In his English Social History (1944) G M Trevelyan writes (pp 363f) of modern education ‘creating an unwanted intellectual proletariat’.
My own experience both as a teacher and as a pupil led me, some thirty years ago, to the conclusion that education (schooling) was primarily designed to produce only just as much literacy and numeracy as was useful to employers. You needed a workforce which could read and write but not a workforce of men and women who might be able to think for themselves.
Circumstances in 2010 are not the same as in those Establishment-dominated years between the wars but when I read that one in five children now leave school without reaching the required standard in English and Maths, I do pause to wonder for our future.
francis cameron, oxford, 5 october 2010
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