LETTERS r „ ,

Paying for Education

101111 Wightwu•k Mrs. Beatrice Jackson

The Lawrence Myth

G. Wren Himmel. f ratios Watson

Riau(' du Midi Prot, sour D. W. Brogan US Passport W. D. Paden Chaos ex Machina G. S. Solt For New Poets C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson

PAYING FOR EDUCATION

SIR,--Mr. Fairlie ('The 1965 Education Act') makes a series of questionable assumptions in his new role faand scope of public education. . . Yet Mr. Fairlie cites cases of sixth-form expansion to substantiate his case.

of educational expert.

,Illost questionable to be that expressed in the fol- lOWing quotation: 'I do not think it is first a question °,` money. What is needed is another imaginative leap forward in the whole concept of the purposes

vours the raising of the school-leaving age, and As a secondary school teacher, I myself found the Rut who, if money is not to be a first considera-

tion. Is going to teach all these new sixth-formers? Where will they be taught? Has Mr. Fairlie ever dis- cussed with a departmental head the difficulties in- volved in obtaining sufficient textbooks. scientific apparatus, or even a tape-recorder to facilitate the teaching of modern languages? Didn't Sir David Eccles. on the evening before he ceased to be Mini- s.ter of Education, confide in him the fact that there is a chronic shortage of competent sixth-form teachers of science and mathematics, not to mention laboratory assistants? Surely, even if he is unaware of those trifling details, he must have heard about the shortage of school buildings in this land?

There are plenty of ideas about the purpose and

scope of education going the rounds. Some of them even the brain-children of harassed, underpaid peda- gogues coping with already outsize classes. Yet Mr. to a

irlie and a depressing number of other people seem imagine that like chameleons they must continue to subsist on air : too much of it hot.

93 Kingston Road. Oxford

JOHN W IGHTWICK