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A “One Best System” in New Zealand?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Extract

The publication of Roy Shuker's The One Best System? has stimulated debate concerning “revisionist” interpretations of the history of New Zealand schools. The essays below help to introduce our readers to these controversies, which concern both methodological and ideological issues in the study of history of education. Three prominent historians offer their criticisms of this important volume, and Shuker provides a detailed response and reflection upon current scholarship in New Zealand. N. D. Daglish is a member of the Education Department, Victoria University of Wellington; Gary McCulloch is senior lecturer in Education, University of Auckland; Pavla Miller is a member of the Department of Sociology and Politics, Phillip Institute of Technology, Bundoora, Victoria; and Roy Shuker teaches at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand, in the Department of Education.

Type
Forum
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Shuker, Roy, The One Best System?: A Revisionist History of State Schooling in New Zealand (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1987).Google Scholar

2 McCulloch, G., Education in the Forming of New Zealand Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Auckland, 1986), 46.Google Scholar

1 See, for example, Katz, Michael, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

2 Tyack, David, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).Google Scholar

3 To a degree, these were indicative of the state of the field. See McCulloch, Gary, Education in the Forming of New Zealand Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Wellington, N.Z., 1986).Google Scholar

4 This dominant view is presented in Cumming, Ian and Camming, Alan, History of State Education in New Zealand, 1840–1975 (Wellington, N.Z., 1978).Google Scholar

5 This was particularly the case with the Massey introductory “Ed and Society” students, a major target audience for the study, who had ready access to such liberal-progressive accounts as Cumming and Cumming, History of State Education, and Dakin, James C., Education in New Zealand (Auckland, N.Z., 1973).Google Scholar

6 Fass, Paula, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's (New York, 1977), 7.Google Scholar

7 Openshaw, Roger and McKenzie, David, eds., Reinterpreting the Educational Past: Essays in the History of New Zealand Education (Wellington, N.Z., 1987).Google Scholar

8 Olssen, Mark, ed., Mental Testing in New Zealand: Critical and Oppositional Perspectives (Dunedin, N.Z., 1988); Middleton, Sue, ed., Women and Education in Aotearoa (Wellington, N.Z., 1988).Google Scholar