Goodbye, Mr Chips
Sir: How right is Mr Thompson (Spectators Notebook,' 3 March) to upbraid the National Union of Teachers for their bigoted attitude to public schools'
It is sad to see the biggest (though not the only) teachers' union and its admirable general secre- tary associating themselves so explicitly with the conventional left-wing dogma 'abolish the public schools.' The proposal is both fatuous and sinis- ter; fatuous because by no stretch of the imagination will the abolition of Winchester lead to an egalitarian Utopia; sinister because any pro- posal to reduce parental freedom of choice and prohibit the spending of a parent's money on his child's education smacks of a very nasty kind of totalitarianism.
I would (naturally) be among the first to agree that the good maintained grammar school (soon. as we know, to disappear from the face of the land) is as good as, or perhaps better than, a number of public schools, but to destroy the lot —and for all the wrong reasons—would deprive the country of many excellent schools which we cannot possibly afford to lose. And does the Nrur, or anybody else, think that the destruction of independent schools like Dulwich or Nottingham High School, which get their fees partly from individuals and partly from local authorities, would do anything but deprive a number of parents of some freedom of choice and a number of poor children of excellent educational opportunities? 'Social justice' would certainly not be advanced by disintegrating what has already been integrated.
The Nur should remember what last year's chair- man of the Headmasters' Conference has said: 'No power on earth can make all schools equally good, but it may be possible to come a good deal nearer to making them equally bad. To some that may represent an advance; there will always be people who hold that if what is desirable cannot be enjoyed by all it should be enjoyed by none. The principle of the equalisation of misery is dear to the human heart, hut profoundly inimical. in my belief, to human progress.'
R. R. Pedky Headmaster Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School for Boys, Sidcup, Kent
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