YOUR correspondent Mr O’Connor (The Bolton News, April 5) clearly subscribes to the doghandler school of childrearing. You know, the sort of people who still believe that children, wives and carpets should be beaten regularly. The question he and his ilk need to answer is “how do all of the other developed economies of Western Europe contrive to educate their young without instuting a Reign of Terror in the classroom?” For indeed they do! Are Brit children more stroppy, more anarchic than other people’s? The other guiding principle of this school of thought appears to be “if there is something we particularly dislike, blame it on Europe”.

Two anecdotes spring to mind. A few decades back I was sharing a flat with a friend who taught physics at the best boys’ school in Leicester. It happened that a female colleague where I worked was going out with one of his sixth formers. I enquired, and the word came back that he was a lousy disciplinarian but because he was a brilliant communicator with an enthusiasm for his subject so obvious that they behaved in his lessons because they didn’t want to miss anything. More recently a friend’s youngest grandson was constantly in trouble and repeatedly getting excluded. He was bright, he was bored, and the school refused point blank to give him work that would test his abilities. Indeed, on one occasion a teacher rebuked him for showing up his less clever colleagues. He got good O levels, went on to do A levels at a local college, which thought he was worth teaching properly and has just attained a good 2.1 degree in computer studies at what used to be UMIST.

For people like your correspondent, there was once a golden age when to quote from the novelist Leslie Charteris: “English sportsmen worshipped God, and bent their bottoms to the rod, for the honour of the school.” For people a bit more sophisicated fear is not the best basis for a teaching relationship.

Peter Johnston Kendal Road Bolto