From the perspective of thirty years later, not all the ideas were bad ones – but far more were than weren’t.
Very few teachers from the state system got involved in ACES – mainly because doing so was likely to be rather bad for your career. For Harrison-Mattley to have been writing in ACES Review, to say nothing of making comments that lead to articles like the one presented here, and a couple of others I’ve found while teaching in a state high school in New South Wales – he must have felt extremely strongly about what he was saying. Teaching at Liverpool High and Merrylands High – I very much doubt he enjoyed it. I suspect he stayed not because he enjoyed it, but because he was passionate about trying to do what he believed was best for his students, whether he found it enjoyable or not.
