Sir, I have been contemplating a reply to John McCormack (April 8th). I was quite transported by his letter I did not realise that such people still walked the earth. My mind went back to an anguished cry at a staff meeting circa 1955 "Headmaster, no decent boy has an adolescent crisis" I taught for 38 years, almost entirely in Northern Ireland. I was lucky. I taught in good schools, where the pupils generally shared their parents' conviction that education was the gateway to fame and fortune. Still, they had to be persuaded to work they and their parents had to be assisted to make a suitable choice of subjects and examinations had to be prepared for against time, and passed. There was also the problem of helping them to make a sensible choice of career and university, fill in an application form and prepare for an interview.
This is all highly responsible work, in no way comparable to working a supermarket checkout. I am proud to have taught a few successful businessmen, churchmen and lawyers, but I bitterly regret my efforts to push a born journalist in the wrong direction (he had more sense). I never had to face worse disciplinary problems than perhaps having to quell, week by week, an idle and rowdy class arriving late on a Friday afternoon, fresh from the human sacrifice of the chemistry teacher.
But there are other schools, where neither pupils nor their parents have reason to regard education as anything more than the gateway to the dole queue. There, the teacher's day is a perpetual battle to maintain order, instruction is systematically resisted, truancy is rife, and those who wish to work are often bullied unmercifully.
Furthermore, an alarming proportion of the pupils have serious reading problems, so that they cannot possibly take advantage of the education offered. Teachers are assaulted by pupils or parents teachers' cars are vandalised and it is not at all unknown for a teacher's life and career to be ruined by false accusations of child molestation.
This is the world of the Blackboard Jungle, far removed from Mr McCormack's Garden of Eden (if it ever existed). No money would pay a teacher for enduring such conditions for years on end, hence the exodus from teaching.
I do hope that Mr McCormack appreciates the efforts of the teachers who polished his powers of self expression. I am sure that his opinions are his own. Yours etc Whitehouse Park, Newtownabbey, Co Antrim.