Professor Brian Boyd's complaints are ("No place for vanity in education" Letters September 6) are a perfect exemplar of the philosophy of those who have degraded our educational system by subjugating outcomes of high achievement and the national interest to a fruitless and disastrous pursuit of equality politics.
He is a specimen of those who believe the most important thing in our schools is not the flourishing of our young people, but rather the flourishing of his own ideological agenda. Mr Boyd is not worried that Professor Lindsay Paterson's proposal will fail, he is worried it will succeed.
Mr Boyd considers it bizarre for additional educational funding to be spent upon a gifted minority when 30% of homes in Glasgow are workless. Presumably he would prefer such monies to be spent on the idle minority instead - as if such interventions had never been tried (which they have) or had ever proved widely successful (which they have not).
I suspect I am not the only one of your readers who found it laughably ironic to be lectured on the evils of "elitist" education by a man who made his career as a university academic.
Consider for a moment how ludicrous it would be for the coaches at Celtic Football Club to train their Champions League squad with players from a Sunday pub league or for Scottish Opera to have joint rehearsals with buskers rounded up randomly on Sauchiehall Street. This is the educational reality Mr Boyd and his supporters have imposed on Scottish pupils for two generations.
There is an unholy coalition in this country comprised of the teaching profession and the political centre-left to stubbornly deny the obvious and abject failure of the comprehensive experiment.
Teaching all pupil abilities together inevitably results in a teaching to the "middle of the class" and hence the promotion of mediocrity. Such a system fails those at both the lower and higher ends of the achievement spectrum. In so doing it acts as a barrier to precisely the same social mobility Mr Boyd claims to seek to promote.
Chris McLaughlin
Giffnock.
THE headline, re private funds for gifted pupils ("Attack on pupil philanthropy plan", September 6, The Herald), filled me with dread for the future of Scottish Education. When I vote Yes on September 18, 2014, I will do so because I believe the people of Scotland have the abilities and drive needed for self-government and that Scotland has sufficient resources to allow it to build a fair and prosperous nation.
An independent Scotland should have an education system capable of nurturing and promoting the talents of all of its citizens and not just those with exceptional talents.
If a post-independence education system cannot achieve this, it would not be fit for purpose. If I believed independence would give us an education system that needed private money to sustain it, I would be voting No. Allowing philanthropists to target resources at a select few would be very divisive and I hope there is no place for this in the current or future Scottish Education system. I am not, and have never been, a member of the SNP. The fact this report was welcomed by Michael Russell, the Education Secretary, gives me misgivings about the vision for the future of education in Scotland held by the Scottish Government. I still intend to vote Yes but am unlikely to apply to join the SNP.
Sean Mc Garvey
Alva.
PROFESSOr Brian Boyd is right to question why philanthropists should give priority to pupils who are achieving academically. Better to give to locally run projects in areas of social deprivation to help youngsters who are not doing well at school. Better still to give most of their riches away, to live modestly and to promote greater equality.
Bob Holman
Glasgow.
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