History of Education Quarterly crisis in the relationships between the sexes: the declining birthrate, firstwave feminism, and an increased participation in paid work (other than domestic service) by women led to a renewed emphasis on the ideology of separate spheres and a push by "experts" to safeguard the reproduction of the superior white race in this endangered colonial outpost. Enter also the notion of the adolescent, a euphemism, Miller argues, for the depen dent child, and the result of an "anxious scrutiny of the passage between childhood and adulthood" (p. 89). These political, economic, and social forces, Miller argues, ushered into existence the hierarchical and gendered structures of secondary edu cation that characterized South Australia, and indeed all the Australian states, by the 1920s, and that still perplex American visitors in the 1980s: the dominance of the fee-charging private/church schools was assured by the preservation of the academic, university-oriented curriculum as the most prestigious form of knowledge (one of the many contradictions in a society that talked ceaselessly about the need for technical education in the national interest); a small number of academic, intermittently feecharging state high schools was established, modeling themselves on the private schools, with secondary education for working-class children bi furcated into technical schools for boys and domestic high schools for girls. Where fees could not do the trick, the orderly transition of children into "appropriate" secondary schools was presided over by a growing army of educational "experts"-indeed, Miller argues, the need to decide who should have access to'the "scarce resource" of academic secondary education (i.e., the definition and measurement of intelligence) set the agenda for educational research for much of the twentieth century. By and large, things had not changed much when this reviewer entered a state high school in the early 1950s. Its disquieting implications for edu cation today ensure that Pavla Miller's book will be controversial and, it is hoped, widely read.
Confrontation with the British during the years 1839 to 1842 jolted the Chinese into a more realistic perception of the wider world. Before the Opium War, the Chinese took little notice of the world beyond the traditional Chinese realm; during the course of the war China's inadequate knowledge of overseas countries proved to be a strategic disadvantage. In the 1840s, knowledge of the wider world was important to China's defense against Western intrusion, and a handful of Chinese scholar-officials who shared this view engaged in the serious study of foreign nations. A small but influential group of Chinese set out to expand China's knowledge of the West; they did so in the belief that this was essential to China's survival. The comprehensive accounts put together by Wei Yüan (1794–1857) and Hsü Chi-yü (1795–1873) and shorter works by other authors suggest the importance of this new perspective in the decade after the Treaty of Nanking.
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