SIR, —There are considerations which Mr. Angus Maude does not adduce
when he writes upon the subject of Privilege in Education. The first is the principle of freedom.
If it is argued that the powers of the modern state are unlimited, which the Conservative member for Ealing South is at no pains to dispute, an equally clear case, I would submit, may be made out for • the natural powers of the family. Only when the family fails in its duty may the State claim the moral right to step in and decide to condition the child this way or that.
Secondly, there are the religious schools to be considered, a category which includes such varied foundations as Eton, Ampleforth and the Woodard schools. The Church is concerned not merely to defend the Christian Humanist Conception of Education: she has a divine commission to teach her children.
The independent schools, like the universities, are the outer bulwarks (as it were) of human freedom in our land in the war of resistance against secular totalitarianism.
Many independent schools are expressly Christian and were founded to challenge " state education." Ideas of privilege—social, economic, educational—never enter our heads. Our vocation is, under God, to see that " there may never be wanting a succession of persons duly qualified to serve in Church and Commonwealth."
My own experience covers fifteen years in State schools and as a training college lecturer, and I am at the present time engaged in founding a new public school to be expressly related to the world of Industry, and to provide precisely those values which the Labour Party policy would abolish. And now Mr. Michael Stewart is to confiscate our endowments and impound our freeholds. I am afraid his is a very puny hand to strike an anvil which has worn out
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