Chapter 46 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

ARE RACISTS ETHNOCENTRIC?



ALTHOUGH COINED much earlier, the word 'ethnocentrism' was first popularised in the epochal work of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson & Sanford (1950). These authors used the term in preference to 'racial prejudice' on the grounds that not all prejudice they were concerned with was racial (e.g. anti-Semitism) and not all was negative (i.e. one can be prejudiced towards as well as against). Generally, then, 'ethnocentrism' in their terms means something like 'thinking of one's own ethnic group as providing a standard from which other groups diverge only to their discredit'

It must be stressed that, although disguised as a definition, what we have here is in fact an explanation of racism. It is asserted implicitly that at least some racists dislike other ethnic groups because they have an excessively high regard for their own group. It is assumed that thinking well of one's own group has as its mirror-image thinking ill of other groups. In two-value logic, this is an impeccable assumption. The trouble is that we do not live in a two-value world. In fact, nowhere has this been better demonstrated than in the follow-up work to Adorno et al, (1950). Early attempts to reverse the wording of the 'F' scale (summarised in Brown) 1965), did assume a two-value world. They thought that if a person agreed with an original item he should disagree with its contradictory. Empirically, it was found that this did not happen. The solution given by Christie, Havel & Seidenberg, (1956) to the conundrum that this phenomenon posed was that psychological opposites were not the same as logical opposites.

It would appear then, that for all their logical opposition, racism (thinking ill of other groups) and ethnocentrism (thinking well of one's own group) might not in fact be highly correlated. Only an empirical enquiry can find out. What Adorno et al, (1950) implicitly assumed needs testing.

That the assumption could be false becomes more apparent when we consider alternative hypotheses for the explanation of racism. It could, for instance, be the case that ethnocentrism is generally merely one aspect of a general trait of misanthropy. People who don't like other races may not like anyone very much. In this case we would expect a positive correlation between ethnocentrism and racism rather than the negative correlation implicitly postulated by Adorno et al, (1950). Thinking ill of other groups may go with thinking ill of one's own group also.

Going beyond this, the most cautious hypothesis of all might be that no generalisation is possible. Attitudes to various groups might be stimulus-specific. We like groups who have features or characteristics that we have been conditioned to like and that is all there is to it. Just because we don't like Jews, it does not mean we will not like Aborigines or that we will like our own society. This hypothesis does at least have to recommend it the fact that the things objected to in one group are often not the same as the things objected to in other groups. Blacks are said to, be 'dirty' while Jews are said to be 'money-hungry'. Presumably one could approve of one attribute while not approving of the other. If so, one would dislike the one group but not the other. Prejudice would be specific -- not general. This raises the possibility that prejudice could in some sense and for some individuals be 'rational'. If one has been thoroughly brought up and, conditioned to place a high value on hygiene and one particular group is in fact characterised by carelessness of hygiene, it is surely in no sense irrational to dislike members of that group. This explanation for prejudice is at least a somewhat simpler one than the complex psychodynamic one proposed by Adorno et al, (1950). It may be that a punitive father produces prejudiced children but the connection is somewhat less direct than saying that disapproval of unhygienic behaviour generalises to disapproval of any particular group of people characterised by such behaviour. Indeed, when a mother socialises her child with words such as 'you dirty little boy' it is as much the person she is condemning as the behaviour. In conditioning an abhorrence of dirt, she is also conditioning an abhorrence of dirty people.

Since it is highly likely that care for hygiene is adaptive, it could be that any group which is not hygienic in some respect must attract 'prejudice' from members of our society. The prejudice could be an undesirable side-effect of something that is of itself inherently desirable.

In one sense, then, there are two polar hypotheses for the explanation of prejudice: the 'rational' and the 'irrational'. The first says that prejudice is not prejudice at all, but rather postjudice. One does not dislike blacks because one has some deep Freudian need to do so, but rather because one has come in contact with blacks and found out as an empirical fact that they are characterised by attributes which one personally does not approve of in anyone -- be they blacks, Jews, Tibetans or one's own brother.

The second hypothesis, on the other hand, is the one with which social scientists are more familiar -- that prejudice is 'irrational' in the sense of springing from deep personal inadequacy. One's own inadequacy is so great and so disturbing that it must be masked by stigmatising other weaker groups as yet more inadequate. It will be seen then, that this paper challenges very extensively any notion of generality in the phenomena of prejudice. Not only does it challenge the view that thinking well of one's own group implies thinking ill of others, but it also challenges the view that thinking ill of one out-group implies thinking ill of another outgroup. The first of these assumptions has passed almost unnoticed in literature on the topic, (for one exception, see Hoogvelt, 1969) but the latter has been the subject of some test.

In fact there has been a consistent record of confirmation for this second hypothesis. There is always some correlation between various forms of anti-out-group feeling. Adorno et al, (1950) found a significant correlation between their anti-Semitism and 'ethnocentrism' scales. In fact, at .80, the correlation was not only significant but high enough to suggest practical identity between the entities concerned. The so-called 'ethnocentrism' scale used in these authors' study, however, was not an ethnocentrism scale in the narrow sense suggested here (thinking well of one's own group) but a rather broad-ranging prejudice scale falling into three subscales labelled respectively 'Negroes', 'Minorities' and 'Patriotism'. Of these three, patriotism might seem closest to what is here called ethnocentrism but even so, it includes items dealing with 'Germans and Japs', 'Mexico', the inevitability of war and so on. The correlation between these three sub-scales was also high-ranging from .74 to .83. The lack of thematic unity in the sub-scales must, however, make one a little suspicious of these correlations. Why, for instance, was the item dealing with 'Germans and Japs' not placed in the 'Minorities' sub-scale? Since this item and others like it in fact went into the 'Patriotism' sub-scale, it must come as no surprise that the 'Patriotism' and 'Minorities' sub-scales correlated so highly.

For all that, it must be conceded that there is at least some generality in all anti-out-group attitudes. Ray & Doratis (1972) reported in fact that even prejudice against religious out-groups correlated with ethnic prejudice. This recurrent correlation must be taken as some support for the 'irrational' explanation of racial prejudice. If prejudice is completely general, it cannot be stimulus-specific or stimulus-bound unless the objects of prejudice are all characterised by the same properties -- and any such set of common properties would be extraordinarily hard to find.

It must be observed, however, that just how general prejudice is, is not really known. Almost all ethnic prejudice scales assume it to be general and hence mix up in the one scale items dealing with a variety of ethnic groups. This was certainly so of the Adorno et al, (1950 ) 'ethnocentrism' scale. It would be much more informative if such a priori assumptions were not made and separate scales used to assess attitude towards each particular ethnic group. If, after so doing, it were found that the separate scales correlated very highly, the hypothesis that prejudice can be stimulus-specific would have to be abandoned. If, on the other hand, it were found that the correlation were only modest, one would have to say that there were some stimulus-specific elements in ethnic prejudice and some general elements. Putting it another way, one could say that for some people prejudice is the result of 'rational' processes and for some others it is the result of 'irrational' processes.

If we assume that 'rational' (stimulus-bound) prejudice is possible, another possibility that arises is that one ethnic group might attract it more than another. Prejudice towards aborigines, for instance, might be almost entirely 'rational' whereas prejudice towards Jews might be almost entirely 'irrational'. There might be different underlying causes for prejudice towards different groups. This, then, constitutes another reason why prejudice towards different groups ought to be treated differently and not lumped together to form a single 'racial prejudice' scale.

The experimental hypotheses so far, then, are: 1. That ethnocentrism will not be significantly correlated with any form of racism; 2. That different forms of racism will be significantly correlated but that the correlations observed will fall far short of suggesting identity.

One difficulty with the second hypothesis is the difficulty of knowing what would constitute sufficient evidence to reject it. How near is 'far short'? Obviously, there is little assistance to be gleaned here from statistical criteria. Underlying the second hypothesis is the view that 'rational' prejudice is possible. The second hypothesis is merely one possible deduction from that underlying theory. To strengthen the test of the theory, therefore, it seems desirable to derive yet a further deduction to form a third hypothesis. If two deductions from the theory are confirmed, the theory will be much more effectively supported.

The second deduction to be made (Hypothesis 3 ) depends on the fact that in Australia, prejudice against Aborigines (blacks) appears to be positively correlated with contact frequency. Overall, Australians at a referendum of a few years ago showed that they were overwhelmingly in favour of increased government action to assist Aborigines. In such circumstances, news reports of anti-Aborigine prejudice are widely noted and are responded to with some outrage. Such reports, however, invariably come from country towns which have an Aboriginal settlement nearby or from depressed suburbs of big cities where Aborigines congregate. We might infer then that most Australians have a rather unrealistic view of Aborigines -- regarding them as 'just the same as us only with a brown skin'. The cultural differences inevitable in a people who were in the stone age only a few generations ago do not appear to be anticipated. When however white Australians are brought face to face with Aborigines, the vast cultural differences soon become apparent and prejudice is evoked where none was before.

The second deduction, then, is that the correlations between the various forms of racism will be less in geographical areas where there is high contact with the out-groups concerned. The rationale for this deduction is as follows: If prejudice is normally composed of both rational and irrational elements, only the rational elements can be affected by contact. Whether contact with the group which one dislikes leads to an increase or a decrease in rational dislike will be a function of the stimulus properties of the target-group concerned. But since, by definition, irrational prejudice is a function of the prejudiced person's deep needs rather than of the stimulus characteristics of the target group, contact with that target group will be irrelevant to that irrational prejudice. Irrational prejudice can only be changed if the underlying needs which caused it change. Irrational prejudice then can exist prior to any contact with the groups concerned and will not be changed by such contact. Prior to contact, in fact, all prejudice must be irrational prejudice. Therefore, in people who have had little contact with Aborigines in particular, prejudice should be in absolute terms less prevalent and at the same time highly correlated. Since any target group will do for irrational prejudice, there should be no need to discriminate between such groups. If you are prejudiced against one, you will be prejudiced against the other.

After contact with the group or groups concerned, however, this relatively cosy little picture must change somewhat. If, for instance, people suddenly find themselves living in close contact with Aborigines and Aborigines happen to be in fact rather unhygienic in their habits, some people previously without prejudice will start to say that they don't like Aborigines. But the same people will still have no reason to dislike Jews. The two forms of prejudice will not correlate. The addition of a few rationally `prejudiced' persons to the ranks of the prejudiced (previously composed only of irrationally prejudiced persons) should attenuate or dilute the previous high correlation between the various forms of prejudice. In operational terms, then, the third hypothesis for this study falls into two parts: that anti-Aboriginal prejudice will be highest in suburbs where large numbers of Aborigines live, and that in such suburbs, the correlation between anti-Aborigine sentiment and racial dislike of other forms will be lower than in suburbs where there are few or no Aborigines.

METHOD

This study took advantage of the fact that, at the time it was carried out, one particular suburb of Sydney, Redfern, was the centre of a national controversy because of its citizens' and local council's desire to prevent the formation of an Aboriginal housing co-operative in the area. Funds for the project were granted by the Federal government and the objections of local residents were overruled. Redfern already in fact had what was probably one of the largest urban concentrations of Aborigines in Australia. It was hence ideal for the present study.

To provide a standard against which attitudes in Redfern could be compared, however, it was necessary to find another suburb of equivalent socio-economic status which did not have an Aborigine population. The only suitable suburb was Zetland. Both Redfern and Zetland were rated 7 (the lowest rating) on Congalton's, (1969), scale of prestige of Sydney suburbs. Although only Redfern had a large population of Aborigines, both Redfern and Zetland had a large population of recent Southern European and middle Eastern migrants. Neither suburb appeared to have any detectable Jewish population.

For the purposes of the study, a questionnaire was designed which contained four separate scales to measure attitude towards the four ethnic groups which were thought to be most relevant to a study of prejudice in Australia: Jews, Aborigines, Southern European migrants (Italians, Greeks etc. ) and Australians themselves. The latter scale was intended as the measure of ethnocentrism among Australia's Anglo-Saxon majority. All four scales had ten items each -- five positively worded and five negatively worded.

It was perhaps regrettable that all four scales had to be new constructions -- no already published prejudice scales were suitable for use on this occasion. This was inevitable, because of the phenomenon mentioned earlier; that most previous work appears to have assumed that the different forms of racial or ethnic dislike invariably go together. Previous scales therefore are in general a jumble of items referring to a whole variety of out-groups. Nonetheless, individual items of previous scales did of course form the cores around which the new battery was built.

The four scales were all of equal length to facilitate comparison of means, reliabilities and other summary statistics. The items comprising the four scales were presented in the questionnaire interspersed among one-another. All were scored so that a high score represented a more 'ethnocentric' or prejudiced response.

Sampling was carried out by a small class of Sociology students as part of their course work. Each student took up to six questionnaires and went from house to house in the suburbs concerned. Each student selected his starting point from a map of the suburb with the aid of a pin and blindfold. He then visited houses in the block which was nearest to where the pin fell. He visited as many houses as was necessary to obtain three filled-out questionnaires from each suburb. Some questionnaires were filled out while the students waited and others were filled out at the householder's leisure and picked up later. The questionnaire was designed to be totally self-administering in order that some approach to standardised conditions of administration could be claimed. All questionnaires were checked for genuineness (to see that the students themselves had not filled them out) and no major problems were encountered: To safeguard confidentiality, the questionnaire was sealed in an envelope immediately the student received it back from the householder and the questionnaire was in any case anonymous. The location at which the person was contacted was however later written on the envelope by the student. This enabled data drawn from Redfern and data drawn from Zetland to be kept separate.

Because the conceptual focus of the study was the attitude of Australia's Anglo-Saxon majority towards the various minorities resident in Australia, the sampling necessarily excluded members of those minorities. If one of the student-interviewers encountered a coloured or European person when they went from door to door, various artifices were used by the students to extract themselves from the situation. If this did not prove possible, the interview was carried out but the results were not used.

RESULTS

A total of 178 questionnaires were actually completed -- eighty-eight from Redfern and ninety from Zetland. There were no significant differences between the two samples on the five demographic variables of Sex, Age, Education, Occupational Status and Political party preference. Item analysis based on the combined samples showed that all scales used worked reasonably well-with reliabilities (coefficient 'alpha') of .78, .79, .81 and .64 being recorded for the attitude to Aborigines, the attitude to Jews, the attitude to Southern Europeans, and attitude to Australia scales respectively. Considering the brevity of the scales and the fact that no pretesting had been carried out, the reliabilities of the first three scales were in fact quite high. All items used correlated significantly with their respective scale totals -- even after correction for overlap.

Contrary to the hypothesis, attitude to Aborigines was not significantly less favourable in Redfern than in Zetland. Means and SDs on the scale were 28.55 (7.05) and 28.63 (7.03) respectively. As the expected corollary of such a finding, the correlations between the various prejudice scales also differed little between the two samples. It had been expected that the correlation between attitude to Aborigines and attitude to Jews would be less in Redfern than in Zetland but the observed difference .333 versus .327 was not significant. The correlation between attitude to Aborigines and attitude to Southern Europeans was .368 in Redfern and .202 in Zetland. This was in the opposite direction to that expected but again was not significant. There was, then no support for either part of hypothesis 3.

Even the above results, however, do reveal that the second hypothesis was strongly supported. The correlation between different forms of racial dislike was in some cases extremely low. Taking such correlations across the entire group (both samples pooled), the attitude to Aborigines scale and the attitude to Jews scale correlated .330 while the attitude to Aborigines and the attitude to Southern European scales correlated .291. The attitude to Jews scale and attitude to Southern Europeans scale, however, correlated quite highly -- at .567.

Perhaps even more strongly supported, however, was the first hypothesis: one's attitude to Australia, Australians and things Australian correlated very little with one's racial dislikes -- .050 with attitude to Aborigines, .039 with attitude to Jews and .216 with attitude to southern Europeans.

DISCUSSION

It must be remembered that this study is principally the study of an assumption -- the assumption that ethnic likes and dislikes are unidimensional. Such an assumption occurs on every occasion when a single scale purporting to measure 'racial prejudice' or the like is used (e.g. Beswick & Hills, 1969). As has been mentioned, it is an assumption which has flowed at least in part from the early work by Adorno et al, (1950) which demonstrated extremely high correlations between measures of various forms of ethnic prejudice -- correlations so high that the assumption of uni-factoriality seemed justified. It has in fact almost become conventional wisdom that the man who is prejudiced in one respect will also be prejudiced in others -- the man who dislikes blacks will not like Jews either, and so on.

It is felt that the present results, although not widely generalisable because of sample limitations, do definitely show that there are at least some occasions when the assumption does not hold. In particular, the present results have given grounds for believing that among many Australians, attitude to Aborigines stands on its own -- whether you like or dislike Aborigines will not be very predictive of your attitude to other potential out-groups. The correlations observed do of course show that anti-Aboriginal people are slightly more likely to be prejudiced towards other groups (eight to eleven per cent shared variance) but, at the same time, the correlations are low enough to allow for there being large numbers of people who dislike Aborigines only. If by 'racist' we mean someone who is prejudiced against practically all out-groups, we can say from the present results that disliking Aborigines does not necessarily make you a 'racist'.

Attitude towards Southern Europeans and attitude towards Jews, however, do fit the classical picture of being highly correlated. How may this, then, be interpreted? It certainly cannot well be interpreted by the classical Freudian model; which sees prejudice as essentially irrational and more a reflection of the prejudiced person's deep projective needs, than of the disliked groups' stimulus properties. If it were all so irrational and projective, why would it matter what the out-group involved was? Obviously, it does matter. Attitudes towards the various groups are clearly differentiated.

The model which sees prejudice as at least partly rational, however, has no difficulty in fitting the results observed here. The different groups have different stimulus properties, so different people will dislike them. Jews are very different from Aborigines. If we can say that Aborigines are 'down and out', then we must say that Jews are 'up and out'. People who don't like sloth will not object to Jews, but they may object to Aborigines. People who do not like grasping materialism, will certainly find no fault with Aborigines but they may find fault with Jews. The fact that attitude to Jews and attitude to Southern Europeans are highly correlated would, on this account, simply show that the two groups have similar disliked properties -- such as being 'money-hungry' and often speaking with a heavy accent.

An intimate part of the Freudian 'projected-hostility' model of race prejudice, put forward by Adorno et al, (19,50) was of course that exaggerated dislike of out-groups was matched by exaggerated loyalty towards the in-group -- i.e. that positive ethnic sentiment ('ethnocentrism') would be highly related to negative ethnic sentiment ('racial prejudice'). The very fact that we have the word 'racism' in our vocabulary embodies an assumption that the direction of the racial sentiment does not need to be stated. It embodies the assumption that if you are 'prejudiced against' (one group) you will also be 'prejudiced towards' (your own group). If the term 'racial prejudice' embodies the assumption that people who dislike one out-group will tend to dislike all out-groups, then the term racism embodies the even broader assumption that race as such will be an obsession to people who show race-polarised dislikes and that such people will have a systematic belief in the superiority of one race or ethnic group -- a superiority from which the inferiority of all other groups must follow.

It is precisely this pervasive assumption that the present work has most clearly upset. This study would appear to have been the first which quite clearly allowed people to show positive ethnic sentiment ('ethnocentrism') without at the same time being committed to a particular stance on negative ethnic sentiment ('racial prejudice'). Because the two types of attitude were measured and reported separately it became possible for phenomena such as general misanthropy (disliking both the 'in' and the 'out' group) and general benevolence (liking both the 'in' and the 'out' groups) to emerge. Most importantly of all, however, it allowed for the possibility of there being no generality in ethnic attitudes at all.

It was then shown that people's opinion of their own group ('Australians') had absolutely no bearing on their attitude towards Jews or their attitude towards Aborigines. Some super-patriots were racially tolerant and some people totally alienated from Australian society were racially prejudiced. All possible combinations were equally likely. Only in the case of attitude towards Southern Europeans was there some relationship with Australian ethnocentrism. Although here the relationship was so weak (five per cent common variance), that some of the possible combinations of sentiment became only slightly less likely. These results also, then, represent a failure to confirm the expectations derived from the Freudian model of Adorno et al, (1950). Again however, there is no trouble in fitting the results to the 'rational' model of ethnic sentiment. If positive and negative sentiment do not have a common underlying psychodynamic cause, but are instead simply a function of the varying stimulus properties of the groups concerned, there is in fact no reason for the two types of sentiment to go together unless the stimulus properties of the two groups are indistinguishable. That they do not go together simply shows that the various groups are distinguishable and that the parameters on which they differ are important ones in the value-systems of the people contained in the sample.

Given the fact that the two generally important hypotheses of the present work came out in a direction which is best fitted by the 'rational prejudice' model, it is of course disappointing that the hypothesis of more local or topical importance was not confirmed. Redfern and Zetland did not differ in degree of anti-Aborigine sentiment. This obviously could be the outcome of several factors. It could of course mean that the model from which the hypothesis was deduced was inaccurate, but it is perhaps more likely that some of the necessary local or topical premises which were also involved in deriving the hypothesis, were not in fact accurate. It could for instance be the case that the people contacted in Redfern did not in fact have a history of greater contact with Aborigines than did the people contacted in Zetland. Regrettably, there was nothing in the questionnaire which allowed the extent of contact for each individual to be checked. Such a refinement should figure in any future studies similar to the present one. The reason why Redfern-dwellers were expected to have had greater contact was simply that Redfern is the Aboriginal enclave of Sydney. Geographically, however, Redfern is a rather elongated suburb and Aborigines are very clearly clustered towards its western end. Unfortunately, an informal check with the student-interviewers suggested that most of the sampling occurred in the central area rather than at the extremes. This, then, would have effectively invalidated one of the assumptions upon which the third hypothesis was built.

We may, then, conveniently summarise the findings of the present study by saying that, at least for the samples studied, the three assumptions embodied in the terms 'racial prejudice' and 'racism' were shown to be false. These assumptions are: 1. That positive prejudice (ethnocentrism) goes together with negative prejudice (dislike of other ethnic groups); 2. That dislike of one ethnic outgroup automatically goes with dislike of all ethnic out-groups; 3. That dislike of a particular ethnic group is necessarily prejudice. It could equally be postjudice -- i.e. a dislike stemming from experience with the group concerned, from experience of its members' real stimulus properties. It need not be a sentiment imported into the interracial contact situation which dictates from the beginning the formation of negative perceptions. Since both the above terms have, then, been shown to embody defective assumptions, a sounder replacement term might be 'ethnic sentiment'.

A remaining objection at this stage might be: 'But prejudice is something that happens at the individual level: even if it should be true that Aborigines are in general dirty or lazy, that still does not mean that any individual Aborigine will be dirty or lazy. By 'prejudice' one does not mean pre-judging the group. One means pre-judging the individual on the basis of what the group is supposed to be like. What is wrong basically is this stupid business of categorising people'.

One might remark that if it is wrong to categorise people as Aborigines, then it is surely just as wrong to categorise them as 'racists'. If it is categorisation of itself that is wrong then there would be few nouns left in the language for us to use. Fortunately or unfortunately, we do invariably work with general categories of phenomena. Take the noun 'dog'. There is in fact no such thing as a dog. There are only particular dogs -- animals that vary in size, shape, colour, smell, sound and practically everything else. Yet from this great variety we do extract a generalisation or abstraction and call it a 'dog' -- even though there is in fact no such thing as a typical dog. Viewed objectively, the whole phenomenon seems to be really peculiar behaviour -- an unparalleled exercise in vagueness. Why do we do it? For the simple reason that communication would be impossible if we did not. If we had a separate word for each individual dog and no general term, a lifetime would not suffice for us all to acquire the vocabulary necessary to discuss dogs. So it is not categorisation or labelling people' that is wrong or stupid. We label everything. We must.

What is wrong is perhaps then forming false expectations of the individuals so labelled. Can this however be helped? If I see that a dog is an Alsatian, I will avoid it because I have heard that Alsatians are often savage. That is probably adaptive behaviour for me -- even though I might have been doing that particular Alsatian a great injustice. It might in fact have been the most gentle and loving dog in the world. It might have been an exceptional Alsatian. If I happen to see that particular Alsatian often, I might quite soon learn that it is not in fact savage and I might in fact become good friends with it. This however does not mean that my initial behaviour was stupid or wrong. It simply means that never in life do we have all the relevant information about a particular situation in which we need to make some decision. We always, then, are thrown back on the need to rely on generalisations. This will mean that in some cases we will definitely be wrong and in consequence make bad decisions. It is however better to make some wrong decisions than to be permanently paralysed in indecision. If we never acted until all the information were in, we would spend life permanently rooted to the one spot. It is clear then, that every expectation, every generalisation, is in one sense prejudice. It is a prejudgment of the outcome of some action or situation based on imperfect information. In this sense prejudice cannot be right or wrong. It is simply unavoidable.

In interracial contact situations, therefore, the only cure for prejudice is to insure that other characteristics are not correlated with ethnic origin. While they are, people will use them, consciously or unconsciously, to form generalisations. For groups such as Australia's Aborigines, this means that a concerted effort must be made to raise their living and educational standard to the same level as that of white Australians. Calling people 'racists' and categorising them as evil, stupid or sick will probably be wrong and will certainly solve nothing.

REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Beswick, D.C. & Hills, M.D. (1969) An Australian ethnocentrism scale. Australian J. Psychol. 21, 211-226.

Brown, R.(1965) Social psychology. N.Y.: Free Press.

Christie, R., Havel, J. & Seidenberg, B.(1956) Is the 'F' scale irreversible? J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 56, 141-158.

Hoogvelt, A.M.M. (1969) Ethnocentrism, authoritarianism and Powellism. Race, 11, 1-12.

Ray, J.J. & Doratis, D. (1972) Religiocentrism and ethnocentrism: Catholic and Protestant in Australian schools. Sociological Analysis 32, 170-179.



APPENDIX I

The attitude to Aborigines scale. Five-point response option to each item from Strongly Agree (5) to Strongly Disagree (1). Items marked 'R' are reverse scored.

1 Aborigines generally don't show much inclination to work.
2 Aborigines have been unfairly discriminated against. R
3 Aborigines are not very hygiene-conscious.
4 Drunkenness is one of the greatest problems with Aborigines.
5 Aborigines often get into fights with one-another.
6 Given the chance, the Aborigine will work as hard as the white man. R
7 It is only because they haven't had the same chance to get an education that Aborigines can't get work. R
8 Aborigines are a kind and gentle people. R
9 The Aborigines are a rather ugly race.
10 We could learn a lot from the way Aborigines always share with one-another everything they've got. R


APPENDIX II

The attitude to Jews scale. Five point response option. Items marked 'R' are reverse scored.

1 Jews tend to be very money-hungry.
2 Jews are as honest and public spirited as anyone else. R
3 A major fault of the Jews is their conceit, overbearing pride and their idea that they are a chosen race.
4 If it weren't for the Jews, we wouldn't have had many of our most brilliant scientists and thinkers. R
5 Jews are definitely not to be trusted.
6 The Jews are much to be admired for having kept their identity in spite of centuries of persecution. R
7 Jews are one of the most cultured races on earth. R
8 After what they suffered under Hitler, Jews deserve the support of people everywhere. R
9 It can't be an accident that so many people over the centuries have wanted to suppress the Jews; they must have done something to deserve it.
10 One trouble with Jewish businessmen is that they stick together and prevent other people from having a fair chance in competition.


APPENDIX III

Attitude to Southern European migrants scale. Five point response option. Items marked. 'R' are reverse-scored.

1 European migrants should make more of an effort to learn English.
2 Italians and Greeks work such long hours that they tear down the conditions won by the Australian workers.
3 European migrants have benefited us by increasing the range of foodstuffs we can buy. R
4 Greeks just don't know how to return the friendliness of the Australian people.
5 Italians are no better or no worse than any other people R
6 Migrants have done a lot to build up Australia. R
7 Italian and Greek migrants have lowered the standard of living in Australia because they all crowd together in small houses and live like animals.
8 I can't imagine any member of my family marrying a Greek.
9 Australia is a much more cultured place because of the many southern European migrants we have received. R
10 One thing you have got to say for migrants is that they are hard workers. R


APPENDIX IV

Attitude to Australia and Australians scale. Five-point response option. Items marked 'R' are reverse-scored.

1 Australia is a dump of a country. R
2 Anyone who wants to get on has to go overseas rather than stay in Australia. R
3 People who knock Australia don't know what they're talking about.
4 Australia always seems to be at least five years behind anywhere else. R
5 Australia has one of the best climates in the world.
6 Australia must be a pretty good place or all the migrants wouldn't want to come here.
7 The Australian way of doing things is pretty hard to beat.
8 Not many other countries have the advantages Australia has.
9 A basic trouble with a lot of Australians is a lack of imagination and stick in the mud attitudes. R
10 Australians are far too easy going for their own good. R

POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM

The most recent versions of the racial attitude scales are given here. See also here for a later application of the Australian patriotism scale. Follow-up research to the research reported above can be found here.

Chapter 47 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


Prejudice Both Pathological and Natural



By MAX BELOFF

The word 'RACIALISM', or 'racism', has become, like 'fascism', no longer a term descriptive of a particular phenomenon, but an undifferentiated term of abuse. The same fate has befallen the term 'genocide' which no longer means the deliberate attempt to extirpate an entire race, however defined, as in the 'final solution', but some degree of oppression which may or may not include large-scale killings exercised by one people over another. Since nothing in politics is more to be deplored than the muddled thinking which shows itself in a perversion of language one must always be sensitive to questions of definition of this kind. I would myself limit racialism in its international political aspect to those cases where a deliberate attempt has been made by a powerful government to rearrange the map of the world or part of it, on the assumption that the biological differences that exist, or are presumed to exist, between different races are the most important aspect of relations between human groups, that the races of man can be disposed in a hierarchy, and that the 'superior' races however defined are entitled ipso facto to subjugate, oust or even exterminate the inferior ones.

In that sense racialist doctrines explicit or implicit are to be found at intervals throughout history; in modern times on a small scale in relation to European colonisation, particularly in North America and Australia. But only in the case of Nazi Germany does racialism as a force in international politics appear to have had a period of domination. Fortunately no regime since 1945 has followed the Nazi path, though the overthrow of the Nazis has not put an end to the appeals of racialism or prevented its survival in some quarters. But although one could no doubt in a mood of pessimism visualise a recurrence of the Nazi phenomenon or of something with the same basic characteristics, it has not happened yet, and this particular problem is therefore absent from the international political scene of the moment.

What does exist as a factor is of course 'race' itself, by which I mean not necessarily with Disraeli that "race is all" but that much that goes on in international affairs, and in many countries in domestic policies as well, is to be explained in terms of the actual or postulated differences between races. Even this subject is full of pitfalls.

For one thing 'racialism' in the Nazi sense as well as other phenomena such as South African Apartheid as it works in practice have so discredited the belief that race is important that some aspects of any serious discussion are almost taboo. No one denies that at any rate some human groups are markedly different from each other, that for instance the Irish soldiers who served the U.N. in the Congo were not likely to be taken for natives of that country. But if anyone suggests that physical differences may have psychic parallels, that some races may for instance be less talented than others in some measurable respect, the suggestion which does not prima facie seem unreasonable is met with such contumely that even a purely scientific investigation designed to establish the facts if possible is thought reprehensible and its results unsuitable for publication. The equality of all races in everything has become a dogma almost as entrenched in the modern enlightened UNESCO-type mind as was the reverse in Hitler's Reich.

It is also difficult because while the major races of mankind can in the broad sense be identified and characterised, the lesser groups within them which may or may not be regarded as separate races can provoke an almost endless quest for definition. Race, caste, even nation are all useful concepts; but all of them overlap and intermingle and give rise to intellectual as well as social and political problems. It is important to emphasise these complications if only as an answer to the type of commentator who denounces 'racialism' wherever a white man is unfair to a black man but refuses to consider whether the concept has any relevance to black men oppressing brown men or vice versa. All right thinking men were opposed to 'Aryanisation' even before it culminated in the holocaust; but who questions the right to pursue 'Africanisation'?

It is also a particularly difficult subject for a Jewish writer because of the ambivalence of Jewish attitudes towards race. For while it is true that Jews define themselves in religious terms, the nature of their religious beliefs and the ways in which the right to automatic recognition as a Jew is acquired --as shown in recent debates in Israel-- emphasises physical descent, and therefore tends to promote the idea that the Jews are essentially a race despite the obvious heterogenity of the physical types present in any large gathering of Jews. Since so much of Jewish energy is spent on maintaining and perpetuating the existence of the Jewish race and since admission to the Jewish religious community of those not born within it is not normally regarded desirable, there is an obvious foundation for saying that Jews are in fact committed to the belief in the importance of race, and this can have repercussions in the way in which international issues involving Jews are debated.

For one thing, it obviously affects the future relations between Israel and its neighbours in so far as they are influenced by internal Israeli developments. If Israel is to remain at anything like its present frontiers-- and I, for one, would expect this to happen-- the future of the country will largely turn on Jewish-Arab relations within it. Some people there argue that the only long-term policy is the creation of a single nationality which could come about through a Judaisation of the Arabs including their mass conversion to Judaism. But in the present temper of the world this outcome is hard to believe in. On the other hand, if the secularisation of the two communities was to go on-- and much in the world seems to point that way-- the problem of race would be posed in a new fashion.

In any event, we cannot rule out the fact that the claims of races to maintain their identity and act as vehicles for separate cultures are common form, and cannot be regarded as illegitimate by anyone who accepts the basic Jewish case for a recognisable identity whether in Israel or the diaspora.

The repercussions of this fact upon international relations will largely be a by-product of the development of a series of internal situations where identifiable racial groups exist within a single political complex. The situation is thus not the same as half a century ago when the issue was one of equality of access to the emptier parts of the world by different races. The exclusion of the Japanese from the U.S.A. and the white Dominions was an important cause of the extension to the Pacific area of the second world war. Such pressures could arise again-- from Japan itself, or from Chinese pressure in Siberia. But the right to limit immigration by category -- i.e., by race -- has now been well established in almost all countries. What we are mainly dealing with are the consequences of a previous period when some kinds of migration across racial divides were relatively unhampered, as they were from Commonwealth countries into the United Kingdom until very recently.

What we are witnessing is a reverse movement, an endeavour to reassert racial homogeneity by getting rid of elements who are regarded as unassimilable or wish to preserve their identity. This does not in all cases lead to serious international complications. Some countries may be too weak to react; what can Greece or the Lebanon do about their diasporas? Or they may not wish to embroil themselves with countries whose goodwill they require for other reasons. India's relative indifference to the fate of Indians in East Africa contrasts very strongly with the agitation about the rights of Indians in East and Southern Africa earlier this century.

In some cases, it is not clear whether or not assimilation in some form is the goal of a racial minority. A generation ago most people took it for granted that the American Negroes were concerned to assert parity of rights with white Americans and that, having achieved this aim and corrected their unequal economic status, the problem would resolve itself by an ultimate biological admixture thus continuing a process which began in slavery times. The United States might have become more like Brazil and develop a complicated racial admixture of its own.

Such views have been challenged by the emergence of movements denying the desirability for the American Negroes of assimilation and claiming an independence of culture looking to the re-establishment of affinities with their countries of origin in Africa. It is not for the Jews witnessing the return to Zion to say that this is unthinkable; the advent of Negroes to the new world began a mere three and a half centuries ago; but they have of course far less in the way of religious or cultural links to build upon, and it may be that what we are witnessing in the United States is only a temporary interruption to the processes of the 'melting-pot'. Meanwhile however there are some signs that other elements in the American amalgam are also beginning to dispute the assumptions of the melting-pot theory and to claim more recognition of their separate characteristics: but these claims fall into the category of national rather than racial ones.

Meanwhile of course the combination of Negro dissent and the Vietnam war are tending to make the United States a general target of suspicion and dislike for most non-white countries, and through the mechanism of the United Nations this fact is not without its significance in international relations. But race would seem ultimately less significant for America's place in the world than questions of economic advantage and pure ideology.

When we look at the great adversary, the Soviet Union, the situation is very different. In theory, the Soviet Union repudiates any form of racial approach to social and political issues; the recognition of some national groups as entitled to a limited cultural autonomy is a purely temporary concession to particular situations, and does not in theory provide an obstacle to the eventual creation of 'Soviet man'.

The reality is very different. The Russians are no more immune from racial prejudice than other people, as 'third world' residents in the Soviet Union have come to learn. The dispute with China is undoubtedly envenomed, perhaps on both sides, by racial considerations. Within the Soviet Union, the Great Russians assert their cultural superiority and claim the leading positions at the expense both of other Slav peoples and of the non-white minorities. The movement of populations is an instrument of government, undertaken for security reasons.

The ambiguity inherent in the Soviet attitude to the Jews is familiar. They have never enjoyed the status of a national minority or been recognised as having the right to cultural self-expression except for brief periods when it was hoped to impress gullible people abroad. As a religious minority they have been subjected to the oppression exercised against all religions. The logical conclusion would have been total assimilation into the host-peoples. But whether in deference to popular anti-semitism of a traditional kind, or for political and even security reasons connected with the links binding Russian Jews to Jews in other countries, this has not been attempted in the sense that the distinction between Jew and non-Jew in the eyes of officialdom has been maintained.

Such pressures and a degree of discrimination in some spheres tends to hold Jews together in a negative fashion and to prevent the disappearance of the Jews as an identifiable group which it is easier to call racial than national or religious, since the national ties are weak and the religious ones only now the affair of a minority. The advent of Israel and the events that have transpired since its foundation-- particularly the Six Day War-- have given a new positive content to Jewish self-consciousness. It is the harder to cope with because of the stance which the Soviet Union has itself come to occupy in the affairs of the Middle East.

It would be too much to say that this stance has been determined by the desire to isolate the Jewish community of the Soviet Union and therefore by considerations that are in the last resort racial. There are good reasons (from the Soviet point of view) for cultivating Arabs rather than Jews; just as no philosemitic tendencies are needed to explain the Soviet Union's original acceptance of the creation of the State of Israel. Policies once designed to embarrass Britain are now redesigned to embarrass the U.S.A.

But it is not clear at all whether the Soviet Union has now got a definite policy with regard to its own Jewish problem: the problem of the Jews who want to leave. For one thing no one, perhaps not even in the Soviet Union, certainly not outside, knows what the dimensions of the problem are; how many Jews would leave if the gates were opened? What proportion would choose Israel as their ultimate destination if other opportunities were available?

We know even less about other racial and national minorities. At a time when racial ties are reasserting themselves, can the Soviet Union be sure of how, for instance, Soviet citizens of Turkic descent -- many times as numerous as the Jews --would react if there was any weakening of the Great Russian determination to maintain their isolation and subjection?

As for the new Super-Power, China, which is clearly coming onto the world scene to an ever larger extent, what role will the historic racial solidarity and sense of racial superiority of the Chinese play in the international policies of China, particularly in relation to the areas of Chinese colonisation in South East Asia?

By comparison with these vast questions, the international problems created by South African Apartheid seem relatively simple. At one time it looked as though South Africa's racial policies were an international danger, in the sense that the countries of black Africa would combine against it and receive backing from the Russians or the Chinese or both, and that the ideological overtones of such a struggle could not leave the U.S.A. and its allies outside it. It now looks as though this was an over-simplification. Apartheid provides a useful slogan for agitators of the Left in various white countries since opposition to it is widespread among good men. But nothing serious can be done in this way, and the obstruction of sporting fixtures or cultural contacts cannot be an end in itself. Meanwhile the black African countries themselves are divided in their attitude according to what they regard as the national interest of particular States. As with the Arab countries and Israel, the most verbally hostile are often those remotest from the line of fire. It now looks much less likely that World War III will begin somewhere on the Zambesi.

Indeed one could argue that race is more likely to lead to international complications on the other side of the Atlantic, in Latin America and the Caribbean. From some points of view, the upheavals in those countries are not merely the consequence of economic deprivation and misery but of the reassertion of the racial identity of the Indian against his Spanish conquerors after centuries of submission. The role of the United States economically and as a prop of Right-wing regimes adds to the sense of racial confrontation. One must again not overdo things. The Tupamaros must be as white as any other Uruguayans and race plays little part in the tangled politics of Argentina. But in the Andean countries, as earlier in Mexico, race is clearly a factor of the greatest importance.

Even this brief survey will show why it seems dangerous and misleading to talk of racialism as the important thing. It is common to all human groups that men seek comfort in shared identities; what we call race is one of the most conspicuous of such shared identities. Most races cherish a vision of their own superiority and endeavour to maintain their separateness by various institutional or ideological means. Religions-- those that do not, like Judaism or Hinduism, identify with a racial grouping-- may try to bridge the gap; so may an ideology like communism. Often they fail or have to make concessions to race in the process.

The world must learn to live with this plurality for a long time; perhaps for all the time the human race still has on earth. Even within particular political communities very different races can survive in a healthy symbiosis and with mutual respect. What we need is a study of what the limits of such co-existence are, where the surgery of partition is needed or merely the gentler cure of federalism or its equivalent. We must look out for where racial feeling becomes pathological rather than worry about prejudices which are deep-rooted and natural. Jews in particular, quick in the light of their history, to sense prejudice in others, must also be aware of it in themselves. International relations are difficult and dangerous and will go on being so; the important thing is to try to distinguish where the real dangers lie. Proportion is all.



This article originally appeared in "Patterns of Prejudice" (1971, 5, 1-4)-- a publication of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, London.

Chapter 48 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974


The New Education



By: F. P. JUST

ONE*

EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA has been characterised over the last few decades by the unremitting importation from abroad of uniformly erroneous innovations which, before being thrown out, have retarded our children. These are frequently uneducated and unhappy in the middle and upper school, and bored in the lower school. One educationist after another, seeing that all is not well, prescribes a remedy; and in almost every case it will simply be another heady dose of the same kind of stuff that has caused the trouble, one more measure that will decrease the child's intellect and make his path through tertiary studies and life in general more difficult.

One catch-cry echoes above all the others that come and go. It is the complaint about 'cramming'. This is the word used nowadays for the acquisition of knowledge, and it is presented as the malady of today's children, whose minds are allegedly over-taxed by the vast amount of data which we ask them to absorb. This is a tempting hypothesis, but it does not stand up to examination, and not even the children themselves will accept it. Indeed, they know much better than many an educationist what is wrong with them: They may complain of overwork, for assignments and discussions are laborious, time-consuming and frequently time-wasting. But they will never complain of 'crammed' heads, for they only wish that after so much effort their heads were indeed crammed with more clear facts, whether in arithmetic, spelling, grammar, history, geography, or any of the upper school subjects.

We have a crisis in our schools, but it is not a crisis of too much juvenile intellect, any more than it is a crisis of manpower and materials. It is a crisis of intellectual depreciation brought on by a series of fallacious ideas and methods imposed by so-called pedagogical 'experts'. Both teachers and pupils suffer from it, and however it may manifest itself in the classroom, it is basically a lack of confidence in one's subject, a failure to devote oneself singlemindedly and wholeheartedly to the usually demanding task of teaching and learning the minutiae which constitute the substance of most disciplines, whether they be tables, foreign verbs or historical facts.

As more and more unsuccessful innovations have been introduced over the years by 'experts' believing they had found a short-cut to knowledge, it has become increasingly difficult for good, experienced teachers to retain or recover their trust in their own tried subjects and methods. As for the young ones, they frequently emerge from training with only the latest, or second-latest, fallacy in their methodological armory. Catch-cries such as 'we must avoid cramming' and 'we must teach pupils how to think' (instead of what to think) are both causes and effects of all this wrong pedagogy.

And now, at the very time when the conception that education is the development of the intellect -- i.e. the accumulation of ordered knowledge -- most needs reinforcing, we have one more massive dose of anti-intellect virus administered by the 'experts' and again prescribed by overseas educationists. It is a classical case of prescribing the cause as the remedy.

Educationists used to be pedagogues, that is to say that when they talked about educating children they talked as teachers experienced in one or more disciplines, and the core of their thinking was centred on the imparting of knowledge to pupils. Then many forsook their disciplines and began to speak as self-styled experts on teaching methods, or, if their leanings were in the direction of ethics, sociology and politics rather than psychology, they became self-styled experts on curricula. It would seem to the cynically-minded that the last qualification for being a present-day educationist is to be an expert in a particular discipline taught in schools -- and knowledge of the subject does not seem to matter.

Of all the innovations with which educationists have bedevilled our schools over the years, the New Education would seem to be the most pernicious. Emanating seemingly from the curricular rather than the methodological variety of educationist, it promises not the destruction of a particular discipline by the use of a wrong method, but the destruction of all or most of the disciplines, and their replacement by a core of unintegrated sociologically-oriented general topics, in which the only common factor is what the New Educators call their 'relevance'. In its extreme form it promises the virtual elimination of school as we know it.

At this point, it becomes impossible to ignore broader ideological considerations, if one is to honestly pursue a discussion of our school crisis. At the risk of alienating the sympathies of teachers who have agreed with the arguments so far presented, but who are unwilling to look Old and New Left strategies squarely in the face, one must go beyond education if one is to explore New Education.

It is not for nothing that one of the original producers of the currently controversial 'Little Red Schoolbook', which is only an extreme manifestation of the spirit which animates the New Education, says this: 'The book has nothing to do with education. Its sole aim is to train a future generation in radical anarchy.' The apparent discontinuity between, say, the New Left anarchists of the 'Little Red Schoolbook' and -- for example -- certain Christian educationists who seemingly dream of some new Garden of Eden, the apparent disproportion between the conspiratorial activities of some young Maoist activist teachers and the introduction of nondisciplinary core subjects in some church school, should not blind us to either of two things:

* There is no question of ideological identity between all the adherents of the New Education;

* There is nevertheless ideological affinity, and the spirit of regenerating society in some manner or another is predominant in all its devotees.

They are all sociologically inspired and all anti-traditional, and they all derive, consciously or unconsciously, from the Rousseau-Marx-Marcuse school of thought. From Rousseau to Bishop Robinson is not even a stone's throw.

The precise effects, present and future, of the New Education on schooling may be summed up by saying that many teachers are concentrating not on imparting a body of knowledge within a given discipline, not on teaching English, mathematics, history, geography, etc., but on changing young human beings and thereby changing society. This they do with varying degrees of lucidity, according to the groups to which they belong, but they all share a common contempt for a large part of the academic content of their subjects, and a common dislike of subjects involving the learning of large bodies of detailed facts. Indeed, one of their main catch-cries, as already mentioned, is that the acquisition of facts, whether they be historical dates, formulae or Latin verbs, is 'cramming'. Naturally, mathematics and the physical sciences, although sometimes badly mauled by wrong methods and incompetence, have suffered the least in New Education, perhaps mainly because nobody has as yet had the audacity to propose that they should be thrown out.

The New Education scheme, of course, also places great emphasis on creativity -- that is to say the study of our great cultural heritage in literature and art is replaced by the creation by juveniles of generally worthless trivia. Again the pupil is denied the knowledge which will allow his judgment and taste to mature.

Languages, which likewise contain a great body of sociologically irrelevant detail, have fared less well, and as well as being practically destroyed in many cases by methodology and ignorance, have reached a stage where their absence from the curriculum has often been suggested.

Poor old English grammar has been dead for years, as can be seen in the speech of many of our pupils and students.

The essence of the New Education is that the core of the curriculum should be the 'relevant' subjects, excluding history as much as possible and concentrating on the social issues of the day.

Whatever grandiose ideas and elaborate systems may be brought to bear on the elaboration of these 'relevant' subjects, where 'relevant' frequently means 'relevant to the teacher's sociological aims', in practice they resolve into projects, assignments and discussions, written and oral, on such things as television, apartheid, aboriginal rights, social injustice, abortion, sex, pollution, conservation, etc. All of these topics to be treated by uneducated children under a teacher who is virtually responsible to no one, for we must not forget that another of the new catch-cries of the New Educationist is that the teacher must be free of all the constraints of inspectors, prescribed curricula and examinations.

The evil of the New Education lies not so much in the choice of topics such as the ones just listed, which of course are stimulating and may be edifying; nor indeed essentially in the fact that they are frequently presented in a biased manner. It lies in the fact that these current topics deprive the child of all possibility of becoming properly educated, of becoming proficient in a number of separate disciplines and basic fields of knowledge, from spelling and arithmetic to history and literature and languages. In all fields in which knowledge of and training and practice in handling large bodies of data are required, our secondary students are generally lamentably poor already -- largely due to fallacious methods and unsatisfactory teaching over the past few decades. Behaviorism, Piaget, Cuisenaire, look-and-guess spelling, audio-lingualism, have all led to low academic standards within various disciplines.

But the New Education will essentially lead to non-education, and this, of course, is precisely what the originators of the campaign want. The old, generally unformulated notion behind our democratic system, including our education, is that controversial sociological subjects with their vast factual and moral generalisations should be left marginal to the basic subjects at school, and become the subjects of political debate in the world at large, where each of us has one vote in democratic elections. Many teachers, with varying degrees of lucidity, instead of trying to produce educated people who will later democratically vote on political issues, are encouraged by the New Education to directly indoctrinate uneducated children with their own answers to these issues. They are by-passing our democratic system -- and we have seen in what general direction -- and at the same time are neglecting to educate our children.

And let us not doubt that their task is easy among the children. It is so much more effortless for everyone concerned to formulate vague theories about contemporary society than to extract and analyse a set of historic facts. And apparently so much more relevant to generalise about current issues than to learn French or Indonesian verbs.

The New Education, for the ninety per cent of teachers I have not mentioned, is a challenge. They will not only have to combat the ten per cent who are already its adherents, and the big guns of education in the faculties and teachers' colleges, but the stream of new adherents who must inevitably emerge from training into the schools. Democracy in general must see it as a challenge, for even if all political motivation were removed from it, it would still remain a destroyer of education. But there is no doubt that those who have exported it to us from America see it as a destroyer of society.

I believe that only parents, and I mean each individual parent, can effectively combat the New Education. Not necessarily, or even desirably, by invoking the political factors expounded in this article, but simply by insisting that our schools maintain their traditional core of basic subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, physics, English language and literature, languages, history, geography, and that teaching within these subjects be efficient and objective.

There are no more inspectors and no more examinations until matriculation and our children are at the mercy of an individual who may or may not be worthy of his charge; we are their sole protectors. If we fail to protect them, whatever the political consequences of our failure, we shall see them pass through school without acquiring more than a fraction of the knowledge and thought processes -- including particularly a historical perspective -- which from time immemorial have marked an educated person and have contributed to the development of the only culture in history that has been able to indulge in the luxury of even thinking of the welfare of the whole world.



TWO

On 22 May 1972 the "Melbourne Herald" published an article in which I made a plea for a return to traditional learning in our schools, and called upon parents to protect their children by personal action against the latest fallacy from abroad: the New Education. But the response to this article from all quarters, teachers, parents, students, has been so overwhelming that colleagues and myself believe we are entitled to call upon the government for some official action. Parents in particular will be satisfied only by an inquiry into what is going on in our schools.

The main points of my article were these:

l. Over the last few decades, wrong methods and the abandonment of scholarship as the main aim of education had destroyed the value of much of our schooling, and produced a crisis of 'non-education' in our schools.

2. The New Education, with its rejection of the basic disciplines in favour of sociologically 'relevant' topics on the one hand, and individual juvenile 'creativity' on the other hand, would deal the deathblow to education.

3. The New Education with its inherent tendency to place contentious social issues (and suggested solutions) before uneducated minds, had opened the way for indoctrination of our children and the consequent subversion of democracy.

4. That whatever we may think of 3, our present educational system, having abandoned syllabuses, inspection and examination, left our children entirely at the mercy of individual teachers who might or might not be worthy of their charge. This point is irrefutable, and alone would warrant action at government level.

Criticism of my article has mainly consisted, apart from personal attacks, of loose restatements of the case for the New Education emphasising its 'relevance' in our modern world. I am accused of being in an ivory tower because I believe that children should have a store of basic knowledge before they deal with 'relevant' subjects. Colleagues and I, and most parents and teachers, do not accept the theoretical case for the New Education, and are dismayed at the results of its practical application. In particular, we believe that the sense of frustration among so many of our school-children comes precisely from the failure of modern schooling to provide them with basic knowledge within recognised disciplines.

But let me move from generalisations and take a specific case of gross non-education from our bulging files. A successful young English teacher, A, finds his Leaving English Literature class (no syllabus, no examination as for Higher School Certificate, HSC) boycotted this term.

On making inquiries he finds a young colleague, X, who frankly admits that he instructs all pupils to examine subjects for their relevance and adds that obviously pupils consider Shakespeare irrelevant. X further states that they often find his own subjects irrelevant so that he teaches them what they want, and as a matter of fact, has taught them mainly sex during first term. He adds that personally he has nothing against Shakespeare, and suggests that A makes himself more relevant with some . . . sex.

When one realises that such cases are simply normal, predictable implementations of New Educational theory, one is not prepared to accept such vague reassurances as those of the Director-General: 'The schools now have a little more freedom and, on the whole, this is good'. The whole Education Establishment knows that the individual teacher now has practically unlimited freedom until he comes up against HSC. And we believe this is scandalous.

Without presuming to anticipate the outcome of any inquiry, we believe that any measures taken to remedy the present critical situation should involve the following considerations:

* The determination of curriculums and syllabuses and methods should be essentially in the hands of a board or boards consisting of representatives of the community and of experts in a particular discipline, and not in the hands of so-called educationists (who may be psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, etc.).

* State examinations or some form of external assessment should be re-introduced so that every child may be encouraged to strive conscientiously to obtain at any of a series of levels a certificate which the pupil and everyone else knows is worth something. Not only will this measure begin to restore efficiency in teaching and motivation in learning, but it will alleviate the pressure on universities since the pupil will see other worthy academic goals apart from matriculation.

* All experimentation should be subject to control by the new board or boards appointed and subject to parents' approval; discredited methods should be replaced by order of such board or boards.

* The role of such bodies as education faculties, teachers' colleges, departmental research branches, Victorian Universities and Schools Examinations Board, VUSEB, (which instead of conducting examinations has abolished all of them except HSC, through which it now lets eighty per cent of candidates instead of the usual seventy per cent) and the Australian Council of Education Research, should be closely scrutinised and defined.

Our ideas, which such considerations would help to implement, are not elitist. On the contrary, they are based on the unshakeable belief that we elders owe it to our children to give them the basic knowledge which in turn will enable them to choose their own specialisation with that lucidity and confidence and self-esteem that only possession of such knowledge can give. To calculate reasonably well, to spell and write and read and speak reasonably well, and to see the world with some historical, geographical and scientific perspective, should be the inalienable right of every normal young Australian. Only imported educational aberrations and their local devotees are robbing him of it. It will soon be too late if the government does not act now.



THREE

... I speak as a parent, as a citizen, as a teacher, and as a linguist, in any case as someone who has spent his life learning languages, teaching languages and trying to learn to read and write and speak languages. I wrote an article, two articles, in the Herald, and the response was overwhelming in the sense of the interest displayed. And I have hence been asked to talk to you today.

... The points I made were four, and I shall deal with them one by one in the light of criticism aimed back at me by the Education Department in the interview in the Herald, 28 June 1972, and I think obliquely in a supplement in the Age, 3 July 1972.

... The first point I made was that over the last few decades, wrong methods and the abandonment of scholarship as the main aim of education had destroyed the value of much of our schooling, and produced a crisis of 'non-education' in our schools. By noneducation I meant basically the failure to provide our children with that store of basic knowledge, basic data, facts, information, which hitherto in our culture have been considered the essential furnishing of an educated man's mind, and I meant at the same time an unwillingness on the part of children and of some teachers to persevere along that hard path -- and it is hard -- of setting children the sometimes arduous task of absorbing these things, which are often seemingly unrelated, seemingly unimportant, and in the opinion of many educationists -- and I hasten to add that I do not put all educationists in the same boat -- irrelevant. 'Relevance' is the key word of the modern education, or the New Education.

Now let me discuss this first point. I mentioned wrong methods and approaches, and I named them. They do not belong to what I defined quite closely as the New Education. I might say that my critics do not seem to have read my articles with the accuracy that one could well demand of them. I think it is about two columns before I talk of the New Education. I talk about the preceding decades, I say we have a crisis which is due to a large extent to such things as behaviourism, the philosophy behind many of the approaches, and which is non-intellectual, Piaget, who stated that numerical abstractions could not be made by children, and so forth, look-and-guess method of spelling, which I can assure you my children have passed through, where they say 'What's that? What's that? What's that?', Cuisenaire, and audio-lingualism, of which I can speak with great experience, and whose effect, I may say, has been disastrous. All anti-intellectual, all opposed to cultivating the mind by creating a store of ordered knowledge, all opposed to pointing out what order there is, for there is order, and all inefficient.

Behind these approaches and methods I have named, there are certain basic attitudes which belong to the Department or to some members of the Department, and which are apparently the official view of the Department.

There is an unreasoned aversion for learning by rote. Why? The Department states at the same time, within a few lines of this, that education should be a preparation for life. But everyone, except some educationists, knows that learning by rote is part and parcel of life, the most efficient method known to man of absorbing a large amount of data. The Boeing 747 pilot learns his cockpit drill by rote, the doctor learns his anatomy by rote, the engine-driver learns his signals and operations by rote, by heart, nobody seems to know where the word 'rote' comes from. Why cannot Johnny enjoy the right of access to knowledge by learning by rote? Only educationists will deny him it. Their answer will be 'because he has to be taught how to think'. But you know, 'how to think' consists of a very few simple rules for handling data. The rules are not complicated, philosophers have defined them. It is the data Johnny needs, and he has not got them.

The same pathological aversion for grammar: (except, thank goodness, for the Minister). You learn your language by using it, they say. Yes, you do. But you can end up with the crudest, bluntest instrument of communication possible, unless you learn at the same time how it works, all its resources, all its mechanisms. If your environment is uneducated, you will learn its crude, blunt instrument of expression; if your environment is educated, you will lose -- lose -- some of the sharpness of its means of expression. History shows, quite clearly I think, that no finely developed language is automatically self-perpetuating. The best southern English is maintained by the best traditional education. If I may be permitted to take an example from history. The whole history of Romania, of that part of the world controlled by Rome, is an illustration of what happened to Latin, which very rapidly, when all the organisation of the empire broke down, disintegrated into mutually unintelligible dialects which grew even smaller in their area of application until not only was Spain quite unable to understand Rumania, but Italy was unable to understand Southern France, and finally little bits of one country could not understand other little bits of the same country. Of course I am simplifying, but it is since the advent of a literary standard and of schools that these languages have once more become sophisticated, sharp instruments of expression of our culture. Through education in language. Through linguistic analysis.

... I believe we owe it to every one of the underprivileged, and I mean mainly the linguistically underprivileged, to give them the means to distinguish between 'He done real good' and 'He did really well'. Whatever educationists may say to this, that grammar will not transfer, let us not believe them. It will transfer. It won't transfer of course if Johnny goes home to a milieu where they all say 'He done real good', but it will transfer if all our schools begin to teach all our Johnnies how to speak so that the uneducated environment becomes diluted with culture. We will soon have an instrument which is not as blunt as that which produces 'He done real good'. 'He did real good', of course means something to us. I hope I can sometimes do real good. But it does not mean the same to an uneducated person. Communication is impeded, although my example of course is rather special.

What is education for, inter alia, if it is not to remove such barriers to communication created by ignorance of the structure of educated English. Let us give all our children every help possible in communication by showing them the orderly structure of language. Make them aware of language, of the tool and expression of thought. Teach them words and notions by reading books, not writing their own juvenile creations.

You know, there is something cynical about people who say it does not matter how you spell or how you write. Something cynical, because they are people in high places and they know very well that they would never have arrived in these places, if they had been unable to write and speak correctly, and they know jolly well that for the whole foreseeable future of Johnny, it will matter, fundamentally.

And finally, and now I speak as a University teacher of languages, make it possible for some of them to become outstanding students of languages and humanities in general.

... The same pathological aversion for competition. No examinations. As the Department says, better a purely relative assessment of an individual's progress than an objective assessment of an individual's knowledge. Examine a child's progress, not his achievement in scholarship. What of the preparation for life of which the Department speaks? Is the Jumbo jet pilot fit for flying because he knows more of his cockpit drill than the last time, or the surgeon fit to operate because he is making progress in this or that? Life needs knowledge and skills, not relative individual progress.

But apart from examinations, how can the systematic elimination of all forms of competition be a preparation for life, let alone an incentive for learning? I understood we still lived in a society in which there was still some competition. The answer to this conundrum, of course, will be found in the ideology of New Educators, who as we shall see are not preparing children for our kind of society.

Finally let me mention the laborious assignment method. One word as a father who has slaved over assignments for many years. I have done projects on dairy farms in Denmark, dairy farms in Queensland, dairy farms in the Western District. I am not an expert on dairy farms, but I am an expert on drawing and illustrating them. In addition, my children, even the most ignorant, are all expert commercial artists. Assignments no doubt have great value, but let us remember how time-consuming they are.

... And so we often find our children poorly taught, deprived of the incentive to learn, and sometimes ready to give up trying and misbehave. They are too often bored and frustrated. Naturally, not in all schools, but already in too many. And often the rot has already set in by the end of primary school, when the child is already conscious of his inadequacy. Why were they not shown how much order there is in this universe? Children love order, and too often we have only given them disorder. Why are they not set objective goals to compete for against others? Why is there nothing that really counts much before HSC, when they get into the big school? They are not dupes, they know what internal examinations often mean. They are adrift, and soon, if they come up against a subject or a master who demands hard detailed study, they rebel. Anyone who is in close contact with schools knows that it is becoming increasingly difficult to interest pupils in the amassing of detailed data required by some of the traditional subjects. Our children know little, they are set no goals. And when HSC goes, as promised by the Minister, it will soon be chaos. I may be totally wrong, but I don't think so.

I have been accused of 'coining a tag'. I have not had that honour. I have been told 'there is no such thing as the New Education'. Well, I picked the title certainly among many I could have chosen because it is current in American literature and because it is on the lips of millions of American parents. And I defined the thing. It is not the title adopted by the devotees, its exponents, certainly, who are very wary about adopting any name since the debacle suffered by Dewey's 'Progressive Education', which is now, I would say, under that name completely discredited. But here it is, coming back, and back under some new name. I picked a name that was convenient for me, and I defined the thing; it is the thing that is important and I could have called it 'Relevant-Creative-Non-Classroom-Situation-Education'. but I chose the 'New Education', and the Department, I may add, after saying 'no such thing exists' spends the whole of the article defending it and saying that it is better than the old. So there you are.

And this brings me to the second of my points. For our children coming up from primary school, ignorant and conscious of their ignorance, are invited to enjoy the latest of all the pernicious imported educational innovations: the New Education. The point was, in so many words, that the New Education, with its rejection of the basic disciplines in favour of sociologically 'relevant' topics on the one hand, and individual juvenile 'creativity' on the other hand, would deal the death blow to education.

.... The relevant and the creative: With the poorest store of basic knowledge imaginable, in many cases, our children are invited to discuss what they would see on television anyway: education, television, apartheid, aboriginal rights, social injustice and inequality, conservation, pollution, women's lib., abortion, premarital intercourse or vice versa, drugs, sex, etc. in a core of subjects which replaces history, geography, English; not quite yet mathematics, but physics and chemistry are being also rapidly 'relevantised', so that we have pupils who have never heard of H2SO4 busily engaged in making an ecological study of their environment. We must not be surprised if some of their conclusions are erroneous, for one cannot study the environment without basic chemical and physical data any more than one can solve contemporary social problems without basic facts and historical perspective.

And yet how difficult it is becoming to interest them in data-amassing subjects. They are restive before all that store of knowledge that once distinguished an educated man from an uneducated one. They are restive before all the data of the physical sciences even. But they are creative. They make films, they write novels although they have not read any. As for the lower school, they may create or do anything. See the way to learn English as described in the Age supplement.

They also have, along with discussions and assignments on relevant subjects, and the creation of juvenile art -- and this comes up from primary school and goes into the physical sciences as well -- what you might call 'smorgasbord learning'. The classroom situation is replaced, and from the tenderest years pupils are invited to help themselves to knowledge of all kinds much like children serving themselves from a smorgasbord table -- this is wonderful in theory, and disastrous in practice.

All of the New Education is the same. It would be good if it worked, but it doesn't. The New Educator's favourite expression is 'There is no evidence to suggest'. Well, there is; all the evidence in the world, if one is willing to look. Many educationists have findings other than those of the New Educators. There are even plenty of authors who know that grammar is indispensable. And there are millions of parents in the Western world who do not need any further evidence to prove to them that New Education is simply more of the old Dewey rubbish. The New Education does not work. At least as far as scholarship goes.

And this brings me to my third point: indoctrination. The third point was that the New Education, with its inherent tendency to place contentious social issues together with suggested solutions before uneducated minds, had opened the way for indoctrination of our children and the consequent subversion of democracy.

The ideology behind the New Education is that the imparting of knowledge, the cultivation of scholarship, of the intellect, must take second place to the transforming, the regenerating of society. Back in the twenties, the socialist Dewey of 'Progressive Education' had talked of adapting children to society, but this was only a front for his real aim, soon openly expressed, of adapting society through the children. The New Education is no different in this respect to Progressive Education. Everyone behind the New Education, the 'Relevant-Creative-Do-It-Yourself Education', talks of creating a new society through the children. If there are some New Educators who are not trying to change children, I have not met them, and they are dupes. But the devotees are pursuing aims going far beyond the imparting of knowledge.

Some are quite frank. They are training for revolution. Others are training for quickened evolution. All have some Utopia in mind, some a Marxist millenium, some a Garden of Eden, some an anarchist paradise, where all are equal, all are deprived of nothing, and all are free to do as they please. All, even the most discreet, are willing to express their condemnation of our present society. Even in the Age supplement you will find, alongside a quotation or two from Dewey, one of the favourite myths of the New Educators, coming all the way down from Rousseau in the 18th century: the myth of the purity and wisdom of youth, and the corruption and stupidity of adult society. All of them are anti-intellectual in the sense that they are not interested in cultivating the intellect. None of them would claim to be experts in a particular discipline.

In Victoria, according to the Minister and the Director-General, source of most innovations and the New Education is the Curriculum Advisory Board, of thirty-five members, most of whose work is according to the same source carried out by a Steering Committee of ten. I have received a roneoed or carbon -- not a printed -- copy of the list of members of this Steering Committee, and found that the list is twenty not ten, the explanation given being that there are co-opted members from experimental schools, etc.

These people consist of two Department Directors, four Education Research Officers or Assistants, one psychologist, four university educationists, and nine teachers. Or something very like that. These are the faceless people, and I call them faceless advisedly, because they are virtually unknown to all the parents whose children are going to be fundamentally, one is tempted to say monumentally, affected by their decisions, who have introduced the New Education into our schools. There is no representative of the community at large, and as far as I know, no leading practitioner of a traditional discipline. They are all educationists, and some of them appear to be self-styled. Some of them, perhaps the most active, are true devotees of the New Education in the sense that they fully share the ideologies I have just mentioned.

We should therefore not be surprised that they recommend such things as absolutely no competition in school life. As devotees of the New Education they are not preparing for an open society of free competition. They are preparing for a socialist society of some kind. Certainly not a capitalist society. Certainly not the kind of society I myself happen -- just happen -- to want my child to grow up into. And yet they have charge of my child. I am not complaining about this vision of a new society at all, I am simply complaining at the way they are going about bringing it into being. At least one of the members sees the products of Victorian education as an intellectual proletariat and a revolutionary vanguard.

Where are the scholars thinking of scholarship on this committee, whether they are New Educators or not? If one thinks that I am exaggerating, and that our Education Department cannot contain such non-conformist elements, let us remember that sixty-three members of the Psychology and Guidance Branch have publicly expressed their admiration of that little Marxist-Anarchist manual for combating bourgeois values and authority, and doing, before you are in your teens if you like, anything you damn well please. Some psychologists! Some guides!

On the Steering Committee, there is not one representative of the community at large, although there are senior members of the Department, with whom I have no quarrel, except insofar as they have fostered the New Education. And yet these people, neither leading scholars, apparently, nor representative citizens, but so-called educational experts, are introducing radical curricular innovations which are fundamentally affecting the lives and destinies of our children, and the whole future of our country. These faceless people have usurped the role of legislators.

We thought the destiny of our children and our country depended on our democratic vote. These legislators, it is true, can only advise. And they are, under the eyes of a democratically-elected Minister. Are we to take it then that the New Education represent the considered policy of the Government? If so, parents, I am sure, had no idea they had given this mandate.

This Committee, can only advise, for in the new organisation of education in our State, schools and individual teachers can practically do what they please. However some of the New Educators are already turning out teachers especially trained to indoctrinate.

'The politicisation of education' is a respectable slogan in some quarters in which teachers are trained. And here I shall stop because I can go no further without names. But I can assure you we have documents which validate such a mild statement. And these teachers, and any others who wish to indoctrinate, will soon be producing the uneducated but indoctrinated minds of which I have spoken in ever-increasing numbers.

Disciplinary troubles will certainly multiply in schools and, in particular, political agitation will increase as more and more politicised young teachers join forces with more and more politicised pupils. I am looking to the future and hoping we can avoid such developments, but we already have such things as this -- the students' Bill of Rights (just some of an enormous amount of New and Old Left literature found around schools). We already have head masters afraid to act because of organised student retaliation. And let us not think that they are not organised by adults. It will soon be too late to stop all this.

The fourth point is that children are already, because of the present system of no prescribed curriculum, no syllabus, no inspection (although there remains a vestige of the former inspectoral structure), no examination, entirely in the hands of the individual teachers. The teacher may be, like most present teachers, a good, competent, conscientious person who teaches proper subjects. But the system allows him to be incompetent or lazy or unmoral or a complete political brainwasher. As far as I can see there is no real check on the teacher's freedom until a situation becomes so intolerable that there is a direct confrontation with the Department or the law.

And this, we say again, is scandalous. Millions of dollars of public money are being provided to let someone teach your child almost anything he may think fit. This is not a proper system of public education. We already have plenty of evidence concerning some of the things already being taught. And the New Education is only just beginning.

We believe that the scandal of this position is only equalled by the fact that the paper qualifications and assessments of our children, as well as any unofficial assessments given verbally, are also in the hands of an individual or individuals closely connected with the child in question. Not only does this sometimes place an intolerable burden on the teacher, but children know that many of these certificates are not worth the paper they are written on. When HSC suffers the fate of all other external examinations, our children will know then that our generation has finally thrown them to the wolves of non-education. Chaos, I believe, will result.

We therefore reiterate our request for an inquiry. Without presuming to anticipate the outcome of any inquiry, we believe one or two things can be stated.

We believe that there must be some form of external assessment, as stated in my article, but we believe that we may not have to go back to the old system. Would it not be possible for those who have chosen to do tertiary studies to choose HSC and go straight through to it, according to prescribed curricula and syllabuses; and for those who wish to leave school earlier,, to choose a lower examination? When the latter leave, for further studies or not, they will have a certificate that everybody knows is worth something, and they will have had motivation in attaining it.

There are other alternatives. Let us look at them and be open to change. But we cannot leave the assessment of a child's performance to the school itself.

But there is a basic principle which we think must be considered in the organisation of education. It is that the control of education should be placed essentially in the hands of a board immediately answerable to the Minister and consisting essentially of representatives of the community and representatives and experts of the various disciplines. The educationists are there for research, advice and training, but let us make sure that our education system is kept out of the hands of the behavioural and social scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, political scientists, etc.

We must have machinery to see that no experimentation is undertaken which does not have large a priori chances of success. One does not cut a man's head off to see if he will grow another. There are experiments going on throughout Victoria, such as the one in the Age supplement (which I do not hesitate to call unmitigated balderdash) which would never have got down to the level of our children if minds other than those of New Educators had examined them, if a board had brought to bear upon them all those considerations which should be brought to bear on any radical form of experimentation. We are dealing with children and not guinea-pigs, and it does not matter whether nine schools or ninety schools are concerned. Each child has only one life and its education should be sacrosanct.

Finally, and we believe that this would automatically ensue from any reorganisation of education along the lines suggested, we must all be ready, all of us who boast of how open we are to change, to be prepared to change back, back to something we once did before, if therein lies the solution to our problems.

We do not think that things will get better overnight. We are very conscious of having simplified at many points, of having ignored some of the pressures of our society. But we are also conscious that some of the worst pressures on our families are coming from the schools, and will come from them more and more unless we act now. The generation gap is being widened by education.



*This chapter comprises three parts. The first originally appeared in the Melbourne Herald, 22 May 1972, and the second is a sequel from the Herald, 22 June 1972. The third part is part of the text of a talk (an address given at a Melbourne University Graduate Union luncheon, 5 July 1972) that offers rebuttals of criticisms provoked by the two articles.