Foot note 30 (page 14) to the expert panel's report to government refers to an 1882 publication [ Page T (ed): Moffatt’s Pupil Teachers’ Course: First Year (London: Moffatt & Paige) ] with this quote:
The ‘New Code’ detailed in this book required teachers to have the knowledge to teach: reading and repetition (50 lines of poetry); English Grammar (parsing and terminations of words) and composition (i.e. writing from memory a passage of prose); arithmetic (vulgar and decimal fractions for boys, and tradesmen’s and domestic accounting for girls including measures and multiples with addition and subtraction of vulgar fractions); geography (British Isles, Australia and British North America, and physical geography of mountains and rivers); history (outlines of British History); music (‘where suitable means of instruction exist’).
The expert panel notes:
The history of education in England reveals a number of seemingly competing models of the curriculum based on very different assumptions about what is educationally worthwhile. Each derived from what has been valued in a particular time, by a particular social class, or promoted by a particular type of school. So, for example, the great public schools built on the classical humanist tradition and were initially geared to educating the ‘whole man’ for leadership roles in government, the military and the Church. With the rise of the merchant and manufacturing middle classes, subjects such as science, modern European languages and geography became important in the academic curricula of the grammar schools. In the late nineteenth century, when elementary schooling for all was introduced, the masses received instruction in basic knowledge and skills [30].
However, such high (and low) Victorian sentiments were not just of their time. Rather, they have echoed down the years which probably explained why my grammar school geography education consisted of so repeated a focus on Australia (e.g., sheep farming, the Murray Darling basin, Snowy Mountain irrigation scheme, ...) and why it took over 100 years for more modern takes on "domestic accounting" to be desegregated. Unhappy days.
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