Letters to the Editor | 18 March 2006

Schools aren’t clubs

From Nicholas Nelson
Sir: Have you given proper thought to the reason that we have an education system (Leading article, 11 March)? Our schools have an essential list of objectives which includes ensuring that young people absorb a body of knowledge and acquire skills that match their potential, and emerge as adults with an ability to assess their world critically and communicate with their fellow human beings. The way you would do this is to hive off 25 per cent or so into exclusive clubs so that they leave school with a strong body of knowledge but no clue about how to communicate with the other 75 per cent. This is why members of the political class are so often completely divorced from the many millions who would rather vote for Big Brother than for any of them.
Nicholas Nelson
By email

Where trendy Parisians go

From Daniel T. Perkins
Sir: I agree with Allister Heath’s view of the Imprimerie Nationale and the passport debacle (‘300,000 Frenchmen can’t be wrong’, 11 March), but the remainder of his article is unfair. Rather than being hemmed in by posters of Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise, the streets of Paris are lined with ads for domestic films, lingerie and Johnny Hallyday. Meanwhile the branches of Starbucks in Paris are full not of trendy young French things but of American tourists who, having travelled 3,000 miles to gawp at Parisian architecture or tick off EuroDisney on their list of ‘visited’ theme parks, prefer a coffee shake in an American chain to trying a genuine café. Anyone with an ounce of ‘trendiness’ will be found in the very cafés Mr Heath claims are disappearing in the largely tourist-free 10th and 20th arrondissements. And in France Gauloises are not so much being squeezed out by Marlboro Lights as being stubbed out entirely, as cigarettes are throughout Europe.
Daniel