In August last year we published a commentary by Dr Michael Furtado commenting on the legacy of Dr Peter Tannock to Catholic Education in Australia. (See "The Legacy of Dr Tannock" Catholica commentary 14Aug2008 LINK.) Today's commentary by Dr Graham English is partly a response to that and other comments Dr Furtado has made about Catholic Education in this country. Dr English's commentary is an attempt to provide an honest view of the good and bad in what Catholic Education has achieved and is achieving.

Catholic schools and the poor

I have not read Michael Furtado's thesis so I cannot comment directly on it. But I can make a few observations about Catholic schools and the poor further to the commentary Dr Furtado wrote on Catholica last year.

When Mary MacKillop founded the Josephites to teach the poor, especially the poor in remote areas of Australia, most Catholics in Australia were poor. Many of the poor, whether Catholic or not did not attend school, or left early, often at the end of primary school. This was especially true in the country. Catholics in the cities usually lived in the poor suburbs as migrants frequently do even now and the religious orders set up their schools there as well as in country towns and villages.

A selection of historical photographs from Western Australian Catholic schools in the 20th Century. These are from a video the editor made in 1998. See the video below.

CBC Terrace, 1905

Bunbury 1911

New Norcia, 1919

Spanish Nuns, New Norcia, undated possibly 1920s or 30s

Kalgoorlie Debutants, 1940s

Albany 1950s

Lesmurdie, undated

Daughters of Charity 1960s

Lesmurdie, undated

Mercedes College, Perth, undated

Aquinas College, Manning, 1950s

When the Christian Brothers came to NSW in 1843 and returned to Australia in 1868 they taught the poor because that is what they were founded for, but also because they came here to teach Catholic boys from Irish families and at the time Catholic boys were almost all poor. I went to a country town Catholic school. In year six in 1955 I sat for a state bursary which was means tested. Not all the boys in my class were academically able to get a bursary but very nearly all of the boys in the school easily passed the means test. It depended on our parents' wages and was a very basic amount; almost all of our parents' combined incomes were less than the cut-off point. The two or three who would have been ineligible, usually the sons of doctors, solicitors or pharmacists, went off to Riverview or Hunters Hill as boarders in secondary school and left the rest of us at the local Catholic school.

Not being educated to stay poor...

But, while most Catholic schools taught the poor from the 1870s until the 1960s it was usually with the intention of helping them climb the social ladder. They were not being educated to stay poor. As the saying has it, give a poor man a fish and he can eat today; teach him to fish and he can eat every day. The religious orders were adding to it, "Teach them to read and add up and you can never tell how far they will go".

A Christian Brother I knew used say wryly that the Christian Brothers were an order of men who ran schools in poor suburbs to educate boys so they could be lawyers and doctors and send their sons to the Jesuits. The school annuals from those days routinely listed the old boys and girls who had done well in the professions or the trades. As anyone who knows the De La Salle or the Christian Brothers histories will tell you, both John Baptist and Edmund Rice founded schools that taught boys useful things so they would be employable. Upward mobility was part of the Catholic schools' reason for being.

The Brothers in Australia, from all congregations and the parents wanted their boys to get good marks in exams so that they could do well in Australia, just as migrant parents from Vietnam, China, the Philippines and other sources of migrants do now. In Melbourne the Christian Brothers' school in Victoria, Parade, was opened to take the brightest boys from their schools in the poor suburbs to ensure they reached the highest levels in exams and eventually in society.

Sadly the poverty in Catholic schools before the 1960s was not always just economic. Not only did Catholic schools of the time between the 1870s and the 1960s teach the poor. They were often poor schools. They were usually poor in facilities. They were frequently overcrowded, especially in the 1950s. And, let us not be romantic about this, they were often poor and inadequate schools. They offered restricted choices regarding subjects, many of them had unqualified teachers, the quality of the education offered in them was frequently deficient, and boys' schools were often violent. The strap was the normal means of discipline.

I was there, both as a student (from 1948 until 1960) and later as a teacher and after a long career in Catholic education at every level from grade three to university I have no doubt that educationally and in almost every other way Catholic schools are better schools now than they have ever been.

One aspect worth noting and celebrating about contemporary Catholic schools is consistency: the consistently higher qualifications of the staffs, and the consistently better quality of the teaching.

The problem of inconsistency...

One of the issues for Catholic school before the 1960s was inconsistency. There were always well educated and strong teachers among the brothers and the sisters in Catholic schools and if a child had the good fortune to get one of them, or several together in one school they could get a good education. There were kind, thoughtful, pastoral sisters and brothers. But in school with a high ratio of students per teacher and organisation that meant one teacher took one class all day the chances of a class getting a well educated and strong teacher were lessened. In some schools some students had one good teacher for all or almost all their subjects for a whole year, and so did well. Or they had a strong school principal who ran a strong school. But others had a less able or even an incompetent teacher for everything for a whole year and were set back. Some school principals were inadequate and their school followed suit.

Sometimes, especially in the 1950s the general education in the local state schools was of a higher order than that in the Catholic schools nearby. Now, that is very unlikely to happen because of consistency of qualifications and organisation, and much higher overall standards.

And much of that is due to the funds that they have, mostly from the governments, and of course the influence the state has over all schools via accreditation of teachers, curriculum, teacher education, and state run assessment and examinations.

I do not have the figures to know whether Catholic schools have more of the actually poor now than we did in the 1950s, and I am not sure how we measure the actually poor. I do know that almost always in Catholic education in Australia from 1870 on, at least a third of Catholic children have attended states schools and that now about half do. Early in the piece the bishops found it hard to convince all Catholic parents to send their children to Catholic schools and as late as the 1960s parents were chastised by bishops for not sending their children to Catholic schools. I know too that quite a few wealthy Catholics now send their children to the more expensive other- than-Catholic private schools.

I also know that even at the height of the 1950s when Catholic schools were claiming that there was a place in a Catholic school for every Catholic child the Catholic schools would have collapsed had all Catholic parents tried to take up the places. Just before state aid became available in the mid 1960s Cardinal Gilroy told Monsignor John Slowey, then director of Catholic Education in the archdiocese of Sydney to draw up a list of one third of the Catholic schools in Sydney with a view to closing them because they had neither the money nor the religious sisters and brothers to staff them. The late Bishop Barry Collins, then head of Religious Education in the Sydney Catholic Education Office told me that in front of Monsignor Slowey and there was no sign of disagreement from him.

John Slowey was one of the founders of teacher education for lay Catholic women at North Sydney in the 1960s because he saw that there were not nearly enough nuns and brothers even at the height of the 1960s vocations boom to conduct the schools. How he hoped to pay the new lay teachers is anybody's guess and the stories of how some of the early teachers were paid are both funny and scary. Some were paid from the tuck shop money in two shilling pieces and holy cards. Some were paid very little at that. Security had no meaning until well into the 1960s for 'lay teachers', superannuation hardly existed and when it did it was sometimes not transportable from one school or one diocese to another. This was still going on in the early 1980s in some cases. In the 1960s Catholic lay teachers were still poorly paid and many of them were superannuated state school retirees who could only exist because they already had an income. Or they were former religious sisters and brothers whose qualifications were not enough to get them a job in a state school. Government funding saved Catholic schools.

Whether it is ironic that in a secular country like Australia Catholic schools are mainly funded by the State (as Ross Fitzgerald says) is a matter of opinion.

I think that schools are mainly about students, whether they be in kindergarten or higher school certificate, and that in a secular democracy (which I thank God every day I live in) one task of the State is to educate ALL its children as well as possible.

The diverse reasons parents choose a Catholic Education...

Parents choose schools for their children, sometimes from an enlightened and informed position, some from a crass position, but often because nothing else is available or because they do not know so they follow someone whom they believe does know. Sometimes they do not think about it at all. My parents sent me to a Catholic school because they were good Catholics and the priests and bishops insisted that they did that. They did not look at alternatives because the church declared them 'out of bounds'. I had some good teachers, a few outstanding ones, and several others that I would never let near a school if I were employing teachers now.

As a secular democracy it is incumbent on us, whatever motivated the parents' choice of a school for their child, that we ensure they get the best education possible. In a secular democracy we give people a choice about the education they choose for their children and sometimes we have to make sure that the children are protected from their parents' choice. So even if we are a secular state and the parents choose a school, a religion or an ideology that we do not subscribe to, we need to make sure it is as good a school as possible.

There might well be schools we object to, I can imagine schools or school practices we would not allow. Many things that were accepted in the 1950s, corporal punishment and shaming for example, we have banned because we think them unacceptable. Government funding gives the voters some influence in the education all children have. This has its drawbacks but it also has much to commend it.

I recently heard a homily in honour of Mary MacKillop. It was a good homily; Father was praising the Sisters of St Joseph and told of an old sister he knows who in the 1950s had 120 children in her second grade to prepare for first communion. He commented that some of us now think that Catholic schools did not always present a loving God. "Of course if you have 120 year twos in one room you might be excused for presenting God as a sort of Alsatian," he remarked. Exactly! But we don't have 120 in a class now, and it has taken some of us who were in those classes a long time to get over the Alsatian God.

Horror stories...

When I was in-servicing teachers in the 1980s and looking at the history of Catholic schools I noticed that those who had gone to Catholic schools often had horror stories, sometimes things they were willing to excuse and sometimes things that were still hurting. I noticed though that teachers who had gone to state primary schools had far fewer horror stories. They had a few but on the whole they enjoyed being at school or where they hadn't they could wear it more lightly than the Catholics.

Then sometime towards the end of the 1980s the horror stories stopped. Younger teachers who had gone to Catholic schools had few horror stories to tell. I have noticed the same thing with undergraduates for the last sixteen years. Most of them were happy at their schools, whether state, Catholic or other.

A lot of the horror stories featured nuns or brothers because they were by far the majority of teachers in Catholic schools from after the first world war until the 1950s.It would be easy to think that the horror stories ceased as the religious disappeared. But that is unfair to the nuns and brothers. Some of them were horrible, and some of them were good people under unbearable pressure. But most were doing the best they could under trying circumstances. Some of what they achieved was wonderful.

The present Chairperson of the National Catholic Education Commission in Australia (the present Senior lay leader of Catholic Education in Australia), Therese Temby, with a class of littlies at Moora in Western Australia in the late 1990s.

I suggest that the big difference came from the government funding and the consequent improved quality of teaching, qualifications, facilities, organisation, and choice. And really importantly guilt and violence all but disappeared as normal means of achieving order and compliance. In a secular democracy such things are not allowed.

One of the great what ifs of Australian education and of parish life is the question of what might have happened had we gone along with state education, taken part as students, parents and teachers and administrators, and also formed strong parish-based catechesis for our children outside of school time. Many country villages and towns could not really support two schools, the Catholic and the state school. There is a case that many Catholic school children in fact had a worse education at the Catholic school than they would have had at the local state school. Many parishes might have been stronger and had vital adult education classes had they spent their money that way instead of duplicating schools. Religious orders might have been founded to do adult education. We might have developed an educated Catholic laity long before we did.

Of course we chose to go our own way and that choice helped form the kind of Catholic and Australian communities we have now, for better and for worse. The irony I see is that the choices we made in the 1880s and the fights we fought about state aid have made all the other non-government schools possible; the Moslem, fundamentalist Christian, the Hari Krishna schools all exist because we paved the way.

Graham English
Australian Catholic University

Image Credits:
The photo montage used in the header and footer images is from the collection of the editor. The background image is of the Bicentennial Mass celebration for the Patrician Brothers in 2008. The foreground images from left include the present Chairperson of the National Catholic Education Commission in Australia (the present Senior lay leader of Catholic Education in Australia) with a class of littlies at Moora in Western Australia a decade ago, a scene from a pilgrimage to the Benedictine Abbey town of New Norcia in 1999, and a happy product of Catholic Education pictured in the mid 1990s.

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©2008 Dr Graham English

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