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The Dictionary of Sydney
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School of Arts, Pitt Street, Sydney 1856

School of Arts, Pitt Street, Sydney 1856

By

Samuel Thomas Gill

Contributed By

National Library of Australia

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Arthouse Hotel Education The School of Arts movement Women of Pitt Street 1858

Subjects

Schools of Arts

Buildings

Arthouse Hotel

Organisation

Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts

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Gill, Samuel Thomas

National Library of Australia

Education

Education in Sydney started with Aboriginal society and the everyday learning and formal initiation of young Aboriginal people. Institutionalised education came with the Europeans, who first created schools for convicts' children, and later for the children of the new gentry and middle classes. Sydney became the centre of education in the colony, with a university, and eventually in 1880, universal education throughout the suburbs of the growing city.

The School of Arts movement

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about 140 schools of arts or mechanics' institutes were established in Sydney by volunteers. They were independent community organisations, assisted by a small government subsidy, and they thrived as centres of local community life. Today, their legacy in Sydney is more than just the surviving buildings. Out of these humble voluntary operations developed the local public library, the modern community or neighbourhood centre, and formal systems of adult and technical education.

Arthouse Hotel

Built as the library, hall and rooms for the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, and long a centre of cultural life in Sydney, the Arthouse Hotel was converted into a pub in the 1990s.

Women of Pitt Street 1858

Pitt Street in 1858 was alive with busy women, who were property owners, independent tenants, employees and small-scale businesswomen. This virtual walk rescues them from the obscurity of history, and shows how varied women's lives in mid-nineteenth-century Sydney really were.

Schools of Arts

Arthouse Hotel

Hotel trading in premises originally built as Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts.

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Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts

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The oldest School of Arts in Sydney was founded to provide further education for working people and has done so since its inception in 1833.