Education key to curing ills of inequality

He states that if Labour is seriously concerned with social divisions, it should abolish private and religious schools. I applaud this idea, which has much of the simplicity of the boy who points out the true nature of the emperor's new clothes.

I have been proud to teach in three comprehensive schools across Scotland during the past decade. Comprehensive education would do much to start to address the problems, though it would be naive to suggest it would end all inequalities in our country overnight.

Having grown up in England, I was told one of the jokes when you come to Scotland is that in Glasgow people ask which school you attended so they can assess your religion (and with it, politics and football team); and in Edinburgh, they ask to find out whether you were privately or state-educated. But it is not a joke; such attitudes are very much alive in the 21st century.

Parents play the system in all manner of ways, whether it involves sacrificing everything to educate their children privately or buying a house in the catchment area of a "good school". The end result, to misquote George Orwell, is that "all secondary schools are comprehensive, but some are more comprehensive than others".

Some will argue that it is a matter of choice, and that this is a society in which we are free to choose. What people frequently forget is that some are more empowered to exercise choice than others, and that not everyone gets their first choice.

It would be a brave party who stated publicly that they wished to abolish private and religious schools. However, it must surely be the right way if we are not merely to paper over the cracks and divisions in our society but to fill them in once and for all. Let not the idea of "inverted snobbery" be a problem either: ensure your children attend their local school. And when it comes to university application, remove social indicators such as school and postcode.

Then again, I have long suspected the boy who pointed out the nature of the emperor's new clothes got a considerable telling off from his mum.

ED JUPP

Panmure Place

Edinburgh

Sam Ghibaldan is mistaken in believing the way to deal with inequality is to abolish private or religious schools. If Mr Ghibaldan thinks preventing people from going to good private or religious schools will somehow foster a better society, then can I suggest he also bans parents from choosing homes in areas where there are good state schools? In fact, why not go the whole way and, in the interests of social justice, abandon the notion of private property altogether?

On the other hand, he could think more maturely and recognise that schooling is so vital that it cannot be left in the hands of the state and those who want to use schools for social engineering.

Real radical thinking, rather than middle-class playground politics, might result in such things as the Swedish voucher system being adopted. Until then, if Mr Ghibaldan's article is anything to go by, it looks as though we are going to be left to the stale, worn-out solutions of the yah-boo class politics which has already so miserably failed Scotland.

DAVID A ROBERTSON

Shamrock Street

Dundee