An education
Sir: Quite apart from the pressure the Gaokao exam puts on students (Letters, 18/25 December), the Chinese education system is unsatisfactory in other ways. I taught English to undergraduates in Beijing for two years and it could be a dispiriting experience. Chinese students are taught very intensively, there is a lot of learning by repetition, and they are also drilled so that they do not ever offend against the party line. You could say they are taught not to think, although that would be a bit unfair. Anyway, they are going to rule the world so it’s all academic.
Rebecca Jed, London SW4
Sir: Oliver Lewis made some valid comparisons between the level of difficulty of certain British and Chinese exams (‘The Gaokao challenge’, 11 December). But his astonishment must be put in the light of own unfamiliarity with mathematical knowledge. His first maths question is to do with set theory and not group theory (and the answer is, after a moment’s thought, trivial). Secondly, dividing one-and-three-quarters by a half is not an equation, merely an expression to be evaluated. Once upon a time, Oxford undergraduates were required to sit the Joint Colleges examination in which questions much harder than these were asked of undergraduates — even to read Modern History!
Andrew Corrie, Cambridge
Sir: When I was a student in the 1960s, universities were run by university teachers — people who love ideas and learning. Sixth-form teachers knew that if they wanted pupils to succeed, they had to try to foster that love in them. Today, university teachers have little influence over anything. University managers tell them that their job is to keep their institutions solvent by pleasing students and government. Students tell them that their fees buy the right to predictable, unchallenging assessment. Government tells them to rejig things so that students from adverse backgrounds do as well as others. Oliver Lewis hopes the new Education Bill might change all this. I doubt it.
Geoffrey Sampson
Professor Emeritus, School of Informatics, University of Sussex
How the World Cup is won
Sir: I agree with Roger Alton (‘Goodbye World Cup, hello xenophobia’, 11 December) that England should never have got involved with Fifa if we weren’t prepared to work within its suspect environment. But I am surprised that he is puzzled by the negative response to awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Does he really think that Qatar won on merit? There are so many obvious reasons why it is an absurd choice. And is he so naive that he believes the campaign by a London PR firm had the slightest influence on the decision? I managed the global media relations for a successful World Cup bid in the 1990s. We were very pleased with some of the coverage of our campaign — which unlike Qatar’s was truly worthy of winning — but I have never deluded myself into thinking that the outcome was decided anywhere other than in closed-door ‘negotiations’.
Bryan Matthews, via email
Point of order
Sir: It was kind of James Forsyth (Politics, 11 December) to pay such close attention to the internal committee elections of the Liberal Democrats but misleading to refer disparagingly to a turnout of 2.5 per cent of the membership. As he should have known, the electorate entitled to vote for these committees is not the membership at large but the much smaller number of members elected by their local parties as ‘voting representatives’ to the party’s annual conference. Of the 3,437 entitled to vote, just over half did so. The party is now considering whether the system should be changed so as to open up these internal committee elections to all members.
Duncan Greenland, London W1
Taking liberties
Sir: James Delingpole promotes himself on his website as a libertarian, which Wikipedia, for example, defines as ‘the advocacy of individual liberty especially freedom of thought and action’. However, in his column of 11 December, he describes engaging his driver in conversation about Howard Flight’s recent remarks on ‘breeding’ and then admits he was rude to assert: ‘You’re a driver, not an MP. Since when has it been your job to decide what’s right and wrong?’ Such condescension is not only part of what his heroes Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan tried to remove from the Conservative brand but also evokes the distinctly illiberal Führerprinzip. He expresses concern about our ‘thinking like slaves’, but his simultaneous qualification of the right of those who serve him to consider and express their own views — even when he himself has sought those views — is not the most attractive advertisement of his desired ‘revolution that will set us free’.
Dirk Hazell
Liberal Democrat parliamentary spokesman, Chelsea & Fulham
Nothing but gossip
Sir: Apparently on the basis of a one-in-250,000 sample Toby Young concludes that the US State Department is interested in nothing but gossip. Perhaps the same can be said of The Spectator. A month or so ago a review of a biography of Lloyd George concerned itself entirely with the great man’s sex life.
G.R. Collings, Cape Town
Consistent hobbits
Sir: Like every other columnist who has expressed an opinion on the casting of white hobbits, Rod Liddle (‘What is the racial composition of a hobbit?’, 4 December) misses the point by pontificating about what Tolkien might have wanted. The fact is, The Hobbit movie is a prequel. As such the first responsibility of its casting of hobbits must be consistent with the casting of hobbits in the three movies which preceded it.
Simon Collins, London
Comments