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O'Donoghue, Thomas
A. (2001). Upholding the Faith: The Process of Education
in Catholic Schools in Australia, 1922-1965. New
York: Peter Lang.
Pp. 170
ISBN 0-8204-5653-5.
Reviewed by James P. Patterson
University of Iowa
July 21, 2002
Though
Christianity "has been by far the major religious influence
in Australia after the arrival of the Europeans who dominate
modern Australia's population," it has generally been
"a subject much neglected in the past," even in
historical writing (Thompson, 1994, p. ix). More recently,
however, "there has been a boom in publishing" about
Australian Christianity (p. ix), including general histories,
such as Thompson's; denominational histories, such as
O'Farrell's (1985) history of the Catholic Church;
and works focused on particular time periods, such as
Massam's (1996) study of Catholic spirituality in the early
and mid-twentieth century. While discussion of formal Catholic
education is an important part of all of these texts, especially
O'Farrell's, few if any books seem to have taken this
as their primary subject.
Thomas A.
O'Donoghue's Upholding the Faith: The Process of
Education in Catholic Schools in Australia, 1922-1965 is a
valuable contribution to this emerging historiography. While the
book does not quite cohere into a comprehensive picture of
Australia's Catholic schools in the early and mid-twentieth
century, it does a generally good job of analyzing and
describing, in clear and direct prose, major elements of that
education and of making a case for the schools'
distinctness from the state-run schools of the period.
An associate
professor in the Graduate School of Education at The University
of Western Australia and author of two books on Irish education,
one of which dealt with the Catholic Church and the secondary
school curriculum during the same 1922 to 1965 period,
O'Donoghue opens Upholding the Faith with a brief
history of Australia's Catholic schools. His focus is on
the diminution and eventual elimination of state support for
denominational schools (including Catholic ones) and the Catholic
Church's ongoing dissatisfaction with "a system of
primary schools [in each state] providing free, compulsory and
secular primary education controlled by government
departments" (p. 2), which had emerged fully by 1901, the
year of Australian federation. Despite the odds, O'Donoghue
writes, "the Catholic Church in Australia was successful
not only in maintaining, but also in expanding an educational
sector independent of state educational systems" (p. 2),
the primary goal being to shape a uniquely Catholic
education.
O'Donoghue's main focus is on four major ways in
which Australia's Catholic schools during the period 1922
to 1965 were distinctive from their state-run
counterparts:
First, Catholic
education was conducted within an authoritarian framework.
Secondly, a major emphasis was placed on religious instruction
and on ensuring that schooling had a religious atmosphere which
was all pervasive. Thirdly, particular gender roles were promoted
on the grounds that they constituted those roles best fitted to
ensuring the salvation of ‘the faithful'. Fourthly,
there was a very strong Irish influence in pupils'
experience of schooling. (p. 3)
To explore these four
elements, O'Donoghue inquired into (1) who taught in the
schools, (2) what educational experiences students were given,
and (3) the general approach to teaching. In the process, he
looked at the public and private life of the
"ordinary" teacher (p. 5), the stated and enacted
curriculum, and the relative degree of teacher- and
student-centeredness, as well as such factors as teacher training
and the school climate. He examined written sources such as the
rules of religious teaching orders, school publications, and
newspaper stories, and conducted interviews with people who
taught during this period to "develop an understanding of
the ‘perspectives' they held" (p. 11).
O'Donoghue manages to complete this ambitious agenda rather
well, although, as I return to below, he makes relatively little
"visible" use of the interview data.
As revealed
in Chapter Two, the "ordinary" teachers in this
period were members of religious orders, who provided the
"cheap labor" needed to keep the schools open once
government funding was eliminated (p. 19). These religious,
predominately nuns, replaced the lay teachers serving in the
earliest Catholic schools (who, in turn, would increasingly
replace the religious in the mid-twentieth century as the number
of religious declined and school enrollments increased). Over
time, the church determined that "the main function of
Catholic primary schools"—beyond which few students
of the day progressed—"was preserving the faith of
its members and passing on its own distinctive cultural
capital"; the secondary schools that existed also prepared
students for public exams "so that the social and financial
status of Catholics could be raised" (p. 20). Members of
religious orders, who had undergone their own extensive religious
training, seemed ideally suited to carry out both missions.
Lacking family or other social obligations, they "were
expected to commit themselves totally to their work,"
something the church could hardly expect of lay teachers (p.
22).
One crucial point that
emerges from this early chapter is that no real unified
"system" of Catholic education existed until the
mid-twentieth century. Prior to this, religious-order-run schools
and parish-controlled schools generally operated independently,
as did the teaching orders themselves. This meant a general lack
of "systematic long-term planning which would have been
required to build a coordinated Catholic education system"
(p. 29) and led to overbuilding of schools in some areas. Over
time, the need for greater efficiency as well as a greater spirit
of cooperation fostered by the international Catholic Church led
to more systematization, as, presumably, did the restoration of
state support at mid-century.
The heart of
O'Donoghue's book is the middle four chapters, each
of which is devoted to one of the four major distinctive features
of Catholic education in the period from 1922 to 1965. Chapter
Three explores authoritarianism in the schools. Although the
author indicates that this was also a feature of government
schools, "Catholic schools stood out in this regard because
of the inflexible approach of teachers working within such
parameters" (p. 41). O'Donoghue largely attributes
the authoritarian ethos to the teachers themselves and their own
strict religious formation and teacher training, which he vividly
relates in perhaps the book's most engaging section. The
asceticism of the religious orders, reflected and embodied in
rigid schedules, constant monitoring of self and others, a press
toward conformity of thought, and detachment from possessions,
friends, and family, could not help but shape the way these
teachers approached the classroom. This was coupled with a
then-current emphasis in Catholic theology on original sin and
the corruptibility of people, which "demanded an
educational system which would be both highly controlled and
highly controlling" (p. 59); education could help redeem
the "fallen." Pedagogically, these teachers,
typically trained by the orders themselves, generally
"viewed teaching as a set of technical activities to be
executed in an inflexible manner, rather than as a repertoire of
intelligent practices to be varied according to unique classroom
contexts" (pp. 62-63). Taken together, these factors
produced an emphasis on manners and morals, hard work, obedience
to authority, and rote learning (even to the point of
anti-intellectualism). It also could lead to the use of corporal
punishment, invasion of students' privacy, and public
humiliation of students.
Chapter Four
focuses on the nature of religion in Catholic schools in terms of
how religion per se was taught, how it was made part of
"secular" subjects, and how it permeated the
atmosphere of the schools. For most students, despite some reform
efforts, "the experience of religious education was largely
one of learning prayers, committing to memory dogma imparted in
an unquestioning manner, and listening to, and reading about the
‘story' of the Church, beginning with the early
Christian times" (p. 76). Teachers also were to put a
religious imprint on "secular" subjects, under the
belief that, as one syllabus put it, "religion and the
profane branches must be intimately associated, running together
in the organic growth of the child's knowledge" (p.
81). In a point that deserves more exploring, O'Donoghue,
citing Praetz, contends that infusion of religion into the other
subjects was more rhetoric than reality, with the unique Catholic
viewpoint diluted by the goal of preparing students for success
in the dominant (Protestant/secular) society. Finally, teachers
and school officials helped maintain a Catholic orientation to
the entire day through monitoring of students
("protecting" them from non-Catholic school
materials, keeping students constantly busy, segregating students
by sex whenever possible, and fostering students' sense of
guilt), encouraging students' faith through rituals, and
touting the virtues of religious vocations.
Chapter Five
addresses two ways in which Australia's Catholic schools
promoted particular views of gender. First, "pupils were
regularly reminded that within the Church's hierarchy of
vocations, to be a nun, religious brother or priest, was to
occupy a role higher than that of the lay person" (p. 93).
Teachers were to be on the lookout for potential new recruits
among students and were encouraged to promote the heroic,
self-sacrificing ideal of religious service while at the same
time brightening the picture with the notion that a religious
life provided community, security, a sense of drama and
excitement (especially via mission work), and elevated spiritual
contentment.
Second, the schools,
bolstered by religious justifications, shaped the roles of
"unconsecrated females" and "unconsecrated
males," often in single-sex educational environments. Apart
from the role of nun, "the schools also promoted a model of
femininity valorizing the good wife and mother who stayed at home
to care for the family" and who largely maintained
"the spiritual welfare of their families" (pp.
101-102). The Virgin Mary served as a role model because of her
"submissive, other-worldly, and busy" nature, as did
"long-suffering, often oppressed female saints" (p.
103). Girls from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tended to
receive somewhat more vocational training, while those from
higher-SES families received a more "refining"
education. Boys' education promoted "strict
discipline and hardship," with the goal of making
"hard men" (p. 106) who would take the lead over
women. With boys, too, teachers emphasized the Virgin Mary, this
time as a "symbol of a traditional concept of appropriate
womanhood" (p. 109). While O'Donoghue claims that
boys were to be disassociated from the feminine, he also argues
that "certain feminization processes" were
"aimed at developing their emotional commitment to family
life" (p. 110); the tension between these points needs
further exploration.
Chapter Six
traces the heavy Irish influence on Australia's Catholic
schools. Indeed, "from about the middle of the 1850s
Australian Catholicism was seen as being synonymous with Irish
Catholicism" (p. 115) due to the dominance of Irish-born
priests and bishops and the influx of Irish nuns. The model of
Catholicism they enforced was "clerical, authoritarian and
non-intellectual" (p. 115) as well as
"isolationist," or separatist (p. 122). Australian
Catholics were encouraged to identify with Ireland rather than
England, and "a very strong association developed between
being Irish and being Catholic" (p. 123). These influences
began to wane only in the mid-twentieth century, due in part to
Catholic immigrants from nations other than Ireland; a sign of
this transition was that schoolchildren "were now
encouraged to think of themselves as part of an Australian nation
which grew out of an Irish contribution" (p.
126).
While titled
"Analysis and Conclusion," Chapter Seven is primarily
new information, offering a brief history of Catholicism in
Ireland, a comparative/international perspective on Australian
Catholicism, and information about events in Australian
Catholicism both before and after the book's focal period.
While this information is interesting, it is largely out of
place, especially considering the analytical structure of the
book. The four core chapters—on authoritarianism, religion
in the schools, gender roles, and the Irish influence—focus
on disparate and not entirely parallel aspects of the schools; a
tighter summary and conclusion could have helped fuse them
together into a more coherent picture. As it is, readers must do
a good bit of synthesizing on their own. The author's
occasional digressions into such subjects as non-teaching
"lay" sisters and the evolution of Catholicism in
Ireland contribute to the book's somewhat diffused
focus.
More
troubling is the book's general lack of information about
particular schools and classrooms. While O'Donoghue
uses a wealth of primary sources, these tend to be one step
removed from the classroom. They are often about teaching,
but not accounts of it. As O'Donoghue is careful to
distinguish between what Goodson calls the
"proactive" (intended) curriculum and the
"interactive" (enacted, mediated) curriculum (pp.
8-9), and as he cites such classroom-focused authors as Larry
Cuban and Barbara Finkelstein, it seems a bit odd that he would
maintain this distance. It doesn't fatally mar the book,
but the author did miss some interesting opportunities. Put more
positively, what O'Donoghue offers is a good stepping-off
point for further research.
Finally,
with its emphasis on the whats and hows of Catholic schooling,
Upholding the Faith arguably does not offer a strong
enough sense of the whys. We get important insights into the
rationale for Catholic education, especially in the discussion of
Irish Catholic separatism, and we get some sense of the struggle
Catholics underwent to maintain a separate school system without
government support. But what might help strengthen the account is
a clearer sense of the overall Catholic vision of education as
opposed to that of the Protestant-influenced
"secular" schools. O'Farrell (1985), writing
about Catholic reactions to "secular" schooling in
late-nineteenth-century Victoria, makes the rationale for
Catholic schooling abundantly clear:
Secular education in
Victoria was the direct outcome of an anti-Catholic political
victory. It was therefore sectarian, and persecuting sectarianism
at that, for it obliged Catholics to violate their consciences,
or suffer. Catholics noted that Protestants were willing to
accept such education: it must, therefore, be also regarded as
Protestant—indeed Bible reading, which such education
retained (and to that extent it was not completely secular) was
the very basis of Protestantism; church authority was fundamental
to Catholicism. (pp. 168-169)
Information such as
this, modified as appropriate for the later time period, would
have helped contextualize O'Donoghue's work more
clearly, highlighting the odds against which Catholic schools
operated.
Such
shortcomings as I have described are largely outweighed by the
book's strengths. Upholding the Faith is an
interesting, engaging, and well-written book that offers a
valuable, temporally focused, and highly analytical perspective
on Catholic education in Australia. It should be of interest not
only to those studying Australia but also to those who are
interested in Catholic-Protestant relationships, Catholic
education, and the social history of education generally. For
those interested in Catholic education in the United States,
O'Donoghue's book provides a useful comparative
perspective, with the Australian story serving, as the author
puts it, "as one example to illustrate that the salient
features of Catholicism and Catholic education were modified in
different countries by the particular circumstances in
operation" (p. 138).
References
Massam, Katharine. (1996). Sacred Threads: Catholic
Spirituality in Australia, 1922-1962.
Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
O'Farrell,
Patrick. (1985). The Catholic Church and Community: An
Australian History (Rev. ed.). Kensington:
New South Wales University Press.
Thompson, Roger C.
(1994). Religion in Australia: A History. Melbourne:
Oxford University
Press.
About the
Reviewer
James P. Patterson is a
Ph.D. student in Social Foundations of Education at the
University of Iowa. His emphasis is on history of education, with
particular emphases on Catholic-Protestant relations over
schooling and the social history of teaching.
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