'Progressive' education
Sir: Undoubtedly great harm has been done to our national life by members of the middle class masquerading as progressives, as Auberon Waugh (1 April) rightly observes. The majority of these trendy reformers are supporters of the Labour Party, but some are Tories, still mistakenly seeking that mythical middle way of politics. Sucking up to the workers is one of the main preoccupations of these people — and nowhere has their influence been more deadly than in the vital sphere of education.
Vast sums of money have been thrown away in recent years in putting into practice their bogus panaceas so that education may become a mindless, effortless, muddled blend of bogus sociology and half-baked egalitarian claptrap. The 'new' primary schooling has spawned mass illiteracy and innumeracy; the unthinking rush into nonselective schooling has proved equally disastrous — especially to able youngsters from poor homes — and still so-called progressives, from Mrs Shirley Williams down, go on with their folly.
Now the latest target seems to be that last
bastion of standards, the examination system itself. Subjected to all this dubious
experimentation, proletarian young have responded in the only way open to them by playing truant on a scale unknown in the days of the unjustly condemned grammar and secondary modern schools! The children of the reformers, of course, are spared this fate all too often by being safely tucked away in independent schools where oldfashioned and more efficient schooling still survives. Countless children meanwhile from ordinary homes have had their education ruined by the muddle-headed notions of would-be reformers, who fondly imagine that the removal of all that gives purpose, meaning and motivation in education is somehow conferring some mystical 'democratic' favour on those whose favour they seek.
J. H . K. Lockhart 21 B King's Avenue London W5
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