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Letters

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Not good, but outstanding
Sir: If, as Matthew Parris asserts, ‘There are no “good” teachers’ (Another voice, 7 June), then there can be no good practitioners of anything. To state that those teachers who are good for some children invariably ‘wreck another’s prospects’ is a reasoning which could be applied to all professions.

How does a good Prime Minister promote the best to Cabinet without discarding the deficient and defective? And what of those journalists who decide each week who is worthy of their attention, invariably to the detriment of others who may be just as worthy? The promotion and affirmation of one is necessarily at the expense of another. Some might call it natural selection. Or is Matthew Parris advocating equality of outcome over equality of opportunity?

I must declare an interest: I am a teacher. But I am not ‘good’; I am ‘outstanding’, or so Ofsted tells me. But this ‘outstanding’ is not as the dictionary defines — that is being concerned with superlatives. No, teachers who are ‘outstanding’ are ‘at least good in many respects’, so that they may be decidedly less than good in others.

The desire to make all teachers feel good about themselves has resulted in grade inflation, such that Ofsted’s ‘outstanding’ no longer means outstanding. Indeed, one might as well introduce an outstanding* to distinguish the truly outstanding from Ofsted’s assessment.

Good teachers, as Matthew Parris demonstrates, are those who inspire and somehow live on in the lives of their students. For one to be lauded by a former pupil half a century on, and immortalised in the pages of The Spectator, is indicative of a truly outstanding teacher and manifestly belies the assertion that there are no good teachers.

Adrian Hilton
Ripon College, Oxford

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Haldane

June 12th, 2008 12:09pm

How strange. All the comments that managed to get posted concerning d'Ancona's interview were negative.Yet here, given pride of place, is a letter praising his clarity of mind. I should say so!

Once again

June 12th, 2008 2:45pm

Dalrymple brutish? What rubbish. Put brutishness in its correct context here. If young scantily clad, drunken women dress like sluts, then so be it - they will be brutally regarded, brutally treated and brutally described as sluts. There is no "nice" word for scantily clad, drunks in public places.

Diary

Rani Singh

I’ve just emerged from the gym, winding down after a day’s writing, when my son Sukhraj calls, alerting me to sudden news of explosions and fatalities in Mumbai.