Sir: As a product of a public school in the 1960s where the sports stars were regarded as gods by staff and pupils alike, I can still - 30 years later - recall every humiliation heaped on me as someone who hated rugby.
One of the more pleasing aspects of the annual surveys ranking schools' performance is that those with this fetish for sports above all are at last being rumbled academically. I am delighted to see that my old school is very much in the third division, and on a recent fleeting visit (the first for 30 years) I was also pleased to see that it had been forced to go into teaching English to overseas students to make ends meet.
Parents are at last wising up to the fact that being good in the scrum is not necessarily the best way to deal with life in the 21st century.
PHILIP BERESFORD
London W5
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