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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-04-03 Daily Xml
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ADELAIDE HIGH SCHOOL

The Hon. J.D. LOMAX-SMITH (Adelaide—Minister for Education and Children's Services, Minister for Tourism, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (15:16): I rise to congratulate the Adelaide High School community which, this year, celebrates 100 years of service to young people and to the development of Adelaide and South Australia. I will be among a group of parents, friends, scholars, staff and community leaders who will celebrate with a centenary dinner at the Adelaide Convention Centre this weekend. It is a celebration of which we can all be proud, because Adelaide High School is truly the flagship of public education in South Australia.

The school has had an exemplary record of service and achievement ever since South Australia's first Labor premier, Mr Tom Price, officially opened the school on 24 September 1908. The school was, in fact, established as part of wide-ranging reforms to support the education of young South Australians by the then Price Labor government.

Indeed, the school has consistently played a leadership role in public education since its foundation. Reports in the newspaper of the day described the school opening in 1908 as a 'red letter day in the history of the education department'. Indeed, it was a red letter day as it was the first free high school in the Commonwealth of Australia.

This year's centenary celebrations acknowledge its leadership. Interestingly, there is a common thread between those days of reform in 1908 when the school was established and today, because Adelaide High was initially established by an innovative amalgamation of a number of post-primary school activities on one location. It was a creative approach to look at how new and emerging needs to educate and develop the skills of young people can be supported by harnessing both educational resources and political will.

In doing so, the door was opened to hundreds of young people who might otherwise not have been able to achieve their potential. Until then, the door to secondary and tertiary education was effectively shut to all but the wealthy and privileged, because most young people could not dream of going beyond elementary school.

A Wakefield Press book entitled The Long Division: State Schooling in South Australian Society by Pavla Miller says of the decades before the Price government established our first free high school:

Where previously money made a neat distinction between those who were and those who were not to receive secondary education, now, in the 1880s, there was a real possibility that the gradual expansion of state schooling might undermine the exclusiveness of educational provisions for the rich.

The years surrounding the opening of Adelaide High were a time of whirlwind change and debate about the purposes of education and its role in the development of the state. For example, in 1910, just two years after Adelaide High opened, Miller's book says that the education minister of the time argued that:

No great business could successfully be carried on if the staff was stupid and ignorant. No state could be great if its people were dull and unready to see and to use the best means... it was the duty of the state to develop the brains of the child, irrespective of class.

Today is also a time of significant reform to enable more young people to achieve their potential. We are making these reforms so that every young person can have their future potential recognised. This Labor government realises that if it tries to see further or achieve more, it does so because, to paraphrase that scientist Isaac Newton 'we stand on the shoulders of giants'. Then premier Tom Price was one such giant. He was a predecessor of mine, as minister for education, and he said of himself: 'I am cut of the rough.' Indeed, he had trained as a stonemason who not only helped to shape the lives of young South Australians but who also cut the stone that built Parliament House.

Then director of education, Alfred Williams, was another such giant who led the way with high school reform and reforms to support compulsory education, with Tom Price's government's support. Adelaide High School's first headmaster, William Adey, also became a director of education in our state and who was a great reformer in his own right. It was William Adey who said on his retirement:

In handing on the torch, I feel confident that the lamp of learning will burn even more brightly in the future years, and that every child, no matter what the position of his parents may be, will be given his birthright—an education which will develop to the utmost all of his God-given powers.

Adelaide High School has enabled many thousands of young people to develop those powers, not only for school (to quote the school's motto) but for life. A procession of South Australian leaders are old scholars of Adelaide High, including former premier the Hon. Lynn Arnold, former education minister the Hon. Don Hopgood, Chris Sumner and many others, including Tom Koutsantonis, a member of this house.

Over 100 years, this is a school that has created leaders who have helped shape Adelaide, our state and the nation across many walks of life.

Time expired.

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