DOMUS Seminar - Campaigning for radical educational change in the 1970s and 1980s

This seminar will explore how in the 1970s an array of new organisations and associations appeared on the educational policy landscape across the globe, aimed at reshaping contemporary schooling, one way or another.

With speaker Helen Proctor, University of Sydney 

In the 1970s an array of new organisations and associations appeared on the educational policy landscape across the globe, aimed at reshaping contemporary schooling, one way or another. Although their activities and campaigns occurred in living memory, some have disappeared from public historical view. Others produced journals or newsletters that survive in the public domain, offering rich insights not only into their aims and rationales, but also, sometimes subtextually, into their organising practices and strategies.

This paper examines the periodical publications of two very different Australian groups, founded in 1972 and 1976 respectively, the ultra-conservative Christian ‘Society to Outlaw Pornography’ (STOP) and the anti-capitalist ‘Radical Education Group’ (RED G). The paper particularly focuses on how these organisations explained their legitimacy to speak out about schooling, and how they aligned themselves with and against international ideological movements of the contemporary ‘right’ and ‘left’.

Helen Proctor is Professor of Education History and Policy at the University of Sydney. This talk draws from her current Australian Research Council Project, ‘Community organising in Australian education policy, 1970s-1980s’, on which she is collaborating with Associate Professor Jessica Gerrard, University of Melbourne and Professor Susan Goodwin, University of Sydney.

This talk will be followed by Q&A with Professor Jane Martin (Director of DOMUS).