (1951) of psychological services as the beginnings of a pastoral caring treatment response to an individual problem of backwardness where a scientific method was used to gauge a measure of the natural intelligence of a particular individual. However, the governance of retardation has a decidedly different character and beginnings. I will begin by examining the origins of intellectual pathology as emerging firstly from the problem of classification in the colonial primary school classroom and then from the application of medical science to the child-body. This will appear as the newly commissioned medical gaze over the primary school child-body at the beginning of the 1910s.
We want more scholarships. The main problem is to foster a favourable public attitude to the values of secondary and higher education, particularly in the minds of parents and the relations who are so closely associated with the children. The hostility and indifference of parents, relatives and acquaintances play a big part in the decisions of children to undertake advanced training. (Mr Davies, M.L.A., in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 1957 58, v.218, p.448)
This chapter will begin to trace a genealogy of the modern good citizen through an examination of the educational ladder. As suggested in the quotation above by R.H. Roe as Inspector General of Schools in Queensland, the term educational ladder represents a succinct conceptual formation of a particular governmental imperative which is of central significance to this book. The joint bureaucratic-pastoral imperative is that of establishing both commonality and differentiation within the school population through formal education or public instruction. The objective of formal education is to measure, calculate, standardise, differentiate, inscribe, shape and guide the school population through two interrelated facets of education: on the one hand, a bureaucratic element is adapted to a pedagogy for establishing norms of literacy, numeracy and vocational competence; and on the other hand, the pastoral element is applied to civilising and Christianising practices aimed at the ethical formation of the good citizen (see Hunter, 1994).
The educational ladder is thus a formation of discrete levels of bureaucratic-pastoral and pedagogic norms, values and practices ranging from primary to secondary through to tertiary levels. The colonial educational ladder, however, will be examined in this chapter as being uncoordinated and decidedly different from the way it appears today.
The origins of the contemporary educational ladder can be traced to the legislation of the new colonial government with the Queensland Primary Education Act, 1860 and the Grammar Schools Act, 1860. Articulation between the State primary school and the State Grammar school did not, in effect, begin until the implementation of the State Grammar school scholarship and the 1875 Lilley Royal Commission. State supported education was formed by the colonial government as two separate and uncoordinated elements - elementary public instruction within the State primary school and elementary and secondary education within the State Grammar school. Access to the State Grammar school was subject to British cultural and educational traditions for white-European good citizens and families with the necessary economic means, social standing and ambition for a higher education beyond the elementary level.
The previous chapter has examined the pastoral origins of shaping the good citizen as specifically relating to the elementary level of public instruction. This chapter will extend this examination into the secondary level of the State Grammar schools and will begin to focus on the shaping of the competent good citizen as a function of educational distribution at both elementary and secondary levels. In doing so, we will establish the historical beginnings and continuity of the bureaucratic-pastoral imperatives of government which would become central to the beginnings of a vocational guidance through a State managed educational system, articulated, modernised and restructured by a number of government initiatives, in particular for our purposes, the New Scholarship.
Civics, usually treated in a perfunctory manner, should deal more with the living present. Local, State, and Federal systems of Government should receive more attention. In many schools the children had never heard of the "White Australia" policy. Shop and Factory Acts, Old Age and Invalid Pensions, Workers' Compensation, Benevolent Homes, Institutions for the Blind, Deaf, and Dumb, Sanatoria, Baby Clinics. These and many other humanitarian institutions which help to make the world a better place should be made the bases of lessons presented with the direct object of stimulating in the child's minds a keenly sympathetic interest, inspiring them to devote their lives to the betterment of humanity and making them feel that "there is no wealth but life". ("From District Inspector Baker's Report", QPP, 1925, v.1, p.806)
This chapter will examine certain governmental practices, institutions and agencies involved in the bureaucratic-pastoral shaping of the good citizen. The period under review will be from the early years of the Queensland colony through to the First World War in the State of Queensland. The purpose of the examination is to map out of those historical and cultural conditions necessary for the emergence of an expanded and articulated educational ladder referred to in this book as the New Scholarship. As we will see in subsequent chapters, the governmental imperative of efficiency generated by the implementation of the New Scholarship sought ways of minimising wastage in the shaping of the competent good citizen, of avoiding square pegs in round holes. Vocational guidance as a governmental practice thus would emerge from those ethical and pedagogic formations of the good citizen facilitated through elementary public instruction.
These governmental practices, institutions and agencies are examined in relation to a range of bureaucratic-pastoral objectives particularly located within the field of elementary public instruction for Queensland children. These objectives were aimed at forming the settled and self governing good citizen through habitual, civilising and Christianising activities compatible with the norms and mores of a white-European, Christian and British society. During this period under review, the classroom, the family, the Christian mission, the government reserve, the orphanage and the State primary school represent an assemblage of institutional sites within which the attributes of character, of the self governing good citizen were shaped, observed, measured, classified and inscribed by the government official as Teacher, Pupil teacher, Missioner, Head Teacher, Superintendent, District Inspector, Police Officer or Protector, each being obedient servants of the State within a hierarchy of surveillance and authority. According to one such governmental official:
The chief end of all true education is the formation of moral character, and the education that makes good citizens is not merely learning, but the cultivation of the powers of learning, thinking, and doing. Much of the character forming is done silently in the schools, and it can be valued on inspectorial visits by its results, as a rule. (District Inspector Benbow, "Reports of the District Inspectors for 1905", in QDPI, 1907, v.9, p.12)
We will also examine the key role of the exemplary teacher in the governmental strategies of controlling these institutional sites, observing and inscribing the attributes and character of the future good citizen. The centrality of the inculcation of certain habitual practices in the repertoire of bureaucratic-pastoral techniques of the exemplary teacher will be examined in relation to white-European and Aboriginal children. The central importance of these practices was attested to as follows in a particular school for white-European children by a District Inspector:
Discipline and tone were generally satisfactory, and in many schools commendable. Habits of order, industry, politeness, and self reliance are being successfully inculcated. (District Inspector Benbow, "Reports of the District Inspectors for 1905", in QDPI, 1907, v.9, p.12)
It was thus not only the teacher in the classroom who was instrumental in shaping the good citizen but the complex fabric of school government itself which, in regard to white-European primary school children, included the supervision and evaluation by a District Inspector reporting on the moral space of character building agricultural education, playground, state school cadets, arbor day, manuals of ideal conduct and so on:
Games in the school grounds are not always superintended, and often times the chance is lost of promoting manliness of character, self control, and the love of fair play. School libraries are not on the increase in the South Western District. If of the right kind, books are helpful in the formation of character. They should hold up ideals of conduct; they should contain stories of heroism, self denial, and integrity, thus giving the teacher the opportunity of teaching the value of character. (District Inspector Benbow, "Reports of the District Inspectors for 1905", in QDPI, 1907, v.9, p.12)
This chapter will thus focus on the bureaucratic-pastoral shaping of the good citizen as a background to an examination of the ethical and vocational distributions of the colonial good citizen which will be examined in the next chapter. During this period under review, the good citizen will also be shown to have been inscribed in secular harmony with the Judeo Christian image of man and woman pertaining to the nineteenth century British Christian society transplanted into the British colony of Queensland. These "men and women", as gender differentiated good citizens, were ascribed fundamentally different roles and differing educational capacities and expectations. This is a significant point to be noted, with particular regard to the continuity of the gendered modern good citizen which was only formally challenged in Queensland in the State legislative arena in the early 1990s. In exploring this genealogy of the modern good citizen, I will firstly outline the origins of elementary schooling for white-European children in the Queensland colony.