Anonymous

Cumbria

IT

I agree with your comment about the brightest being held back - and this was brought home to me a little while ago.

I was at a gathering of people who had all been what would now be described as "gifted children" at some point in our past. Two things really struck ...

1) If you plot intelligence you end up with a familiar bell curve - those down in the bottom 2% get special education because they are classed as having special needs. At the other end, the same distance away from the mean, the top 2% don't generally get any help.

2) Others had had the same issues that I had.

As one of those stuck in comprehensive education, I learned two things : how not to stand out as bright, and how I didn't need to work hard. Like others, I was just plain bored by school that didn't offer any challenges. Also like others, I arrived at university without the skills I then needed - I just didn't know how to study/learn and ended up going from near the top of the class at school to scraping a third when it came to dishing out the degrees.

Every time I hear some politically correct idiot saying how everyone is equal, competitive games are bad because there are losers, everyone should be able to go to university, and all the other current 'fads' - I get REALLY annoyed at how we are badly failing our current generation of youngsters.