Bernie Evans asks a vital question about scholars from underprivileged backgrounds and suggests a more excellent and generous course in college (Letters, 29 June). We were in this example before, many years ago, within the context of grownup education. By specializing in girls returning to learning, after which access to higher education, we determined their children accompanied them.
The answer appeared to lie inside the home as a good deal as college. None of my parents or grandparents went to university. After leaving the faculty, I followed my father into shipbuilding and coal mining. After 15 years of night, weekend, and extramural college classes, I gained scholarships to Ruskin College and Magdalen College, Oxford. My children both went on to college and professional careers.
Those systematic pathways for adults have been lost. A personal training specialist, Alan Tuckett, has asked: “Why has England set out to wreck person mastering opportunities?” He might have brought up that the Guardian urnished systematic assistance and insurance of grownup schooling for many years. What took place?
• There may be a privately knowledgeable bias in admissions to the former guys’ Oxbridge schools; however, there are honorable exceptions. As a gauche, just 17-12 months-vintage in 1964, I went to Somerville (Oxford) and Girton (Cambridge) for interviews from a tiny Pembrokeshire grammar school. I didn’t get a proposal from Oxford. But two of my interviewers at Girton have been scarily glamorous and highbrow Americans without time for the British magnificence system; any other, Dame Gillian Beer, explicitly stated that they always discounted for “the Roedean effect”. And yes, they did provide me with an area.