Teacher John Marsden’s lessons in Covid-19 lockdown

Best-selling author John Marsden knows better than most what it takes to keep kids entertained. ­

Author and school principal John Marsden. Picture: Julian Kingma

Best-selling author John Marsden knows better than most what it takes to keep kids entertained. ­Famous for his series of Tomorrow, When the War Began books, devoured by teenagers of the 1990s, Marsden is also principal of two alternative schools in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges, 60km north of Melbourne. In the past four weeks, the schools have gone from open to closed to partially open, as regional Victoria lurches in and out of lockdown.

Marsden has seen first-hand the frustrations of cooped up parents, forced to juggle working from home with keeping their kids both on task with remote learning and sufficiently entertained. It’s the last bit he has trouble with.

“Parents should not be responsible for their kids’ entertainment,” he says. “If parents are expected to be entertainment officers then it means we’re going to have a generation of adults who expect to be entertained by artificial means. The ability to entertain yourself is something that’s lacking in many modern families.”

Parenting and schooling are Marsden’s favourite topics, and he’s about to release a new book documenting his journey through Australia’s often dysfunctional education system, from abused schoolchild to successful principal. Titled Take Risks, it happens to be the motto at one of his schools, Candlebark, where school camps are mandatory and kids are encouraged to live life to the fullest, even if it sometimes means getting hurt.

It hasn’t been a great week for risk-taking at boutique private schools in Victoria, with Fitzroy Community School in Melbourne’s trendy inner north suffering a major Covid-19 outbreak. About half of the 120 students continued to attend school for lessons during lockdown, with principal Tim Berryman being a vocal critic of school closures since the beginning of the pandemic. More than 30 positive cases have now been linked to the school.

Marsden has a close association with the school. He taught there prior to opening Candlebark in 2006 and originally wanted to run Candlebark under the auspices of Fitzroy Community School, as a country campus, but was urged by Mr Berryman to go it alone. Instead, he imported many of the school’s core philosophies to Candlebark, including a dogged resistance to rules you don’t agree with, a position that brought Fitzroy Community School unstuck this week.

“It really is a brilliant school that does wonderful things,” says Marsden. “They’ve always carved their own path and have done it again in this situation. With hindsight it seems to not have been a good decision. But I still admire their forthright way of doing things. We can all make mistakes.”

Marsden says he can sympathise with kids feeling constrained or bored during lock­down, but ultimately he doesn’t see remote learning as an insurmountable burden. “You’ll find in countless societies, past and present, kids living in squashed conditions or in isolated places. Kids in outback Australia have been doing distance education for years and seem to tolerate it happily and successfully.”

Marsden’s top tip for lockdown parents is to back off and let kids find their own fun. “I used to have Matchbox cars. I would draw towns on the driveway with chalk. There’d be bank robberies and ambulance smashes, I’d create all these stories. It was great preparation for writing books.”