Screen tests
Sir: As somebody whose teaching career coincided with the digital revolution, I must take issue with Sophie Winkleman’s well-meaning but blinkered views on screens in schools (Actress’s Notebook, 30 March). I shall ignore the several familiar yet unsubstantiated opinions presented as facts, but I cannot let ‘straight back to books, paper and pens’ go unchallenged. Adults involved in education have often, lamentably, seen it as their job to prepare children for the world they themselves grew up in, rather than the one that awaits the next generation.
The comment, ‘Well it worked for me!’ boils my blood. Any perusal of the current school curriculum would have visitors from outer space rolling their eyes in disbelief at how irrelevant to a child’s future much of it is. ‘Right, children, today we’re going to be learning how oxbow lakes form.’ Bafflingly, we don’t seem to have recognised that almost anything a child wants or needs to know is now at their fingertips. The world has moved on at lightning speed and preparation for inhabiting that world must be the priority. Once public examinations complete their transition to digital only, children in schools and the adults they will become will rarely, if ever, need paper and pens again in their lives. Sad? Perhaps. But inevitable nonetheless.
David Edwards
Norton-sub-Hamdon, Somerset
Passion project
Sir: Charles Moore would love to see a film approaching Jesus’s Passion through the eyes of a practising Jew (Notes, 30 March). He might also be interested to read M. Kamel Hussein’s City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem (1959), a very sympathetic Islamic look at the Passion. Sadly I suspect that it would be unlikely to be written today.
Timothy Kinahan
Bangor, Co. Down
Road to nowhere
Sir: I thoroughly enjoyed Rory Sutherland’s article on driverless cars (The Wiki Man, 30 March). At last a new perspective: one which shows why the whole idea is fatally flawed.
Fortunes have been spent already on the chimera of this techno dream. Politicians and businessmen seem especially gullible to the snake oil of Google et al. Like the paradoxical frog leaping to the wall, champions of driverless cars tell us they are getting ever nearer to success but they never arrive there, and never will. Safety and insurance are clearly unresolved issues, but so too are spontaneity and happenstance: the very stuff of owning a car. Like bikes, cars are an extension of oneself – while trains, buses, taxis and the imagined driverless cars are not. Bring on driverless trains and buses. Forget the cars.
Chris Rhodes
Horsham, West Sussex
The uncertainty principle
Sir: Justin Brierley’s contends (‘Living on a prayer’, 30 March) that, if the Resurrection of Jesus is not literally true, then Christianity isn’t valuable. Where does that leave the countless people whose Christianity inspires them to put the needs of others before their own, and who derive comfort and company from church attendance, but whose belief in supernatural events (such as the Resurrection) is a bit flaky? Perhaps in this uncertain world there is a great appetite for the kind of certainty – but certainty is not belief. Belief encompasses doubt, and it is doubt which gives belief depth and makes it valuable.
Anthony Thompson
Hereford
Latin lover
Sir: Harry Mount asks whether male classicists are irresistible to female fans of Latin (‘Veni, vidi, non vici’, 30 March). It is now 50 years since I started a Latin degree at London University (which I left with a barely scraped third); at the start, my philosophy, like that of Catullus, was vivamus atque amemus (‘let us live and love’); by the end, it was more a stoical nil desperandum.
Tom Stubbs
Surbiton, Surrey
Atlantic alliance
Sir: As Yascha Mounk says, in Britain the cult of the brilliant essay is prone to encourage writing which displays originality but gets things spectacularly wrong (‘Degrees of influence’, 30 March). Perhaps it is time to craft a new genre which seeks to combine the strengths of the solid American and flashy British styles at their best: the dazzlingly competent.
Ivor Morgan
Lincoln
Flair path
Sir: Yascha Mounk is right about the game UK academia plays when seeking flair. In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the principled, wayward tutor Hector says: ‘I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone. If I had gone to Oxford, I’d probably never have worked out the difference.’
Struan Macdonald
Hayes, Kent
Up the Downs
Sir: I read with fascination the review of Alexandra Harris’s book, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape (30 March). Such was the variety of characters mentioned that I could understand the absence of my favourite author, Hilaire Belloc. The depth of his work is founded on his love for these very square miles of Sussex, and he relates a journey across the county in his marvellously bizarre 1911 novel The Four Men. I managed to arrange a walking trip with some friends, suggesting we follow part of the book’s exact route. There is indeed a magic about those few square miles which I do not fully comprehend.
Timothy Smith
Heaton Moor, Lancs
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