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5.2 Education Context
This section addresses the following points: compulsory age of schooling; key syllabus
documents; and key textbooks including related school curriculum documents. The
timeframe given to this era of Before and Immediately after WWI, covers the period of time
six years prior to and almost twenty years post WWI. The era finishes in 1937. One reason
for this long duration of time is pragmatic, directly influenced by the slow pace of change of
school curriculum in the early part of the 20 th century. It was not until the 1930s that the first
major change of school History curriculum since WWI occurred, with the implementation of
a new (not revised) History syllabus in 1930, and in place until a new syllabus was
implemented in 1938. Textbooks covering the content of the new syllabus were then rolled
out over the next five years. Despite extensive searches, the actual syllabus itself has not been
able to be located; however there is sufficient detail in the preface and introductions of the
Government sanctioned textbooks (Dunlop & Palfrey, 1933, 1934a, 1934b, 1932a, 1932b) for
accurate knowledge of what was included in the syllabus. Due to the slow pace of change in
the syllabus, textbooks will be analysed from a range of years to determine how (or if) they
accommodated this period of rapid social and political change that occurred as a result of
WWI, through curriculum documents, if not the syllabus itself.
An example of just how static the curriculum change was in this era is evidenced by the 1913
edition of the Queensland Reader: Book V (Department of Public Instruction, 1913b). The
copy sourced for this project has the following written on the fly page: “C.E. Martin 1933” in
what looks like adult handwriting (therefore assumed and most likely to be a teacher’s copy).
Given that this book was first used in schools in 1915, the date of “1933” means that it was
still used in Queensland schools almost 20 years later. Of further note, the 1933 and 1935
editions of this Reader are exactly the same; content has not been altered in any way,
indicative of the slow process of curriculum change during this time.
The approach to the selection of textbooks for this era has been different to that of the later
eras explored in this project. As resources from this era are scarce, it has been those that have
been able to be sourced that have been used, rather than a selection from a wide range of
books.
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