SO, Mr J Turner gets very angry (April 7) over school holidays, and calls teachers, "this pampered section of the working population"?

Something appears to have made him very bitter against the teaching profession and, for some reason or other, he puts the blame on to them for the school holidays. He also states, quite rightly, that school buildings should be, "fully utilised to get good use out of expensive, ratepayer-funded buildings". I have no argument against that, but, to go back to the beginning.

The teachers themselves do not fix the holidays, or the length of them, and I have no doubt whatsoever that he took full advantage of them when he was at school.

How can Mr Turner attach blame to the teachers if the Education Authority do not allow the school buildings and amenities to be used by the general public?

Like Mr Turner, I was also in the Engineering Trade but I did not work at a bench, day in and day out, and I most certainly got more legitimate holidays than the four weeks that he states that he gets. As an engineer I travelled extensively in the UK and abroad and I did enjoy my work which, in later years, did involve teaching. The fact that teachers received more, and longer, holidays than I did was never an issue with me.

Mr Turner states that teachers are turning out "illiterates, innumerates, yobbos and yobettes who are wrecking our society". Again, I quite agree, there are a good lot of them in schools, but let us put the blame for this where it surely belongs. The "do-gooders" in this country have seen to it that bad behaviour must be tolerated, and that so-called punishments must never fit the crime. Also a lot of people appear to think that teaching right from wrong and good manners is not the domain of the parents, but that of the teachers. The fact that I grew up to respect other people and their property rests solely with the way I was disciplined and brought up as a child by my parents. In a lot of families today, this is not done, and the teachers have to put up with this and the disruption that it brings in their classes.

Mr Turner should vent his anger at the people who are really responsible for turning some children into the so-called "untouchables" and not at the teachers who have to deal with them on a daily basis. He seems to forget that a teacher's hands are tied, and as far as his facetious comment on "Open University degrees" is concerned, I wouldn't dignify it with an answer.

Jack Sinclair

Rawson Road

Bolton