Educating Mr Kinnock
Sir: Since you attributed to my department the honour of making Mr Kinnock what he is today (Leading article, 28 February), 1 must defend him from that charge. He belongs, you tell us, to a post-literate age and all because, at University College, Cardiff, he studied `undemanding, and possibly non-existent, subjects like "in- dustrial relations" ', an 'indeterminate cor- pus of learning' for which 'reading was not essential'. Some of this is true, some prejudiced. 'Industrial relations' (since you quaintly enclose it in inverted commas) is concerned with work and its management, its study requiring moral, economic, social and technical consideration, not bad foundations for a university education. It is nonetheless demanding because it is dif- fuse. Indeterminacy is a necessary charac- teristic that it shares with other studies, like 'philosophy'. Your prejudices may relate to your classical contempt for the useful; 'industrial relations' may seem to you as suspect as other banausic pursuits like 'engineering', 'physics' or `chemistry'. Or do you find it undemandingly modern like `English literature' or `economics'?
Perhaps it is illiteracy that we induced in Mr Kinnock. I must confess that we do not set out to teach our students to read and write. In Mr Kinnock's case and mine those provisions were made respectively at Lewis Grammar School, Pengam, and at Aberdare Grammar School. Neither of those institutions would have perpetrated or approved the syntactical vulgarity of your penultimate sentence. If you will sneer at those deprived of your own Olympian standards, you must talk proper, boyo.
P. D. Anthony
Head of Department of Industrial Relations and Management Studies, University College, Cardiff
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