A giant of modern Australian education practice
By Guy Rundle
DOUGLAS CHARLES WHITE January 17, 1933-February 4, 2023
Doug White, who has died aged 90, was a giant figure in the development of modern Australian education practice, co-author of the highly influential Manifesto for a Democratic Curriculum, and a leading figure of the Melbourne left, as a co-editor, for decades, of the commentary journal Arena.
He combined fierce political and intellectual commitment with a love of nature and the land, inspiring many others to break down the boundaries between.
Training initially as a primary teacher, after a Wimmera farming and Methodist upbringing, in the early 1950s, Doug gained a scholarship to Melbourne University, to study science, majoring in Botany. Like many he was attracted to the Communist Party’s radical demands for justice and was active in its plethora of campaigns. At Melbourne University Labour Club, he met Eva Wolf, daughter of a Viennese Jewish family. They married in 1957 and would have three children.
Having gained his master’s in education in the 1960s (a PhD came later), Doug joined the education faculty of Latrobe University in 1970, after a decade of high school teaching and policy work, as one of the founding staff. He quickly became one of its major drawcards for new students looking for innovative ways of thinking about teaching.
In the 1960s, in the Education Department’s curriculum and research branch, Doug and other education pioneers such as Bill Hannan had become excited by the possibilities opened by new education theorists such as Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich and others, who made visible the industrialised character of education as it was, the waste of talent and potential, and ways to develop critical thinking as part of learning. At La Trobe he would channel these into his work in the Centre for the Study of Innovation in Education.
During this time, he had left the Communist Party, and become involved with Arena, the lively “new left” journal started in 1963, becoming an editor alongside Geoff and Nonie Sharp. Working from a “small-m” Marxist framework, Arena was a place for new thinking inspired by writers such as Marcuse, C Wright Mills and Rachel Carson, who were exploring the changing nature of society in the post-WWII era.
Doug White: trained initially as a primary teacher.Credit: Phil Noyce
Over the years, Doug became a major contributor to Arena’s distinctive approach, which explored the way in which the post WWII explosion of new technology and their integration into state and industry, was changing the nature of social class, selfhood and heightening new contradictions between intellectuals and wider society.
Doug would be an editor of Arena until 1998, and a contributor of articles for half-a-century. He was part of the journal’s development of new theories as to the changing nature of social classes and production in societies transformed by science and technology, and the need for a new politics arising from that. Over those decades Arena would publish every important left figure writer and theorist including Humphrey McQueen, Dennis Altman, Judith Brett and many others.
By the 1980s, Doug was a mainstay of the education department at La Trobe, and its head in the mid-1990s. Doug’s charismatic teaching and supervision of students was legendary. He took a “reflexive” relationship to the inherited power structures that school systems reproduce, while maintaining a commitment to teaching for mastery of traditional disciplines. This approach, which drew hundreds of teachers as students, was fighting on two fronts: initially against traditional and uncritical approaches, and later against “post-modern” approaches, which did not recognise a “real” structure of knowledge, or the importance of skilling.
The interest in skill flowed into Arena’s experiments over several decades with combining manual and intellectual labour, printing the journal, constructing buildings, large-scale gardens and a semi-commercial orchard at its rural block. When he retired to Longwood East in central Victoria in 2001, he developed his interest in indigenous plant species, in his huge rambling garden, and at the community run Euroa Arboretum.
Before that, he had a final professional chapter with strong connections with Yunnan province, China where he taught often and whose students, when visiting La Trobe treated him with unabashed reverence.
He also became involved with Aboriginal education in Central Australia, and in the 1990s he worked for three years at the Institute for Aboriginal Development in Alice Springs, affiliating it with Latrobe. He was active to near the end, when dementia claimed his final years. A key figure in Melbourne’s intellectual and political life for several decades, when asked what he had done, he would always reply: “I was a teacher.” So can many since, who were inspired by him.
He is survived by his former wife Eva, their children Anna, Jim and Miriam, and his companion in later years, Eileen Sedunary.
Guy Rundle is a long-time editor at Arena.