Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

Bad luck or injustice? Professor Lauchlan Chipman, of Wollongong
University, said that ‘even awkward and unpopular people have rights’. He
said Toben’s case ‘typified the fate of the one-off model in Australia.
While school authorities are making determined efforts to lift teaching
performance and elaborate procedures are in place to ensure that this
does not occur at the expense of teachers’ rights, it would be ironic if one
of the few sacked for incompetence turned out not to have deserved it.
Tony Abbott latched on to these observations of mine and persuaded his
editor to run the story. This article caused concern for the Education
Minister. Within my own family it caused embarrassment also. My sister’s
friend had read the story while on a plane returning from overseas. ‘How
dare you’, she said, ‘go public with such a story of shame’. Needless to say,
my sister survived her career in Victoria’s education system, but she
prostituted herself in the process by swimming along with the feminists and
other fashionable ideologies that floated about from the late 1960s.
Someone once said to me that the face you have at 20 is the one given to
you by god, your face at 40 is given to you by life and your face at 60 is the
one you deserve. Whether this applies to my sister is not for me to decide.
I know she would be quite upset to hear, Tony Abbott, then the Federal
Opposition leader, talk publicly about sexual virginity as he did in January
2010, something that needed to be done in order to break down negative
peer pressure on this and other matters. After all, we would do well to
develop just a little public modesty within the Australian social fabric. The
fact that Abbott was a Rhodes scholar, as was my German principal-mentor
Helge Merz before World War Two, indicates the ideal of the bodymind/physical-mental
balance is not dead.
*
One man’s fight to clear his name
Michael Barnard, The Age, 15 December 1987
If I had to nominate a Victorian Battler of the Year - perhaps ‘fighter’ is
more appropriate here - an eminent candidate would be Dr Fredrick
Toben, the Goroke school teacher dismissed by the education
department amid a swirl of local controversy three years ago.
Dr Toben, it was alleged, was incompetent. Since then he has been fighting
doggedly to clear his name, mostly at great financial and emotional cost. He
weathered the humbling and frustrating transformation from his chosen
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