Abstract
The aims of the junior technical schools in Victoria were, from the time of their formal establishment in 1911, to provide preparatory education-training for two groups. First, for the relatively small number who proceeded to higher technical education, appropriate for industrial chemists, engineers and architects, and secondly, for the relatively larger numbers who sought to enter skilled trades. The first successful campaign in Australia for a general science for all other secondary students in Victoria was waged in the War years 1939–43 on a platform of science as “a badge of utility and a key to good citizenship”. These were the modest terms upon which science teaching secured a more central place in the classical literary curriculum. The final campaign twenty years later in technical schools was fought on the platform that school science was “not just a servant to trade or engineering courses.”
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Fawns, R. The struggle for general science in Australia: The final campaign in the technical schools of the state of Victoria. Research in Science Education 26, 1–22 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02356960
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02356960