Bernard Lane | April 23, 2008
BECCY Marzi, 20, says the critical analysis in her teacher training degree turned out to be not so critical.
"The only viewpoint that was accepted was the social justice/progressive viewpoint," she says.
"Critical analysis means developing your own perspective, doesn't it? If you're just told how to think, how are you developing your critical analysis skills?"
She abandoned her education degree at the University of Sydney and went down the road to the University of Technology, Sydney, to study business/law. She won't be a teacher after all.
Last Friday she joined 20-odd Young Liberals in a demonstration against bias in education outside the Surry Hills headquarters of the NSW Teachers Federation. Some wore pantomime prison garb, suggesting they were captives of leftish education unions. One student held a placard proclaiming: "Make Love not Bias."
They passed around a megaphone in order to broadcast litanies of bias at one another. They were watched with bemusement by a jovial policeman, a minuscule media contingent, a truckie bringing in beer supplies for the Teachers' Club, and the occasional union worker nipping out for a smoke in the rain.
Noel McCoy, federal president of the Young Liberals, says they want a charter of academic freedom to promote intellectual diversity.
He denies any wish to quash opinions distasteful to Young Libs: "We're saying the whole range of views should be put."
McCoy lacks faith in the existing procedures to deal with complaints of bias on campus: "What we're seeing from the examples on our website (makeeducationfair.org.au) is that the processes don't work." Sometimes students who complain become targets, he says.
At one point Marzi threw out the narrow reading list set by her teacher trainers. "It was entirely from one radical perspective. (And in the set text) other ideologies were all decried as bad and wrong, they were not given a fair shot," she says.
She did her own research and put the rhetoric of critical analysis to the test. In fact, the result was not all bad.
"Some (lecturers) realised that I'd done a lot of work and rewarded me ... some marked me down very harshly for it," she says.
