Letter: Teachers want the very best for their pupils

Sir: Bryan Appleyard seems to suggest that our most urgent need is to educate our children in the Oriental way, 'drilling them in the discipline of their cultures'. I should be fascinated to know what the national curriculum of the countries he singles out - Japan, Korea, Malaysia and China - look like. What is the average size of the classes? How much time is allotted to non-examined subjects? What proportion of the children thus educated and efficiently examined ends up in the sweatshops or on the assembly-line?

The Western vision of education may be muddled and hopelessly idealistic, but it rests quite properly, on the idea that there is something more to life than the struggle of the ant heap.

Yours faithfully,

DORAINE POTTS

Oxford

9 June