THE EDITOR, Sir:
IT IS a pity that Dr. Thompson, after recognising the basic flaws in Dr. Minott's report, then proceeds to do the same sort of nonsense. It is naive empiricism to attempt to extrapolate the quality of pedagogy in a school directly from exam results. It is not just nonsense, but harmful nonsense. For it merely penalises some schools, and by extension, the teachers in them for being willing to teach weak students. One has only to look at the difficulty that the Ministry of Education experiences when trying to place students from the GSAT to see the effect of this narrow-minded view of education.
The schools which consistently achieved good results have done so primarily by denying access to weaker students and will quite openly tell you that they only take the best. They built the reputations, primarily by doing this. Schools that grant access to students of a wide range of ability are being penalised for doing so, even when excellence is achieved by some of them on a regular, if not limited basis. If I am allowed to make an informed bit of speculation, I suspect that when most of the schools in the mainstream of the system get students who perform in the 90 per cent range at the GSAT level, they get good results from them.
Judging from what he said on a television programme recently, Dr. Thompson is suggesting that we reinforce this tradition whereby schools screen out students who do not 'make the grade'. But I would suggest that education is for everybody on the bell curve and not just for those at one end of it. After all, a good teacher should be able to teach students of a wide range of intelligence and hence, a good school should be one that allows students with a wide variety of abilities, including those capable of achieving excellence, to reach their full potential.
Dr. Thompson's and Dr. Minott's method of assessing schools is not just flawed, but is fundamentally wrong and ultimately harmful to the system. It gives the parent living in Frankfield the impression that if their child is bright they must send him or her on a torturous trip, by taxi, to Glenmuir, or board the child at great expense at Munro or Hampton. Yet the child might be able to walk to Edwin Allen which produces excellent results from a few students on a regular basis.
I submit, that what we should be
discussing is how we go about placing students in our high schools. In my view, children should be placed in publicly funded schools, primarily on the basis of where they live. The present system of placing students serves only to satisfy the egos of certain people.
I am, etc.,
R. HOWARD THOMPSON
Rockton, Waltham,
Mandeville
