The most recent upload to the Dictionary has quite an educational theme, with articles addressing three very different strands of Sydney's pedagogical history.
Kate Matthew's piece on Governesses outlines the culture and practices of the education that most middle-class children, especially girls, received for the first century or so of European settlement. Governesses occupied an awkward spot in the class structure of the colony, not quite servants, but not quite ladies either. As one of the few forms of relatively respectable employment for middle-class women, governessing was the only option for many women who found themselves unsupported or alone.
Samantha Frappell's articles on the Garcia School of Music (part of St Vincent's College, a Catholic girls' school in central Sydney) and its founder, Mary Christian, later Sister Mary Paul of the Cross, examines the kind of private school education that largely replaced governess-based teaching in the city by the end of the nineteenth century. Sister Mary Paul's eventful life reveals that some women managed to regain their lost respectability, by heroic measures.
And Mark Dunn has a piece in the latest upload on the Waterloo Tanning School, part of the push for technical education in the late nineteenth century, when factory owners and reformers alike clamoured for technical training as a way of making Sydney's workers more productive and competitive.
Bootmaking class in the pattern cutting and clicking room, Erskineville Bootmaking School 1909
If you haven't already seen them, you might also want to have a look at the Dictionary's articles on:
