SIR,—I am merely a parent with two children at a
primary school and with no other vested interests whatever in the education profession. I was appalled by Charles Brand's article and the contempt which he feels for the primary schools and their teachers. The picture he gives is a travesty of our own school and of the many other schools my friends' children attend.
I doubt whether the country realises the debt it owes to the primary schools. They provide one of our few pedagogic advances since the war. My children's school is a quite different and incom- parably better world than the primary school I attended in the 1930s. The children learn the three Rs very well, but they also have awakened in them a real interest in many other subjects and in the world at large. They also do a great deal of written work which has to be marked; as the staff has no free periods at all, this can only be done at night. It is quite obvious, too, from the children's work that the staff spends a great deal of time and thought in evenings and holidays in preparing material for lessons.
In my experience primary school teachers are extraordinarily competent and devoted. I am ashamed to see the struggles of the married men teachers on the 'basic' and to see the young women starting after two or three years' training at a salary no larger than they could have got at eighteen as shorthand-typists.
MARGARET COWING
4 Strand-on-the-Green. W4
[We have only been able to print, for reasons of space, a small selection of the very large number of letters on this subject; it has also been necessary considerably to shorten many of those we have given.—Editor, Spectator.]
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