Previous chapters have indicated the range of intellectual effort devoted to attempts to comprehend and contain those elements of post-war political and economic change which seemed to threaten social order. In these attempts, Australian commentators often worked within established and expanding institutional structures of policy, advice and analysis in international affairs, in economics and in criticism of social development. The conservatism of their analyses was as much a result of the adjustment of those structures to circumstances as the product of ideological initiative or reaction. At the centre of post-war change, however, there was perceived to be a subject which could not be directly addressed through existing agencies, yet which was most vulnerable to instability. That subject was ‘the individual’, not so much in social action, but in private conscience. The accummulated effect of twentieth century modernity, culminating in the mobilisation for war from 1939 to 1945, had not only called into question many traditional social structures and assumptions, but had wrought fundamental changes on the concept of ‘the individual’ itself.
Australian intellectuals were far from alone in this new awareness of the importance of individual subjectivity in social analysis, particularly as it was associated with post-war reconstruction reform. By mid-century, industrialisation, urbanisation, consumerism, social mobility, concepts of psychology, electronic communication and propaganda - all provided a context for the realisation that societies could no longer be efficiently disciplined and reformed from without by the agents of the state and the control of the streets, the home and the workplace. What was increasingly required was a culture of guidance from within the individual. The thesis that ‘wars begin in the minds of men’, for example, had been internationally acknowledged in the foundation of UNESCO in 1946. The post-war period was one in which greater personal access to knowledge was presented as the panacea for social and international conflict. ‘Knowledge without morality’, it was argued, had led to totalitarianism, and morality itself could only be restored through respect for the individual - for human ‘dignity and rights’, and for the capacities of ‘reason and conscience’.1 At another level of commentary, David Riesman predicted in 1950 in The Lonely Crowd, one of the most influential books of the period in the United States, that the coming decade would constitute ‘a stage in historical development’ between ‘the widely variegated social character types of an ununified world and the even more widely divergent individual character of a unified but less oppressive world’. At the heart of this transition, Riesman identified ‘the new "plastic" man’, undefined by a continuity of traditional values or by the certainty of future directions, yet integral to the process of change, and individually responsive to its forms.2 For Australian intellectuals, who were closely tied to concepts of
!For a study of these two themes in the functioning of UNESCO, see Clare Wells, The UN, UNESCO and the Politics of Knowledge, London, 1987, esp. ch.3; also Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.
2David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, New Haven, 1950, p.xxv.
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social management geared more to the state than to private interests, this realisation was especially challenging.
Concepts of ‘citizenship’, as we have seen, were revitalised after the war to define the place of this individualised agent in political and economic fields. These concepts related, however, mainly to public conduct in the context of ‘culture’ and ‘community’. Social analysis also had to adjust to this new
42- emphasis on subjectivity by defining strategies less in terms of the external influence of class or th # state, and more in terms of establishing the conditions of ‘self-government’.3 Gradually, in American and British commentary especially, and then in Australia, these strategies centred on a concept of ‘personality’ as it defined the latent dispositions to citizenship within the individual, and the functional relationships between self and society. For Australian intellectuals, ‘personality’ and social psychology in turn provided a new sphere of social engagement and commentary, yet one mediated by more conservative cultural patterns reflecting their own established assumptions and the lack of institutional supports to accommodate the concept of ‘the individual’.
The location of this sphere, and the definition of the strategies adopted, were diffuse and sometimes imprecise, partly reflecting the very ‘plasticity’ of individual subjectivity that Riesman observed. Nor can this commentary be readily associated with major public figures, for part of its significance lies in the extent to which it was incorporated within more discrete areas of ‘expertise’ emerging in the post-war period. In general terms, this awareness of ‘personality’ was most significant among intellectuals in the fields of education, of the formation of values in the media and entertainment, and the regulation of personal conduct - of delinquency or of sexuality, for example - as the basis of social stability. While far from exhaustive in coverage, the chapter draws examples from commentary on adult education, film and later television criticism, the broad appeal of social psychology, and the imaginative depiction of social and personal relations in fiction. In each of these areas, attempts were made in the 1950s to construct and express a sense of subjectivity which was based not only on the defining the features of a ‘way of life’, but also on creating the conditions for the adjustment of ‘personality’ to ‘citizenship’ within a ‘unified’ society. Across this range of reference, it is clear that although post-war reformism was based on a new awareness of individual rights, the terms in which both those ‘rights’ and the concept of the ‘individual’ were defined came to owe more to a conservative emphasis on resistance to change, and the evocation of an idealised social conformity.
* * *
Implicit in the liberal reformism - Rowse’s ‘secular evangelism’ - of the first decades of this century, was a commitment to encouraging a perception of collective interests in society which might replace the conflicts of class. The subjectivity of the individual was largely subsumed within loyalty to a group, and comprehended in evolutionary terms. Social reformism was couched as an educational process, providing the means for the realisation of the rational basis of a ‘social consensus’. In this process, groups were to be guided by the ministrations of organisations such as the Workers’ Education Association, which combined both a pedagogical and sociological function. Yet the domestic conflicts of the First World War, and more significantly, the political pressures of the Great Depression, prompted some qualification of this trust in rational social evolution. The barriers of class seemed to become more rigid, and the interests defining those loyalties to become more fundamentally antagonistic. As Rowse argues, by the outbreak of the
3For a study of this transition, see Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and Society, vol.19, no.l, 1990, p.28.
Second World War, the assumption of an emergent rationalism was being replaced in social analysis by ‘a concept of managed irrationality’.4 Previous chapters have suggested that the transition did not stop there. The demands of the Second World War - a total war of civilian mobilisation, of morale rather than of loyalty - required that such irrationality be precisely calibrated if not overcome for the sake of optimum efficiency. It was to be managed at the level of the individual rather than of class. In Chapters Three and Four it was noted that the inter-war concept of an evolutionary social totality became instead a ‘community’ of participants, consolidated by private assent to the bonds of social life. This emphasis placed a new stress on the ‘adjustment’ of the individual as a ‘citizen’, and on the origins of that adjustment not only in public allegiance but also in personality.
Perhaps the clearest example of such a transition in social analysis is provided by the operation of the Australian Army Education Service (AAES), established in 1941 to serve a series of objectives based on the maintenance of morale and the preparation for post-war reconstruction. In meeting the particular demands of war, the AAES applied some of the educational ideals of the inter-war years on an unprecedented scale. It also united new strategies and expertise which would continue in influence well into the 1950s. For those with experience of adult education in the inter-war years, the AAES offered the first opportunity, with ‘a reasonable budget and reasonable staff, to achieve something of their earlier aspirations.5 Employing up to 500 officers by the end of the war,6 the AAES was not created by the Army itself, but imposed upon it by the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs in Canberra.7 Its officers, dispersed throughout the force but inevitably more active in larger camps, were to offer an education ‘for victory’, ‘welfare’ and ‘citizenship’. Not only were they to ‘boldly attack ... the causes of moral weakness and disaffection among the men’, but their objective was to prepare soldiers to return to the community ‘as good and useful citizens’. Vocational training was central to these goals, but so was
fostering and broadening the troops’ sense o f social responsibility, keeping them in touch with their civic interests, and encouraging them to think intelligently about the problems o f reconstruction which will face the community.8
‘Citizenship’, then, was defined not only through participation but also through attitude and personality. That the AAES attempted to reach beyond ‘training’ to the more subjective bases of social conduct was demonstrated by the inclusion of aesthetic education among its programmes. Together with lectures, discussion groups, and sessions developing manual skills in art and craft work, there was an emphasis on literary and music appreciation. Here, the aim was both ‘entertainment’ and a commitment ‘to raise and extend the troops’ cultural interests’, giving them higher standards of taste and making them ‘more receptive to new ideas’.9 Assisted by whatever technical aids were available, from film to talks and the
4Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character, p.23. This summary is based heavily on Rowse’s arguments in the first three chapters of this book. In his analysis of C.H. Northcott’s ‘theory of consensus’, Rowse provides a succinct formulation of a widely prevailing understanding of individual subjectivity at that time - pp.50-1.
5R.B. Madgwick, ‘Adult Education as a Commonwealth Movement’ in W.G.K. Duncan (ed.), The Future o f Adult Education in Australia, Sydney, 1944, p.24.
6See Fred Alexander, Adult Education in Australia, Pasadena, 1953, p.10
7For a personal account of involvement in the AAES, see Mungo MacCallum, Plankton’s Luck: A life in retrospect, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 142-55.
8AAES, Handbook fo r Education Officers, n.d., p.7.
distribution of the Service’s Current Affairs Bulletin, the AAES officer was to attempt to instill in soldiers a critical awareness of ‘what they’re fighting for’.10 This meant convincing them that:
The Germans swept through Europe, and the Japanese through Asia, not only because o f the efficiency of their tanks and planes, but because of the fanatical belief of their peoples that they had a mission to conquer the world.* 11
Some equivalent if less extreme commitment to the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘democracy’ would be necessary to the Australian soldiers’ own task of defending and rebuilding their own society. Yet the cultivation of a sense of personal independence was also seen to be a crucial objective:
It was noticed in Europe at the end o f the last war that many o f the demobilised soldiers were spiritually lo s t.... That frame o f mind contributed to the breakdown o f democracy in European countries.12
That ‘frame of mind’, then, was to become the basis of reformist strategies, not in terms of the imposition of an ‘social character type’ (to use Riesman’s terms), but in facilitating the expression of ‘individual character’.
If troops offered almost laboratory conditions for exercises in social conditioning, the AAES officer had also to be adept at balancing a commitment to independent thought with collective goals - a balance not always easily maintained. Drawing on some of the more politicised members of the inter-war generation,13 the very form of the AAES provided opportunities for the articulation of views of dissent. Its weekly newspaper, SALT, encouraged discussion among soldiers, inviting contributions and correspondence as an open forum of debate. As with similar programmes in Britain, this concept of ‘participatory citizenship’ existed in the ironic cointext of military discipline, yet was spurred by reconstruction ideals for a better world.14 Defined partly by the need to mould the individual for return to post-war society, this context also encouraged comment c>n the reshaping of society itself in sentiments which could be disturbing to authorities.15 To some extent, mobilisation could contain such critical attitudes, for wartime efficiency required that soldiers be invested with a more precise individual competency in both skills and commitment. The soldier, after all, was a unit in a disciplined context separate from society and with its own specific operational objectives. Again, Australian practice drew on British models in these fields. In Britain, treatments initially developed in military hospitals influenced a range of ‘social therapies’, based on psychosomatic theories, and on medical ‘interpretation’ rather than ‘direction’. These theories were geared towards the management of the individual ‘from a pathology conceived of as social maladjustment to a normality construed in terms of functional efficiency’.16 The efficiency of wartime, however, was to be sustained in temporary, ‘artificial’ conditions. In the transition to civilian life, to regular work and ‘citizenship’, the calculation of individual normality had to answer to more diverse notions of what it meant to be efficient in society. Just as Chapter Three noted the individualising strategies developed in industrial
^Handbook, p.18.
11 Handbook, p. 18.
12Handbook, p.20.
13For an autobiograhical account of his period with the AAES, see Ian Turner, ‘My Long March’, reprinted in Turner, Room For Manoeuvre, Melbourne, 1982, pp.116-20. ‘Army education was an obvious point of communist concentration, and comrades all round the army tried to transfer in’: p.l 17.
14For the British comparison, see Neil Grant, ‘Citizen Soldiers: Army Education in World War II’,
Formations o f Nation and People, London, 1984, pp.171-87.
15See for example MacCallum, Plankton’s Luck, esp. pp.144-5; 150-2.
16Nikolas Rose, ‘Psychiatry: The Discipline of Mental Health’ in Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (eds.),
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psychology to deal with the worker’s bargaining strength in times of full employment, so, in the more diffuse area of social management, the demobilised individual was seen to require new strategies.
Added to an emphasis in the AAES on maintaining the allegiance of the individual soldier, was the realisation, itself prompted by mobilisation, that there was a widespread lack among the Australian population of what seemed to be ‘fundamental’ and ‘simplest’ attributes of general knowledge, literacy and comprehension. Soldiers might be ‘highly intelligent’, so R.B. Madgwick, the Director of the AAES, observed, but their distance from the ‘ordinary techniques’ of education meant that they required the demonstration methods of kindergarten teaching rather than a continuation of the university models of instruction which had been assumed to be appropriate in the education of adults before the war. The troops also required a more comprehensive, ‘Commmonwealth-wide’ provision of services if new methods were to have anything more than piecemeal effect.17 Towards the end of the war many educators hoped that the AAES would be continued on an equivalent scale, but in a form more appropriate to civilian society.18 Anticiptating this form, Madgwick argued in 1944 that a lower standard of teaching must be adopted to meet the abilities of students, premised not on the general topicality of issues, but on an immediately accessible approach ‘adapted to their own experience, problems and aptitudes’ and based on Teaming to shoulder civic responsibilities’.19 The AAES, then, not only indicated a need to appeal more directly to the individual in the achievement of post-war stability, but also signalled that such an appeal would need to be tailored to a sense of thie subjectivity of that individual, and premised on the lack of any more extensive or effective social integratiton.
At the end of the wair, the AAES was praised in many quarters for its role in maintaining morale and fostering intellectual activity among troops.20 This success prompted serious consideration of the importance of adult education in the general context of reconstruction, both among the public and at State and Commonwealth governmental levels. The nature of such post-war provision, however, became a matter of considerable debate in the mid to late 1940s, caught in the general struggle over questions of whether priority should be given to voluntary and local responsibility for such services, or whether they should be the subject of centralised control. Each State initiated some form of inquiry into the issue. In NSW, the majority report of an advisory board appointed in 1944 favoured the public support of voluntary or local government organisations. The minority report favoured centralised control. In 1947 the Tasmanian government withdrew its funding from the WEA, vesting all responsibility for adult education with the State Department of Education.21 Such recommendations inevitably had an effect on the perceived
17Madgwick, ‘Adult Education as a Commonwealth Movement’, pp.24-7.
18See for example C.E.W. Bean, War Aims o f a Plain Australian, Sydney, 1943, p.114.
19Madgwick, ‘Adult Education’, p.31. Outling the ‘main pre-occupations and driving forces of the average man or women’, Madgwick suggested a curriculum to meet the individual demands of: ‘(i) Getting a Living, (ii) Finding ways of using "leisure" which will be satisfactory to the adult, (iii) Making a home and rearing children, (iv) The wider field of personal and social relationships in which can be grouped all the problems of learning adult ways of behaviour in an adult society’: p.29.
20See for example the assessments quoted in Andrew Spaull, Australian Education in the Second World War, St Lucia, 1982, pp.252-3.
21D.M. Waddington, W.C. Radford, J.A. Keats, Review o f Education in Australia 1940-1948,
Melbourne, 1950, pp. 167-70. In Queensland, a board established in 1944, comprising academic, government, employer and employee representatives, was committed to the regional provision of ‘classes, recitals and displays’; South Australia and Western Australia, relying on university and WEA facilities in the capital cities, were more restricted in their services. See Waddington, Radford, Keats, Review,
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functions of adult education, if not on curricula then on the definition of the relationship between that