BASIC SLAG S, ,—It is regrettable that you have once
more given Charles Brand room in your columns to display his obvious feeling of intellectual and professional superiority. He sees the grammar school teacher, dealing with the sixth form, as a member of a super-elite of the teaching profession.
Many of our colleagues in primary and secondary modern schools devote long out-of-school hours to devising new approaches, making visual aids and developing projects so that they might educate, rather than merely contain, their classes of fifty. After all, they are responsible for the education of nine- tenths of the nation's children. Has Mr. Brand never encountered a grammar school teacher who gave up the struggle years ago and lapsed into a comfortable and complacent routine?
The sort of generalisations Mr. Brand makes are only likely to embitter large sections of an already divided profession. Moreover, they reflect the kind of thinking current in present Western society, which assumes that only a meritocracy and its tutors should really be catered for. If the teaching profession is to retain any professional status at all, obviously it needs to be better paid. Increases on the basic rate would recognise the value of every kind of teaching. Graduates are already paid for their qualifications. If we widen the gap between them and the rest of the teaching profession still further, we are merely giving tacit approval to the belief that education is more concerned with realising the potentialities of the highly intelligent few, than developing the personality of every child according to his interests and ability.
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