The pre-eminent chronicler of the classroom, United States historian Larry Cuban, has depicted the history of the classroom as a contest between 'teacher-centred' and 'student-centred' pedagogies. In the foundational form of the classroom, rows of desks faced the front where, on a raised platform, standing before a blackboard, a single adult talked, told, and controlled dozens of students who sat up straight and listened, recited, copied and remembered their way through one 30-minute 'lesson' after another.

But this form has long been under assault from 'progressivism' and its disruptive ideas about how to organise space, students, time and activities to produce 'active' and 'creative' learning driven by 'student needs and interests'.

The contest between the old and the new, Cuban argues, has been settled decisively in favour of the established order. As a stroll down any school corridor will reveal, 'student-centred' teaching and learning have steadily gained ground, particularly in the earlier years of schooling, but even there it has been absorbed into a 'hybridised' but clearly teacher-dominated classroom order.

There is little evidence to suggest that things have played out differently in Australia. Here as in the United States a crazy-brave rebellion in the 1970s in support of the 'open classroom' and its team-taught, flexibly-grouped, activity-based learning was effortlessly defeated. A former colleague conducted a national evaluation of the open classroom, and could tell some very funny stories about the ingenuity with which teachers used pot plants, book-cases, office partitions, stacks of cartons, anything to turn open classrooms back into closed ones.

Twenty years later another incursion came from a different direction but suffered the same fate. In the early 1990s the National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning (NPQTL) set out to encourage different ways of organising the work of students and teachers, but soon disappeared without trace. The classroom is a jealous god. Read more

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• Eureka Street
• Image: Maryknoll School

"It is an important and historic ruling," Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said in a statement, adding that the decision "has been welcomed with satisfaction by the Holy See."

Speaking on behalf of the government, Franco Mfattini, Italy's Foreign Minister also welcomed the ruling. "Today Europe's popular sentiment won out," he said.

The court over-ruled a previous decision and was passed by 15 votes to two.

Lombardi said the court recognised "that the exhibition of the crucifix is not indoctrination but the expression of the cultural and religious identity of countries of a Christian tradition."

It also recognised "that the culture of human rights must not be inconsistent with the religious fundamentals of a European civilisation in which Christianity has made an essential contribution," Lombardi said.

The case was brought by an Italian mother who was unhappy that crucifixes were on display in every classroom in a state school.

Friday's ruling by a higher court is final.

Sources:
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Reuters