Paradigm, No. 16 (May, 1995)

I like to think that I have the second-best private collection of old school textbooks in New Zealand -- fewer volumes than Hugh Price but more than anyone else.

I began collecting textbooks soon after I was appointed as a lecturer in the Education Department of the University of Canterbury, from 1972. I was responsible, among other things, for a third-year course which dealt in part with the history of education in New Zealand. There was quite a substantial literature on the development of the New Zealand education system, but most of it was chiefly concerned with administrative and political matters, finance, control, and access. The only published curriculum histories were John Ewing’s two volumes on the development of the primary school curriculum.¹

Ewing traced broad changes in attitudes and practice and in successive sets of syllabus regulations, but more often than not he stopped well short of what I and my students -- particularly the teachers -- wanted to know. For example, Ewing noted that the 1891 history prescriptions did not require pupils to learn more than about a dozen dates or to answer questions on more than 25 persons.² But which dates and which persons were they, and what did children have to know about them? Turning to the prescriptions themselves was hardly enlightening. One simply learnt that in Standard 5, for example, those dates and persons would be from ‘The period from the accession of Henry VII to the death of Queen Anne.’³

Ewing made just enough use of textbooks to show what would be required for a more detailed understanding of day-to-day work in the past. He referred to about twenty specific volumes or series in his treatment of developments between 1877 and the Great War but only four or five items received more than a line or two and many of them were simply named as typical texts of the time.

Textbooks are also important in understanding what went on in New Zealand secondary schools in the 19th century. The central Department of Education did not stipulate a syllabus for secondary schools; their courses were determined by tradition and the requirements of the University of New Zealand’s entrance examination. In their annual reports to the Minister of Education, secondary schools were required to indicate the work of their highest and lowest classes, and almost all of them met this requirement by simply listing the textbooks used. Many of these texts were standard fare and present no problem: Caesar’s Gallic Wars, for example, or Horace’s first and second Odes. But what was covered and to what level in Longman’s English History Reader, or that firm’s first geography, in the Junior Temple Reader or in Pendlebury’s Shilling Arithmetic? ⁴

It was not just a matter of filling in the gaps in existing works: Goldstrom’s study of British school readers suggested quite new lines of enquiry, as did Ewing, whether he was aware of it or not.⁵ For example, Ewing noted the appearance in the 1880s of local textbooks, but made no systematic comparison between the content and concerns of these and the British works they eventually replaced. Did British geographies or histories ever mention New Zealand, I wondered, and did they confuse it with Australia as readily as some books I had encountered as a teacher? What did the New Zealand texts tell little colonials about themselves and their country?

As Hugh Price has noted, New Zealand libraries and bibliographers have largely ignored school textbooks.⁶ That Ewing was able to make even limited use of textbooks was, I suspect, only because the New Zealand Council for Educational Research’s library had somehow acquired a small collection of such works: he would not have found many in other Wellington libraries. It is not surprising that the only two published historical analyses of classroom material were both studies of the New Zealand School Journal, complete runs of which were available in the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education and in one or two other libraries.⁷

Knowing what I was after was no great problem. A national system of primary education was established in 1877. From 1878 until 1906 approved textbooks for primary schools appeared in the New Zealand Gazette and secondary school texts were listed in high schools’ annual reports.

A very few of these works, particularly those by New Zealanders with other claims to fame, were available in libraries and a few others in second-hand book shops, but booksellers generally met my enquiries with polite puzzlement. Booksellers, in the 1970s, like New Zealand librarians and bibliographers, were aware of a few school texts by notable New Zealanders; they would keep James Pope’s Native School Reader, for example, or the New Zealand School Reader compiled under instructions from William Pember Reeves, but I was told a number of times that recently acquired collections had included school books but they had been discarded along with other ‘junk’.

General second-hand dealers’ shops, however, particularly the larger and more disorganised, were a better bet. Histories, arithmetics, geographies and miscellaneous readers could be found among books piled in dusty corners or jammed willy-nilly onto creaking shelves. Shops to raise funds for the Salvation Army, the St. Vincent de Paul Society or the Christchurch City Mission were also a happy hunting ground, as were church and school fairs and auction sales of the effects of deceased estates.

Garage sales as a means of disposing of unwanted goods became popular in Christchurch in the late 1970s; and I learnt to read the classified advertisements in the Saturday morning paper with discrimination. The older parts of the city were best, particularly if middle-class, while some streets could be ignored because they were lined with new blocks of small flats. Most promising of all were the words ‘giving up housekeeping,’ or ‘deceased estate’-- although one always felt like a vulture. Many outings were, of course, fruitless but I acquired a number of useful additions to my collection in this way and occasionally I stumbled on a wonderful hoard. Once I found half a dozen things I wanted in a dusty box of books among the usual array of bicycles, lawnmowers, broken television sets and old furniture. As I was walking off with my prizes, I heard the man say to the woman, ‘There you are. God knows why Mum kept them but I told you that someone would be interested. Tell you what, we’ll get the rest of them out next week.’ I helped him drag three more boxes out from underneath a pile of old doors and window frames in a tumble-down shed and finally left with about twenty volumes.

When visiting other New Zealand cities for academic conferences, I use the classified telephone directory and a street map to locate second-hand shops and plan my route. I have also learnt to check opening times by telephone wherever I can as some dealers keep odd hours. (Even this is no guarantee; the owner of a very fruitful second-hand shop in south Dunedin -- gone now, alas -- would close it and head for the hills when the skiing was good.) Asking dealers if they know of any others can sometimes lead one to humble or newly established shops which do not have a telephone or are not yet listed in the directory.

My family used to sigh when I braked sharply outside a shop in a small town but they learnt that we would reach the holiday spot faster if they got out and searched too and they have become adept at spotting school readers in dark corners.

Shameless appeals to large, first-year university classes have also produced some long-sought items. Some students have also brought in family heirlooms for me to read and return; in some Britain and brought to New Zealand.

Until significant numbers of New Zealand texts in organised series began to appear in the 1890s, the schools relied on British texts. Counting numbered series such as the Royal Readers as one entry, the 1878 Gazette list of approved texts from which district education boards might choose contains 98 items of which only two, both geographies, were published in New Zealand.⁸ That list includes many textbooks well known both to British teachers of the period and to those in the Australian colonies, Canada and in the Cape colony: Nelson’s Royal Readers, for example, Colenso’s and Barnard Smith’s arithmetics, Allen and Cornwell’s English grammars, Vere Foster’s copybooks, Collier’s History of the British Empire, and Curwen’s tonic sol-fa course. The 1905 list was much shorter and contained more New Zealand than British items; 21 published in the colony and 17 in the Mother country, but the New Zealand series were much more widely used than the British.9

The British Museum catalogue has been extremely useful in fleshing out sometimes cryptic references to particular books or series in the Gazette list. It includes a surprising number of New Zealand works. When on study leave in Britain in 1978, I spent a good deal of time reading school books in the British Museum Reading Room, including a number of New Zealand works I had not been able to locate in either a library or a junk shop. I subsequently ran across advertisements for some of these New Zealand works, or reviews of them, in the teachers’ magazine, The New Zealand Schoolmaster, and found that the dates the British Museum had assigned to undated works were very accurate, taking into account the time required for passage by ship.

Use in the colonies of British books means that I have been able to pick up copies of textbooks which were widely used in New Zealand by poking about in second-hand shops and markets in Britain and Australia. I have visited only two Australian states: Brisbane, Cairns, and the little Queensland towns in between were not very fruitful, but I recently found some worthwhile items in Tasmania, including a couple of Nelson’s Royal Star Readers and a good copy of Mangnall’s Questions.

While on study leave in London in the late 1970s, I acquired a few books in second-hand shops and rather more in street markets. There was a great haul in Sidmouth where a bookseller was disposing of an elderly teacher’s books, including those she had used as a schoolgirl and a school method text which had been a prize at the Exeter Diocesan Training College.

About a year ago, I managed to persuade my family that a brief visit to Britain had to include at least two days in Hay-on-Wye. I combed the bookshops in that remarkable town and found a number of items I would have bought 10 years ago but had since acquired in one part of New Zealand or another. In the end, and to my family’s annoyance, I bought just one book. Most booksellers in Hay knew just what I meant; many said that such books soon went and some of them mentioned a recent methodical searcher who had bought everything that looked even halfway relevant.

School texts are now also rather harder to find in New Zealand than they were 10 years ago. Those who went to school in the 19th century have gone and their effects have been disposed of. Families who still have such books are much less likely now to toss them out or bundle them up with stuff to go to a bookseller. And while booksellers are more likely to keep such books and to list them in postal catalogues, that is because rather more people want them. And, of course, these days, I already have most of the items I run across in second-hand shops or at church fairs. For all that, I am still adding slowly to my collection. A year or so ago, I was asked if I would sort out the books and papers of a deceased inspector of schools, a man who had served in the Great War; and at his heirs’ invitation I swooped on two more 19th century school method books and a little health reader published by the Christchurch firm of Whitcombe and Tombs and illustrated by Norman Lindsay. The only other copy of that health reader I had handled belonged to the British Museum.

A former student who is now a speech therapist in Wellington wrote to me recently. Her clinic is located at a suburban school and she is cleaning out a considerable accumulation of material which includes school readers from the 1940s and 1950s. Would I like a set of the Janet and John readers, first published in the United States in 1936 as the Alice and Jerry series? I certainly would. Nisbet and Co. printed a special New Zealand edition in 1949 and it was almost universally used here, but Janet and John were superseded by a New Zealand series in the 1960s and disappeared so rapidly and completely that I have not been able to get a full set in good repair.

I have not catalogued my collection but at a careful estimate it includes about 1000 volumes. The majority of them are primary school texts, partly because as a former primary school teacher that was where my interest lay and partly because fewer secondary than primary school texts were published in New Zealand during the first half of this century. (Secondary schools continued to rely, especially in the senior forms, on such standard texts as Nesfield’s grammar and Hall and Knight’s algebra.) I collect British works included in the Gazette lists or evidently used in a New Zealand school before about 1920 and New Zealand publications or editions up to about 1950. I also collect teachers’ manuals and school method texts. Most of these teachers’ books would also have been perfectly familiar to British teachers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, e.g., Dexter and Garlick’s Psychology in the Schoolroom, Currie’s Common School Education or Mrs. Harbutt’s splendid treatise on modelling in plasticine, Plastic Methods for Plastic Minds.

The ‘Irish’ texts were widely used in New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s, but I have only a few of them. I also have a small number of other texts from the first half of the 19th century, e.g., Key to Francis Walkingame’s Tutor’s Assistant (1810), part of the minor industry Ian Michael has described in Paradigm. ¹⁰ The bulk of my collection, however, was published after 1870, with the British books part of the flood of publications following the Revised Code and Forster’s Elementary Education Act 1870. Many series are incomplete, although I have managed to fill some gaps by photocopying items people have lent me.

The condition of the books as they came into my hands ranged from near mint to sad piles of detached pages and boards. I have repaired and rebound the piles of pages, retaining as much of the original binding as possible. While I would prefer not to tamper with a fair copy, I have usually replaced staples with linen thread before rust eats right through the pages.

I have made considerable use of my collection in following my research interest in the historical formation of social and political attitudes in New Zealand. What, for example, did European New Zealanders learn about their Maori fellow-citizens? ¹¹ What did school children learn about themselves, their country and its place in the Empire and the world?¹² British texts were produced for a system which included church schools and provided for religious instruction in state schools, but the New Zealand Education Act of 1877 ruled out religious instruction. Did New Zealand textbooks support the churchman’s standard dismissal of the new system as ‘Godless’? ¹³ What moral and social values were presented to school children and in what ways?¹⁴ When, if ever, were New Zealand schools attacked for threatening the moral order and revealed religion by suggesting to school children that species had evolved? ¹⁵

Collecting textbooks has given me an enormous amount of satisfaction. It has enabled me to answer the general questions with which I began and to explore the origins of some enduring New Zealand myths. It has also been a work of preservation in that I have a number of New Zealand publications which the National Library of New Zealand had ignored and which might have vanished forever had I not run across a copy in a junk shop somewhere.

At one time, most people who heard of my interest in old textbooks clearly regarded this as a quaint hobby. I used to mumble that other people played cricket and collected stamps without having to explain themselves. These days, people who ask if I am the fellow who collects the old schoolbooks usually go on to ask if I would like to check through their grandmother’s things before they dispose of them, or whether one of their post-graduate students might consult my collection to verify a reference.

Notes

 

1. John L. Ewing, The Origins of the New Zealand Primary School Curriculum 1840_1970 (Wellington: NewZealand Council for Educational Research, 1960); John L. Ewing, The Development of the New Zealand Primary School Curriculum, 1877_1970 (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1970).

2. Ewing, Development, p. 78.

3. New Zealand Gazette, 1891, p. 1130.

4. All these works were listed in the annual report of the governors of Nelson College, Appendix to the Journal of the House of Representatives, E-12, 1903, p. 23.

5. R. Goldstrom, The Social Content of Education 1808-1870: A Study of the Working Class School Reader in England and Ireland (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972).

6. Hugh Price, School Books Published in New Zealand to 1960 (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press with Gondwanaland Press, 1992), pp. 7-9.

7. D. R. Jenkins, ‘Social Attitudes in the New Zealand School Journal’. NZCER Studies in Education 4 (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1939); E. P. Malone, ‘The New Zealand School Journal and the Imperial Ideology’. New Zealand Journal of History, 7 (1973), pp. 12-27.

8. New Zealand Gazette, 1878, pp. 1312-13.

9. New Zealand Gazette, 1905, p. 1242.

10. Ian Michael, ‘The Textbook as a Commodity: Walkingame’s Tutor’s Assistant’. Paradigm no. 12 (December, 1993), pp. 21-27).

11. Colin McGeorge, ‘Race and the Maori in the New Zealand primary school curriculum’. Australia and New Zealand History of Education Society Journal, 10 (1981) pp. 13-23. ‘Race, empire and the Maori in the New Zealand primary school curriculum’. In John Mangan (ed.) The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 64-78.

12. Colin McGeorge, ‘Learning about God’s Own Country’. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 18 (1983), pp. 3-12.

13. Colin McGeorge, ‘Religious aspects of the secular system before the Great War’. In David McKenzie and Roger Openshaw (eds) Reinterpreting the Educational Past: Essays in the History of New Zealand Education (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Education Research, 1987), pp. 159-67.

14. Colin McGeorge, ‘The moral curriculum: forming the Kiwi character’. In Gary McCulloch (ed.) The School Curriculum in New Zealand: History, Theory, Policy and Practice (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1992), pp. 40-56.

15. Colin McGeorge, ‘Evolution and the New Zealand primary school curriculum 1900-1950’. History of Education, 21 (1992), pp. 205-18.

 

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