My Progressive Education

Ian Reilly looks back on a 1970s high school education.

Nick Cave is now a world-famous Australian musician living in Berlin, and I am not.

But Nick and I share humble beginnings, and a bond of lived experience; we both started our lifelong learning journeys at the same high school in Wangaratta, a small country town in Australia. 

Unfortunately, Nick’s relationship with my school was not a happy one. By the time I embarked on my academic voyage, Nick was only a legend, but a legend that floated through the school corridors like a persistent odour. 

According to Nick, his parents removed him from the nurturing clutches of our government school to send him to a fancy private school in Melbourne.   

According to the persistent odour, the school suspended (or expelled?) Nick and was  more than happy to see him go to a “better place”; or any place really, provided it was a long way from Wangaratta High School.  Berlin might be far enough.

Today’s educators might say my high school’s traditional teaching methods were unsuited to Nick’s “learning style”.  It’s true that even as a high school student, Nick was into music in a big way, and later launched a band called “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds”; perhaps because Nick’s bad seeds could neither germinate nor flower in the nutrient depleted soil of our understaffed and overcrowded education system.  Because as Nick first walked through the wire entry gates, the school was overwhelmed trying to educate the vast baby boomer population passing through its bowels.  It now resembled a python, which having been forced to swallow a large pig, now lacks the intestinal resources to digest it.

What Nick failed to appreciate was that Wangaratta High School offered a “broad based”, “well rounded” education.  Its teachers not only aspired to impart academic learning (in the classroom), but also the survival skills and mental toughness (outside the classroom) necessary to thrive in 1970s Australia.  My learning styles must have been more aligned to the system, because I successfully navigated my early education with all my body parts intact, and no psychological scarring that a few more beatings from my fellow learners couldn’t fix. 

By 1976, the baby boomer pig was still being digested in the falling political ash of the Vietnam War. President Ford was the leader of the free world, and we played a popular card game called Watergate, where we had to lie and cheat to win—all essential extra-curricular life skills we were learning from Nixon—the former leader of the free world.  This was the era when the 1960s peace marching, placard wielding, flower weaponised hippies were now teachers in our schools. 

They arrived progressive, tolerant, aware of learning style differences, but with no life experience.  We liked our new teachers, because contrary to evidence, they believed we were inherently good, and what we thought was bad behaviour, was merely the expression of a troubled soul, or an underprivileged upbringing.  And what teenager isn’t a troubled soul?  Meanwhile, our traditional teachers (acknowledging that some had been Rats of Tobruk, or starved and beaten as prisoners of war) had a less benevolent view of the depravity of mankind in general, and out-of-control baby boomers in particular.

But the wheel of progress turned, and perhaps in final recognition of alternative learning styles, Wangaratta High School embarked on a progressive experiment.  Dropping the traditional curriculum like leprosy, the school adopted a “modern learning system”, where only Mathematics and English were compulsory, and everything else was optional.

While our parents had misgivings, we thought it was fantastic.

One subject taught us how to make model aeroplanes, and another, how to play chess.  The more academically inclined could learn “creative” writing, a subject having a curriculum so creative it was ethereal, but anything we wrote was “wonderful”.  Perhaps a rock band rebel like Nick would have revelled in the revolutionary freedom of the new system?

With measurable achievement considered an unnecessary constraint on freedom, our new teachers also viewed student uniforms as a symbol of authoritarian control.  They campaigned to abolish the school uniform, arguing that not only was it a symbol of fascist oppression, but the imposition of an unnecessary financial burden on poor struggling families. 

It was true that money was tight, and few student’s parents had a professional income.  Most were struggling farmers, small business owners, tradespeople, and unskilled workers.  Noting that senior students would soon leave the school, they focused on abolishing the uniform for Form Six students—convinced this compelling, thin-end-of-a-wedge argument would divide the system, allowing the conquest to be completed by the overwhelming force of reason.

Our community may have been fiercely egalitarian, but it was also democratic.  To the dismay of our progressive teachers, the Form Six students voted to keep the uniform, and democracy yielded the wrong result!  The girls led the charge, arguing the status quo avoided deadly fashion and appearance competition, which would favour the wealthy; and because uniforms were made from lasting, durable fabrics, they could be passed down from child to child, making them the low-cost option for poor families.

Meanwhile, commitment to academic freedom resulted in a relaxed approach to classroom control, and an absence of planned outcomes.   But unplanned outcomes can have unforeseen consequences, with the result that every poor student in the entire year level was randomly swept into my English class. They weren’t bad kids, but they had very short attention spans, and were unlikely to pursue an academic career—or any career at all.  My desk neighbour’s life ambition was to fill cars at the local service station.  It wasn’t that they had different learning styles—they had no learning style at all.

Our sweet, idealistic English teacher, straight out of university, would have made a great hippy.

From the start she seemed a nice person and we liked her. 

And she liked us. 

Briefly. 

Because most of the students ran over her like a steamroller, ran rings around her like circus clowns, and made her life a living hell.  She once left the class in tears, and there were rumours she cried a lot in the staff room during lunchtime.  Every now and again the Vice Principal, a tall, well known former Australian Rules Football player, would come in and dress down the class to restore order. 

There would be an uncertain peace for a short period, before both guerrilla and full scale war resumed, leaving her hapless, helpless and psychologically shredded. 

At the end of the first term, she had a nervous breakdown, went on sick leave, and never came back. The Vice Principal dressed us down yet again, and some of us, whose empathy glands had not been beaten out of us, felt genuinely sorry for her. 

Then our new teacher walked into the classroom.

She was an American.

Being American wasn’t unusual.  Being desperately short of teachers, and with the baby boomer pig proving difficult to digest, Australia paid higher teacher salaries than the US.  We imported vast numbers of ready-made teachers whose only deficiencies were an inability to spell, and a speech impediment they called an accent.

Miss Smith was from California.  She was tall, strong, big-hearted, had a beautiful smile, and was as tough as nails. 

American teachers were distinctly more interesting than the local species.  They had an accent like the people in TV programs like The Brady Bunch, Superman or Bugs Bunny, and the aura of American pop culture dripped from them like jewels.

We mistakenly thought all Americans were wealthy; but what was true was that they had all grown up and lived in places we only saw in the movies, and could only dream of ever visiting one day.  We liked her.

Like many Americans she was verbally strong and articulate.   She had a booming voice, a formidable disposition, and took the most unruly kids to task in a way that first provoked fear, and then stunned admiration.

She had great expectations for us, the students in her class, and had the lofty, if unrealistic aim, of imparting useful knowledge and even English writing skills.  It worked for me, and every time I write a document outline, I think fondly of Miss Smith.  While she might have been a freedom loving American, she was not a progressive hipster, and was probably made using the same mould as Katharine Birbalsingh, who is currently recognised as the world’s strictest teacher.

After the initial culture shock, getting around her became the solemn life purpose of most of the class. Those with short attention spans, and small ambition in life, excelled at providing a constant dripping of irritating and undermining behaviour, work avoidance, subtle resistance, and even rebellion, without engaging in full scale war; similar to World War Two Resistance movements, but without any actual violence. 

We thought she was battling well against this cunning and determined foe—she was certainly performing better than her sweet but hapless predecessor. 

In fact, we thought she had everything under control. 

Then one day she exploded like Krakatoa.

It was full red in the face, out-of-control anger that had us stunned.  She ranted and raved.  She unloaded every verbal shell in her arsenal, fired up a flamethrower, bombed the hell out of us, and then threw in a few verbal hand grenades for good measure. 

She finished by telling us she'd taught in some of the toughest schools in “ghettos” in San Francisco, where there were police at the doors frisking for knives, shootings in the streets, and beatings, but never in all her time there had she ever had a class as badly behaved and disrespectful as this one.

When the ash and flame finally stopped falling from Krakatoa, there was a stunned silence.   But then we digested what she said, and realized we had been weighed and measured against some of the world’s toughest schools­—fearsome places we had only heard about in the news, seen in movies, or read about in the papers—and had come out on top! 

Our hearts swelled with pride.

Krakatoa’s eruption only increased our respect for Miss Smith, for we now added “only human” to her list of commendable character attributes.  By ruling an out-of-control class with a rod of iron so she could impart vital skills and knowledge, Miss Smith demonstrated by action that she really cared about us.  She, and other teachers like her, wanted to give us future opportunities, help us find a good job, maybe even go to university.

It was a courageous decision to launch a radically new curriculum and learning system onto an unsuspecting bunch of kids and parents.  But a courageous education decision can negatively impact a life for decades, directing a child onto a dead-end track, and cost a lifetime of lost learning opportunities.  By the end of that year, most of us were tired of being guinea pigs in a social experiment.  We knew we weren’t learning much, and our parents were alarmed. 

The school reversed their courageous decision of the previous year, and to our relief, returned to a traditional curriculum and teaching methods.  In the following year, my English teacher expected us to read books, act drama, and write essays frequently.  And he made us rewrite essays when they failed to meet expectations.  I learned more in that year than I did in all previous years combined.

But years later, when I was an international volunteer high school teacher in Samoa, I found myself at the other end of the argument.   Classes were orderly, learning by rote was the only learning style available, and classroom silence was a measure of teacher success. Control was achieved by harsh and sometimes violent discipline, making Miss Smith’s class seem like a freewheeling, progressive wonderland.  Now I found myself in the shoes of my progressive teachers, trying to loosen up stifling learning rigidity that created its own lost learning opportunities. 

And my Samoan students loved wearing their school uniform, because when your family’s income is measured in hundreds of dollars a year, it’s a privilege to attend high school.  You wear your school uniform with pride, not only because it looks good, but because it’s a badge of honour.

They also loved music. It was in their DNA.  They sang before they could talk, and my students frequently and spontaneously broke into song, sometimes doing an excellent cover band imitation of Bob Marley, or UB40, or making up their own songs. 

In the music milieu of a tropical island paradise, maybe even Nick Cave would have been happy.

Ian Reilly is the author of ENCOUNTER:  A Journey into Chaos, Culture and Compassion, which is searching for a publisher.