ABSTRACT
One of the first parliamentary initiatives of the newly established Australian colony-state of Victoria was to lay plans for a popular school system. There is a sense in which, faced with the task of establishing the infrastructure of social governance in a colonial setting, the Victorian parliamentarians and notables had to solve problems that had confronted the emerging states of Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perhaps it will seem less surprising that the first popular school systems in Europe were established by the churches as instruments for the intensification and dissemination of Christian spiritual discipline and pastoral guidance. And while the appearance of Christian school systems may have roughly coincided with the emergence of the administrative state, such systems were—in their initial inspiration and organisation at least—the product of an autonomous history. They were the expression and the instrument of a specifically religious effort to Christianise European peasantries.
