A teacher replies
From Mr John Turnbull Sir: I enjoyed Leo McKinstry's polemic CA tale of two inspectors', 17 March), but he was clearly swept along by his own enthusiasm. Perhaps he thought he saw a bandwagon starting to roll and wanted to get on board.
I refer to his swipe at the 'teacher-training colleges, trade unions and local education authorities [LEAs]' for allowing or even encouraging the Left, over the last three decades, to impose on schools a 'child-centred, anti-elitist orthodoxy that has caused such damage to basic standards of literacy and numeracy'.
He seems conveniently to have overlooked the fact that for the greater part of 'the last three decades' the Conservatives were the party in government — 22 years compared with Labour's eight — and seemingly best placed (one might think) to do something about any such damaging orthodoxy. He appears equally unaware that, apart from being prime minister for 11 of those Conservative years, Mrs Thatcher had also been the secretary of state for education from 1970 to 1974. Few would have described her, or indeed any of her education ministers at the time, as being soft on the Left. And the majority of English counties before the 1997 reorganisation were Conservative-controlled LEAs.
As a teacher in the Fifties and Sixties I was never committed to 'the ideal of education as a subversive activity' and didn't know anyone who was. Perhaps we were all too busy trying to meet the educational needs of our pupils to pay much attention to the meddling of politicians at all levels.
John Turnbull
Pershore, Worcestershire
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