SIR.--1 read Charles Brand's article in the Spectator with interest
and strong general approval. Having nearly completed four years in the sixth form of a very good grammar school, 1 have gained a place to read English at a Cambridge college. I suppose, in some ways, y I. or others like me, can claim to know more about this discussion than the people most likely to write letters to the weekly journals. The
following for what it may be worth, is my experience :
J. Post-Advanced level work is analogous to first- year university work. With the rising competition for places and scholarships in the universities, and particularly at Oxbridge, a sixth-former has every year his standards pushed up by the increased num- ber of applicants. This is not only a demand on the university applicant, it is a demand on the teacher. Generally speaking it has always been the case (and is now even more so) that the sixth-form teacher has to have the qualifications and ability of a uni- versity lecturer or tutor. Why should he not be paid at a comparable rate?
2. There are, therefore, very few schools which can provide such teaching facilities, simply because the salary is almost laughable compared with what a graduate of ability can command in other spheres. A short time ago there was a complaint voiced by some headmasters of smaller grammar schools that unless the school's name was known at Oxbridge it was virtually impossible to get a boy accepted by a college. It was suggested that this was because of the strong prejudice on the part of the two major uni- versities in favour of taking sixth-formers on the basis of 'school prestige.' This may be the case, but I strongly suspect that very often the main reason is that the smaller grammar school cannot provide teachers capable of bringing an applicant up to the required standard in a college examination.
3. As to the matter of relative standing of grammar school compared with other teachers, surely there is a distinction to be made between the teacher who can get by with applying what he has learnt on an education course, and a teacher who needs real intellectual ability to do his job properly. Might I suggest from personal experience that the 'art of teaching' at a sixth-form level is an encumbrance, and that a good teacher will throw it over in favour • of basic self-expression? There is nothing worse, and nothing annoys an intelligent sixth form more, than a teacher who talks to them as if they were thirteen-year-olds.
4. Lastly, some observations on the teaching of my own subject, which happens to be the same as Mr. Brand's. I have heard others talk of, and, in- deed, have suffered on occasion myself, the teacher of scholarship classes who 'deals' with Wordsworth, for example, by glancing at a couple of lyrics,
skimming through The Prelude, reading `Tintern Abbey' and the 'Immortality Ode,' and discussing the meaning, together with such critical comments as, 'That's a fine poem. Falls off a bit towards the end. Next week we'll have a look at Keats' No one ever got advanced level, a fortiori an open scholarship, with that sort of tuition.
And so it will go on, I suppose, as the howler has it. `to the last syllabus of recorded time' or until the right men are attracted into the grammar schools by a sensible rate of pay.—Yours faithfully,
SIXTH-FORMER
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