SIR.-1 wish that my colleagues in the teaching pro- fession
would not compare their lot with that of ice-
cream vendors. The comparison would only be valid if ice-cream manufacturers and local education authorities were public benefactors and ice-cream vendors and teachers supplicants, There are those among us who would live on cat's-meat to the end of their days rather than be party to causing (as opposed to merely helping) Smith, J., to fail his GCE. One can respect their misguided zeal, so long as they don't complain (as your contributor does) about the monotony of the. cat's-meat.
The biggest problem is presented by those who imagine, in this day and age, when 'the rate for the job' is part of a Conservative Minister's everyday vocabulary, that they can have responsibility (in the present Smith, J./GCE sense) and a large car and Spanish holidays. The fact is that one can have one or the other,, but not both. One can only conclude that this ambivalent attitude is present in a majority of teachers, for it is reflected in the policies of their associations. How else can one explain for instance the NUT's Guide to University Entrance Require- ments, supplied free to members. i.e., to schools, since the number of members thinking of entering a university must be very small? What other union so blithely devotes its members' subscriptions to doing the employers' work for them?
The tragedy is that this responsibility, statesman- ship, call it what you will, is, as Miss Whitehorn pointed out in her article some time ago, completely ill-conceived. Your contributor appropriately men- tions the case of the visiting French schoolmaster, but he omits to add that. French secondary school teachers owe their enviable position to a strike which they staged some time ago to coincide with the Baccalaurdat examinations, whose importance in the French national life is at least as great as that of the GCE in the English. It is at least arguable that if English teachers had shown the right sort of re- sponsibility ten years ago, some of those children who are now deprived of, say, GCE Physics, owing to lack of staff, would now be receiving a balanced
education, atm forty would not still be looked upon as a reasonable size for primary classes. How can teachers contemplate the table given at the end of your article without feeling some sense of blame? Is it not time that teachers realised that, following the example of the authorities, they have fallen into the habit of looking upon educational expenditure as a sort of poor-law relief?
As long as teachers' organisations persist in being 'statesmanlike,' so long will local authorities 'peg' their rates at the expense of education and Ministers of Education dictate maximum salary scales to the supposedly autonomous Burnham Committee. And just as long will the general public, better versed than teachers in Mr. Marples's 'rate for the job,' be moved only to contempt by accounts of teachers' privations such as the one which you publish.— Yours faithfully,
D. GRSY
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