Down with trendies
Sir: Progressive Thinking these days rejects not only intelligence testing but also the fact that intelligence is largely a matter of inheritance. The baleful influence of the environmentalistic lobby on our educational system is only too ob- vious: your trendy educator has only one idea in his head; and that is to force universal non- selective schooling upon the nation.
The dismal record of this type of educational institution is ignored. Even the conservatives re- main curiously equivocal in their attitude, thus affronting many of their supporters and ap- palling those who have had the wit not to be taken in by the endless stream of propagandist gobbledygook masquerading as educational thought that gushes forth from so many quarters. Unfortunately not only the structure of education—and with it many good- schools—is at risk: the attack includes the very nature and content of education too.
Our anti-intellectual iconoclasts, obsessed with class hatred largely of their own imagining. would wipe out traditional schooling and substitute a kind of mad anarchy of the type tried in the Soviet Union in the heady 'twenties or in. America at the height of the progressive era. In a situation like this, it is high time that conservatives at least started doing some positive thinking on education. Leaving it to the local authorities, that is, to the risk of rule by ignorant councillors and their bureaucratic satraps. hardly seems much of a substitute.
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