SIR,—I regard it as a pity that Mr. Angus Maude,
M.P., in his quite excellent article did not set out to answer the first of Mr. Stewart's arguments, namely that the existence of opportunities in education above the average is an offence against " social justice." I realise that this omission on Mr. Maude's part was deliberate. He says that those who hold this view are not amenable to rational argument. Maybe he is right, but the case should not on that account go by default, even though space restricts the argument in support to one only.
In a fairly recent and most telling book, Mr. Charles Morgan reminds us that the liberties which are really endangered in a modern state are not those of the body but rather those of the mind. In my view the most effective weapon we have with which to fight this dangerous trend is the questioning and thinking individual citizen, reared in an atmosphere where originality of thought and a probing mind are encouraged. In the training of this mind the school period is vital, and the more the processes of education are brought under the State the less likely are originality of thought and the questioning mind to flourish, for State rules and regulations do not go welt with freedom from orthodoxy in any field. I shall be told I make a bogey of the State, and in the present state of thought in the political parties I may seeth to. But in education you plan far ahead, and I ,am not, at all convinced by the argument that there is something inherent in the British which always makes their' State machinery benign.
The more you concentrate children into large schools, as the London County Council are doing, the more easy is it to regulate what those children shall think. So too the more independent schools that are taken over, the narrower grows the field for training the really inde- pendent mind, and the larger the number who will believe what the State tells them without question. Far be it from me to be content with the restricted field from which our independent schools draw their pupils, but to destroy them on that account is to carry the process of state regimentation one most vital stage further.—
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