LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Leaven in the Schools
SIR.-1 read with interest Lord Beveridgernsuggestion tbat.if those few children who bring - intellectual interests" with them from home were sent to the same schools as the masses they would act as a leaven." 1 he troublesome question is why this has not already happened at the
English public schools For there too, of course, the boys with intellectual interests have usually been a minority. But have they acted as a leaven? Did not most of them either lear.a in their first week to assume the mask which they never laid aside until they reached the univer- sity. or else undergo years of such ostracism-as turned them into soured intellectuals who are such a feature of our age? The hope that they would have fared better at State schools would he reasonable if we had evidence that proletarian philistines are less hostile, or less successfully hostile, to distinction than philistines from bourgeois homes. But have we? Is it not more probable that English boys of all classes know equally well how to cope with " leaven "7—Yours, &c., C. S.. LEWIS.
Magdalen College, Oxford.
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