Ross Farrelly

Published in Sydney's Child , August 2006 I was driving in New Zealand last summer in a car I had borrowed from a friend. Not surprisingly for the Shaky Isles, it was raining. It rained a lot that “summer”. If fact, it rained just about every day we were there. One of the windscreen wiper blades on the car was somewhat worn and it didn’t clear all the water from the glass as it passed back and forth before my eyes which continually searched the sky for a glimpse of the azure blue I had been told lay hidden beyond the canopy of thick grey cloud which blanketed the sky, so I decide to replace it. The first service station we came to was in the middle of nowhere. Right bang smack in the middle. Waiouru is the official name of the place but it’s known affectionately to the locals as “Waiberia”. I needed a leg stretch so without really thinking there was any hope they would have the necessary part I stopped and told the proprietor about our predicament. Miraculously, he had the very win...

Published in The Age , 8th September, 2005. The feel good 2002 French movie "Etre et Avoir" ("To Have and to Hold") portrayed an affectionate, dedicated teacher lovingly caring for a small group of children in a tiny rural school. The movie had no plot, minimal characterisation and moved at a pace suitable to cure an ADHD child of insomnia. It was nevertheless popular because it reinforced the ideal concept of how we would love our teachers to be: patient, thoughtful and above all child-centred. This deeply held idea of the altruistic teacher helps us understand why there is such an anathema to the words “education” and “profit” being used in the same sentence. The idea of a teacher motivated by financial gains, with one eye on the class and the other on his bank-balance is not a palatable one. We much prefer our teachers to be altruistic, teaching out of the goodness of their heart and because of their love for children and the welfare of soc...

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...