Race, Legitimacy And History: Elite State Schooling In Settler Colonial Australia
Author(s):
Helen Proctor (presenting / submitting) Arathi Sriprakash
Conference:
ECER 2016
Network:
17. Histories of Education
Format:
Paper

Session Information

17 SES 03 B, Educating 'The Other'

Paper/Poster Session

Time:
2016-08-23
17:15-18:45
Room:
OB-E0.32
Chair:
Iveta Kestere

Contribution

Since the late 1990s, a growing body of educational research has examined the exceptional academic success of ‘Asian’ diaspora students in North America, the UK, Canada and Australia (e.g. Archer & Francis, 2007; Lee & Zhou, 2015; Ho, 2015). Much of this scholarly work has aimed to problematise the category ‘Asian’ and to challenge the kinds of essentialised ‘cultural’ categories that are highly visible in contemporary public discourse. In Australia, for example there is common understanding both that ‘Asian’[1] students are scoring high grades in public examinations and that this academic success is related to their Asian-ness (e.g. see Watkins & Noble, 2013; Pung, 2013; Broinowski, 2015 for various accounts of such discourses.)

In this paper we are particularly interested in how the legitimacy of Asian educational success is contested within the public discourse—often in coded ways. For example, ‘Asian’ students are often collectively described as newcomers or immigrants, no matter how long they or their families have lived in the country of settlement. Arguing that the category ‘Asian’ is a concept formed through the imagination, conflation and reduction of geopolitical and cultural histories, we consider the value of examining the phenomenon of ‘Asian’ educational success in Australia as it is constituted historically rather than culturally. We use this analysis to reflect on the contributions of an historical approach to research on recent and contemporary migrant educational participation and experience, not only in Australia but also internationally.

This paper examines a series of vigorous twenty-first century newspaper debates about the apparently disproportionate success of ‘Asian’ students in qualifying for entry to a prestigious state high school in Sydney, Australia. Race and racism, enmeshed but silenced within the historical structures of Australian schooling, were made hyper-visible through media representations of this ‘problem’ which brought together concerns about masculinity, entitlement, and Australia’s complex post-colonial relations with both Europe and Asia. We consider these debates as a case study of a racialised struggle over social and educational legitimacy.

We argue that we need to think about ‘migrant success’ or ‘Asian educational practices,’ and similar struggles over legitimacy in schooling, as specific historical and political conjunctural effects. In the case of the settler colonial state of Australia, this requires attention to the histories of European colonialism that endure in present educational systems and a recognition of how the ‘subjects’ of our research, or of our public debate, are constituted with respect to that history. As historian of imperialism Ann Stoler (1995, 69) aptly notes,

'Racism does not merely arise in moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the bio-political state, woven into the weft of the social body, threaded through its fabric' (see also Stoler, 2013).

Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Ghassan Hage (1998; 2014), and the historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (2008) among others (e.g. Anderson, 2003), we mobilise ‘whiteness’ as a category of analysis, arguing that race is crucial to the understanding of the long relationship between privilege and academic selection in Australian schooling.  As postcolonial theorist Sara Ahmed (2007) suggests, ‘institutions involve the accumulation of past decisions about how to allocate resources, as well as “who” to recruit. Recruitment functions as a technology for the reproduction of whiteness’ (p.157). The operation of recruitment is particularly crucial for the analysis of secondary schooling, with its exclusive origins and its historical operation as a site for the differentiation of young people, and the making of future leadership classes.

[1] In Australia  ‘Asian’ is most often conflated with the almost equally catch-all identifier, ‘Chinese’.

Method

We begin the paper by briefly reviewing some key contributions to the historiography of Australian secondary education. We focus on accounts of the public high school’s long struggle over its own legitimacy as an elite, meritocratic institution against competition from first, the wealthy private schools and second, the mid twentieth century comprehensive schooling movements. Such struggles have largely been framed in terms of social class, and to a lesser extent, gender. Race, ethnicity and immigration have remained a sideshow in the historiography in many ways. [2.] There is an absence of inclusion of not-white or non-English speaking background people in the historiography of secondary schooling and also a relative lack of explicit theorisation of race and immigration. This is despite the importance of schooling in the strategies of immigrant families and the centrality of ideologies of whiteness in the foundation of Australia’s schooling systems. Looked at another way, however, we argue that not only the history but also the historiography has been saturated with race, despite its apparent silences. The long rivalry between public and private boys’ secondary schools, for example, can plausibly be read through the literature as a story of competing ideologies of elite, white masculinity (eg see Bessant, 1984; Crotty, 2001; Sherington et al, 1987; Campbell, 1999). Our historiographical analysis orients our subsequent media analysis of the ‘problem’ of ‘Asian’ ‘migrant’ students at Sydney Boys High School to the ways the debate emerges from, and in turn reinscribes, whiteness in Australian education. Our approach combines a re-visiting of the historiography with a discourse analysis of press coverage of two related eruptions (in 2002 and 2013) of a controversy over whether the entrance examinations for the academically-selective Sydney Boys High School ought to be reformed in order to secure a more ‘diverse’ school population. A discourse analysis was conducted, using more than forty pieces from the two main Sydney daily newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph as well as the national daily, the Australian. Coverage of the issue encompassed news stories, editorials, opinion pieces and letters. [2.] Although we note a recent flourishing in the broader history of education literature of exploration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander relationships with schooling, e.g. see McLeod & Paisley, forthcoming; Healy, 2015.

Expected Outcomes

How do we understand this controversy over who gains entry to a ‘good’ school? Part of the answer comes from the contemporary historical context: the rise of marketised schooling and the intensification of competition. But there is a longer history. The issue is specific in both time and place but is produced through historical permissions from the settler colonial structures of schooling and society; structures that need to be more fully recognised and understood. This paper is a work in progress. Our preliminary findings suggest the following elements are important in the understanding of the controversy as a conjunctural effect: An important precipitating incident was a crushing rugby defeat by an elite private boys’ school. This incident can only be adequately understood if read through the long history of clubbish sportsmanship and rugby masculinity in elite Sydney schooling (e.g. Sherington, 1983; Proctor, 2011). Related to a series of racialised discussions of bodies and of ‘character’ or ‘well-roundedness’ was a racialised debate about the relationship between entry examination success and authentic intelligence. Partisan readings of the school’s history were deployed: press coverage was suffused with the school’s claims to historical leadership; a committee of ‘old boys’ proposed new entry procedures to restore the school to an imagined past. Whether this imagined past was ‘white’ or whether it was ‘diverse’— ‘diverse’ here employed in opposition to ‘Asian’—was one of the questions raised. There was a subtext in the press coverage that government schools are accountable and thus the community ought to have a say in their selection processes. Finally: much of the debate turned upon claims about the meaning of racism and the speakability of race issues. This was a debate in which representatives of the urban professional middle classes, those traditional supporters of progressive race politics, were divided and discomforted.

References

Ahmed, S. (2007). The phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8:2, 149–168. Anderson, Warwick (2003). The cultivation of whiteness: science, health and racial destiny in Australia. Basic Books, New York Archer, L. and Francis, B. (2007). Understanding minority ethnic achievement: race, gender, class and ‘success’. Routledge, Abingdon. Bessant, B. (1984). The influence of the ‘Public Schools’ on the early high schools of Victoria. History of Education Review, 13(1), 45—57. Broinowski, A. (2015). Testing times: selective schools and tiger parents 24 Jan 2015 Good Weekend magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/testing-times-selective-schools-and-tiger-parents-20150123-12kecw.html Campbell, C. (1999). The social origins of Australian state high schools, in C. Campbell, C. Hooper and M. Fearnley-Sander, (eds), Toward the state high school in Australia, ANZHES, Sydney, 9—27. Crotty, M. (2001). Making the Australian male: middle-class masculinity 1870-1920. Melbourne University Press. Hage, G. (1998). White nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Pluto Press, Sydney. Hage, G. (2014). Continuity and Change in Australian Racism. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 35(3), 232-237. Ho, C. (2015). The New Meritocracy or Over-Schooled robots? Public Attitudes on Asian-Australian Education Cultures, unpublished paper, Asian Migration and Education Cultures International Workshop, Western Sydney University, 9–10 December. Lake, Marilyn & Reynolds, Henry, (2008). Drawing the global colour line: white men's countries and the international challenge of racial equality. Melbourne University Publishing. Lee, J. & Zhou, M. (2015). The Asian American Achievement Paradox. Russell Sage Foundation, New York. McLeod, J. & Paisley, F. (forthcoming). The modernisation of colonialism and the educability of the ‘native’: transpacific knowledge networks and education in the interwar years. Proctor, H. (2011). Masculinity and social class, tradition and change: the production of 'young Christian gentlemen' at an elite Australian boys' school. Gender and Education, 23(7), 843-856. Pung, A. (2013). The Secret Life of Them. What it takes to shift class in Australia. The Monthly. http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/february/1363325509/alice-pung/secret-life-them Sherington, G. (1983). Athleticism in the antipodes: the AAGPS of New South Wales. History of Education Review, 12(2), 16—28. Sherington, G., Brice, I. D., & Petersen, R. C., (1987). Learning to lead. Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Stoler, A. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire. Duke University Press, Durham. Stoler, A. (2013). Imperial debris. Duke University Press, Durham. Watkins, M. & Noble, G. (2013). Disposed to learn: schooling, ethnicity and the scholarly habitus. Bloomsbury. London.

Author Information

Helen Proctor (presenting / submitting)
University of Sydney
Faculty of Education and Social Work
University of Sydney
Arathi Sriprakash
Cambridge University

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