An aristocracy of talent? Describing self and other at an early twentieth-century high school

This paper is a reading of early twentieth-century government high school culture as it was expressed through a twenty-year run of one Australian high school's student-authored magazines. From its first issue the editors of The Parramatta High School Magazine were keen to promote its role in the making of a community. The idea that high school people belonged to a special and exclusive group was reiterated in a number of ways. Writing in the magazines described the features of a shared culture - whiteness, literacy, good taste, rational behaviour - and implicitly defined high school students as different from other categories of people, including non-English speaking foreigners and 'the uneducated'. Central to the process of classification and identification were statements of 'who we are' and 'who we are not' which were grounded in the language of meritocracy, and encompassed particular contemporary understandings of social class, race and gender.