Family allowance

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33516, 23 April 1974, Page 14

Family allowance

Sir, —Having been under the impression for many years that the family benefit allowance is to help parents feed and clothe children, or capitalised towards a first home, I am now disillusioned completely. Why is this benefit excluded specifically whenever a new Wage Order or even a “Christmas handout” is announced? I am a divorcee with two children to support, and also repay a house mortgage. My job is remuneratively small, with maintenance payments usually in arrears (my former husband is overseas). Consequently, I must rely on the benefit to supplement my income. How am I. and many others, supposed to budget for school uniforms and other clothing, which are outgrown at an alarming rate, when every General Wage Order increase is swallowed up by galloping prices of strictly essential goods? Surely this social security benefit is more deserving of reappraisal too?—Yours, etc., CENTSLESS. April 21, 1974. Education debate Sir,—What Professor Nuthall and others fail to appreciate is the true pur-

pose of so-called irrelevant academic standards in education. Examinations in themselevc-s are of little value, but the skills and wisdom the system as a i whole develops are not without considerable merit. The j.study of such “subjects” [(horror) as English literature land history can teach more [about human nature than [can the mediocre platitudes of less gifted beings. There is more human truth in such things as poetry than there will ever be in the semiscientific warblings of minor experts in the social sciences. We should not be looking at schools in terms of value for money or usefulness in specific areas so much as in terms of understanding and appreciating life as a whole. To narrow our viewpoint is to encourage mediocrity in a society which seems bent on doing this already.—Yours, etc., G. S. KITCHIN. April 21, 1974.

Sir, —As one of the "programmed parrots” referred to by “Square Root” perhaps I should explain why I support the two first steps in reading and arithmetic. The alphabet familiarised a small child with the shape of the letters which must some day be used to make words, and the multiplication table brought the future use of figures into some sort of recognisable focus. I have made no claim to scholarship, but I have found that the natural facility for selfexpression which reading brings, and a certain ease in totting up figures in my head, to be useful assets in life. I am quite ready to believe that the teaching of mathematics in this scientific age is geared to the highest abilities of those who have occasion to use them, but a decade of compulsory education does not seem to have grounded the majority of school leavers in the elements of ready reckoning, or in the arts of spelling and composition of written communication in their native language.—Yours, etc., CARACTACUS. April 22, 1974.