ABSTRACT
CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND OF SCHOOLS OF THE FUTURE
When the new Liberal government was elected in late 1992, after more than a decade in opposition, it set in train the most radical change to an education system in Australia’s history. Victoria had entered the brave new world of education. It was the culmination of a transformation from education as it had previously been undertaken for more than a century into something completely new, one that might have been described by Drucker, who, in his most recent book, Post-Capitalist Society, argued:
Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation… Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself, its world view; its basic values; its social and political structures; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world… We are currently living through such a transformation…
(Drucker, 1993:1)
Yet it would be inappropriate to suggest that the transformation only started in 1992. Better, it might be seen as the culmination of something that had been going for more than two decades. In any discussion about school restructuring in Australia, the Karmel Report of 1973 is the logical starting point. The Report to the Commonwealth Government by the Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commission, entitled Schools in Australia (Karmel, 1973), was described by Caldwell (1993:3) as ‘arguably one of the most influential documents in school education in the last twenty-five years’. It was here that the issues of equality, devolution and community involvement were first presented as part of a national educational debate, one that was to change the face of Australian schools dramatically for the first time in a hundred years.
