8. How the Hell Did I End up Teaching?

JOHN CATRON

8. HOW THE HELL DID I END UP TEACHING?

INTRODUCTION My decision, after much prevarication, to go into teaching, seems so long ago now that I’m almost tempted to begin with, ‘Once upon a time ….’ Until that moment, I had looked somewhat askance at a career in education and had my sights set on economics, mainly because I had read The Affluent Society by J. K. Galbraith in 6th form (or, more correctly, during my Higher School Certificate … more of that later) and the simple idealism and yearning for fairness that permeated the book, helped shape my nascent political views and gave them some direction and purpose. The year was 1975. I had just completed one year of an arts degree majoring in Economics at Macquarie University in Sydney. My parents and I had migrated to Australia five years earlier and I had completed my secondary education (via their post-16 route: the HSC). Economics, at that time, seemed to be the appropriate vehicle for a left-of-centre idealist, caught up in the heady optimism of the Whitlam government; with Keynesian approaches dominating the financial discourse and concepts of shared prosperity through tax and spend policies becoming mainstream, orthodox and even viewed in some quarters as a little cautious. Jim Cairns, the then Labor (sic) treasurer was, at that time, famously quoted suggesting that governments could simply print money to fund their way out of economic difficulties. For the next thirty years, a different economic ‘wisdom’ prevailed and hardened into the neo-liberal orthodoxy in economics to the extent that any aspiring economics academic would be hounded out of western university faculties (Mirowski, 2014, p. 293) was probably for the best that I did not take up a career in economics and opted instead for education. My views would have been a major hindrance to career advancement, whereas education offered the prospect of being able to work in accordance with my views. That does sound a little too pompous, even for me, but it’s the best wording I can come up with to define the set of values I continue to hold and which have provided a sort of conscience against which I tend to measure myself. In fact, I’ve probably taken too many career risks based on this values set which have caused me problems during my career and, hopefully, this reflective writing exercise will help me to articulate and understand that process with greater clarity and perception. Meanwhile, back in 1975, that new economic model was poised to break the Keynes consensus. Nixon famously asserted in 1971: ‘we’re all Keynesian’s now’ prior to exploding that same (Friedman, 1965) and the Australian Labor Party lasted only two years before it was ousted in a quasi-coup (Horne, 1983) that not only ushered in Friedman economics dominated by the right wing, supply-side

Chicago school but also a debilitating sense of impotence for the centre left of politics that remained in place for a generation. That’s when I decided to try education for a career. In writing these first few paragraphs, I seem to have charted a thought-through, decision-making process for my entry into the education profession, with objectivity and calmness. To be honest, this was not the case and the trends shaping politics and economics that influenced me at that time are only brought into relief through the passage of time and reflection. However unarticulated the rationale was at the time, I believe that these were the prevailing drivers of the decision I made to quit the economics course at Macquarie and to join the education faculty. I had passed all my courses until that time (Economics, reasonably well; Accountancy, reasonably badly) but the passion had been slowly sucked from my studies. The courses were dry, they seemed to have no relevance to the excitement of Galbraith and even less connection to the political ideals that fired me up. Education, on the other hand, offered passionate idealism and I could also translate my love of reading books into a paid career! What I didn’t realise at the time, and which has come only too sharply into focus recently, was the extent to which the revolution in economics in the mid-1970s would incrementally but overwhelmingly suffuse and distort education as a profession, to the point whereby a production line model of educational delivery would become the dominant metaphor for perceived success. In this brave new world of education in the UK, there is now no such thing as ‘context’ (echoing the old Thatcherite lie that ‘there is no such thing as society’ … as I write this passage, Oliver Letwin, the Conservative cabinet minister is in the news for blaming the 1985 London riots on ‘bad, moral character’ (The Independent, 30th December 2015). Not police tactics; not slums; not entrenched, institutional racism; not poverty; not unemployment and certainly not a combination of these factors!) So it is now in education. A child born into hunger, poverty, emotional distress, lack of opportunity and neglect is expected to make the same progress as a child born into affluence; who has the support, guidance, money and opportunities that advantage confers. The abolition of context from educational accountability means that the educational progress of any child is simply and exclusively attributable to the moral fibre of the individual child. Therefore, in this distorted view of the world, context is irrelevant. And, therefore, we do not need Scandinavian models of social pedagogy and community funding; we do not need the professional autonomy and positive regard of teachers in South East Asia. We simply need to instil backbone, character and the will to win. All of this is not to suggest that there weren’t other influences on my decision to start teaching and, subsequently, to stick with it. In the following sections, I will reflect on my (somewhat nomadic) early years and on my social and cultural background along with the links between my politic views and a career path that, in retrospect, seems more haphazard and coincidental than I had realized at the time. However, the main point from this crucial decision is that I have always been driven by a strong sense of injustice and political awareness and this has ensured that a certain restless desire; a political itch, has permeated my career – both

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