Hey,

I hate the Daily Mail. Case in point: the small tirade on last Sunday's Magdalen jumping incident. It basically said that there are too many students going to university, as evidenced by the moronic actions of the bridge jumpers. This event proves students are cretins, and they only get in through rich parents paying for the best education and moving near the best schools, so while their son or daughter is a closet retard, he or she still manages to get into uni.

Tragically, while the bridge jumpers are indeed demented, they are probably not unintelligent. Do you know any actual dumb people at this university? It was just supposed to be fun, if misguided, and while it is also fun to laugh at their stupidity, the consequences were never planned that way. It was, in short, an accident. To insinuate that low intelligence was the reason for the injuries only brings the same conclusion about the journalist who wrote the piece. I'm willing to believe that there are too many people at university in this country, or equivalently, the government is paying too much towards the entire university system. But I don't think the student body of Oxford is the problem. If you want a starting point, how about the hairdressing and salon management students at the University of Derby? Or how about meat technology and management at Leeds?

The article then went on to say that bringing back the grammer school system where only the most able of students had access to the best education and not the children of the most well off further pushes home the lunacy of the writer. For one, it ignores the fact that well off parents will still manipulate the system for the primary school years. Indeed, most research shows that the skills learned in this time are more valuable than anything subsequently learned. Secondly, it ignores the fact that the grammer school system may irreversibly condemn a bright student to a second rate school because of a couple of bad tests.

To my mind, a fair schooling system is one where all schools are given equal, uniform and plentiful resources and teachers are paid highly to stop the best being headhunted by private schools. The current UK system allows the money to follow the pupil, which inevitably creates a two tier education system. Better schools attract more resources, as parents from further away who can afford the extra travel expenses send their children to the better performing schools. Consequently, the schools they leave behind, and their predominantly pooer background pupils suffer because of a smaller budget. The advocates of this system argue that this system gives incentives for schools to compete more like firms for resources and pupils. But they forget that this is not an instantaneous transition, and even if a poor performing school does improve, it may be too late for a generation of children who have already reached its end.

Craig