Abstract
The state schools established in each Australian colony in the nineteenth century were often justified on the grounds that they offered an education which would enrich and enlighten cultural life. A study of the curriculum and methods they used and the manner in which they were organized and their teachers trained and paid suggests that the state schools, far from offering an introduction to culture (in the sense of ‘high’ culture), actually provided an alternative to it. In the early twentieth century, efforts were made to reform the elementary school so that it would provide at least a limited access to culture. These efforts, bitterly criticized at the time on the ground that they distracted attention from basic subjects such as the three Rs, continued to be resisted throughout the twentieth century. At the same time as the elementary school was being changed, the state endeavoured to broaden educational opportunity and access to the high culture by establishing secondary schools. Political, economic, and administrative considerations led the state to establish a structure of schooling which, at the secondary level, provided an alternative to the cultural activities being developed in the elementary/primary school. This paper warns against a ‘back to basics’ movement which would take the culturally impoverished nineteenth-century elementary school as a model, and suggests that, despite structural limitations, the establishment of state secondary schools has led to some widening of cultural opportunities.