Funny man Charles Firth...concerned about education

Firth gets serious about curriculum

By Kerri Carr

In a funny speech to November's Friday Forum comedian Charles Firth also had serious words to say about what happens when corporate sponsorship influences the way curriculum is taught.

Living in the United States for the past 18 months, Charles Firth undertook research for his book American Hoax, discovering a set of institutions, sponsored by large banks and corporations, that design corporate-friendly materials for American public schools.

Charles explained the foundations "bribe you to come along" to their courses, with teachers normally paid about $150 to attend an institution's course.

He told the Friday Forum how acting as one of his characters he attended a Foundation of Teaching Economics (FTE) course, "Is capitalism good for poor?" where he was given three kilos of class handouts and encouraged to personalise them to make it look like as if he's done the work.

"It's really playing on the need for these over-worked teachers to be spoon-fed their curriculum, but by completely corporate funded, privately funded organisations," he said.

Charles described Foundation for Teaching Economics public affairs development vice president Jim Klauder's reply when he suggested that teachers were "left of centre": 'Oh yeah, but that doesn't really matter because we just bring them back to the curriculum by using tests.'

"I'd never realised it's just a completely stringent strategy that tests equals making sure teachers don't have any autonomy," Charles said.

"Education is becoming explicitly hegemonic rather than being there to make you think and that's why corporations are part of the push; actually ramming home ideas about an ideology about why the ruling classes are great and why everything is fine."

Charles is concerned there is little opposition to corporations influencing material taught in United States schools.

"Unions have to be involved in the fights that affect their profession," he said.

"What use is it to be on more than $[US]100,000 a year if some organisations with money and power can come in and basically undermine your profession and everything you devoted your life to, right in the front of your face?" he asked.

Of the Australian situation, Charles said: "The centralisation of the curriculum is not just about getting control of everything -- it is about taking education to a scale where unions have less influence in Australia.

"In the US, at a state level and at a more local level, the teachers' unions are strong...but at the federal scale they basically don't exist. By comparison, corporations are much more powerful at a federal scale than at a local or state scale.

"The whole structure of this union [NSW Teachers Federation] has its power focussed at the state scale and Howard knows that which is why he is trying to rip it out to a federal scale."

Charles described the Howard Government's push for a national curriculum as a "disaster".

"If it turns out that corporations can start funding national-scale bodies to influence the curriculum it's going to be [a] really hard battle.

"When the Federal Government puts up a wedge like the [A-E grading] and tries to wedge the State Government about that, it's important for the State Government not to blink but to actually line up with the unions against the Federal Government because if they don't then the Federal Government is going to win every single time and that's what's happening in the US.

"What the Howard push is about is the de-professionalism of education and education innovation," he said.

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