Ross Farrelly

Published in The Australian 28 March 2005 English in Australia , the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, is yet another example of the endless dispute between conservatives and leftists over what should be taught in schools, and which teaching methods ought to be employed. Sawyer accused English teachers of failing to educate a thoughtful generation of voters who can successfully apply their critical faculties to the policies presented in the recent election campaign. It's obviously desirable that voters be able to judge the relative merits of political parties. But the part of Sawyer's editorial which aroused comment was that he equated the success of the Howard Government with a lack of judgement on the part of the voters, implying that successful teaching entailed engendering sympathies which lie to the left of centre. Kevin Donnelly responded by bemoaning the influence of left-wing, progressive ideology in the English classroom and yearning f...

Published in Policy Magazine , Spring, 2005. A footnoted version of this essay is available on request. At the beginning of Pierre Boulle’s classic novel The Bridge Over the River Kwai, the commanding officer of the British prisoners-of-war, Colonel Nicholson, asks his Japanese counterpart, Colonel Saito, to reconsider his command that the British officers work alongside the other ranks to construct the bridge. Unbeknown to Nicholson, Saito has a deep seated antipathy to anyone questioning his authority. In a paroxysm of rage he beats Nicholson senseless and inflicts a punishing work regime on the rest of the prisoners. Saito’s reaction reminds me, in vehemence if not in kind, of the response of the education bureaucracy whenever the words “profit” and “education” are mentioned in the same sentence.  Teachers’ unions in particular are vehemently opposed to “edupreneurs”,   companies which wish to provide service for pr...