Are we circling back to basics in schools?

More than half of my adult life was spent in education. I started off when it was fashionable, and quite productive, to have an enthusiast with a stick of chalk in hand, standing by the side of a Victorian-style blackboard propped, rather precariously, on two pegs jammed into two holes in a wooden easel with its legs roped together to prevent it "doing the splits". Following morning assembly, I spent almost an hour every day on mental arithmetic, spelling and testing the efforts of the previous morning. I found that to start each day in this manner, kick-started young brains into a readiness to accept the lessons to follow.

The aim in those days was to proceed from the known to the unknown. In other words, to make sure of a firm foundation of basic knowledge on which to build more advanced concepts. It is of little use teaching the electron theory without first knowing what a permanent magnet will do when it moves within a coil of wire.

I get the impression that education is getting back to basics, although rather slowly, I suspect. The grounding of the past is not flamboyant enough for this modern world and contradicts many of the over zealous and fancy theories of the whiz kids of modern education thinking.

Everything in life seems to eventually go round in a circle and return to the beginning. I'm sure this is happening in education.

Wouldn't it be good if those who are responsible for the national curriculum would remember that when half way round a sphere, the quickest way back to the start is a diagonal? Which saves a lot of time and wasted effort.

WILSON TAYLOR, High Heaton, Newcastle 

Mysteries science is unable to answer

PETER Scargill's maxim of religion staying out of the science class (Voice of the North, October 11 & 16) works both ways: science shouldn't be used to bolster claims that it is not equipped to deal with.

For instance, acceptance of the Big Bang theory leaves you with the question of what there was prior to that cosmic event. The answer is nothing. Nothing in the sense that time and space were absent, nothing intelligible at all existed, a fact that constrained one physicist to tell an interviewer that if he wanted an answer to what that means he should refer to a theologian.

It is the same with many of the claims of evolutionists. They will tell you categorically that life emerged from a primordial soup; ask what the recipe is so to speak and they cannot tell you. Move on up the chain of being and we see consciousness in animals; what is it? There is no scientifically provable answer. Move further up to the human and you observe that amazing quality, consciousness: conscious of itself and you are confronted by another mystery of the universe that cannot be reduced to "facts".

These qualitative differences in existence are easily recognisable, but are mysteries not amenable to scientific reductionism. Another way of putting it is that we can easily destroy them but we cannot create them. We don't know how.

In E F Schumacher's fascinating book, A Guide For The Perplexed, he summarises the position thus: "Descriptive science becomes unscientific and illegitimate when it indulges in comprehensive explanatory theories which can be neither verified nor falsified by experiment. Such theories are not 'science' but 'faith'."

DEREK ROBERTSON, Gateshead

Unsafe to assume Genesis is accurate

THE creation of the world in six days would appear to involve a paradox, the chicken and egg problem.

A day is the time it takes the Earth to make one complete revolution on its axis, so how can this time be implied before the Earth is created?

It also appears that creationists rely on the authorised version of the Bible as the infallible word of God. Unfortunately, to assume the authorised version, and here we are talking about the Book of Genesis, to be accurate, is unsafe since it is already mistranslated in the Hebrew, probably because it is untranslatable.

The only way to understand Genesis is by means of the Hebrew letter-number system of the Qabala. Hebrew writing has no numerals; each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet corresponds to a number, so for example Aleph is one, Bayt 2, Ghimel 3, Dallet 4 and so on. These letters (numbers) form the code, the so-called Cipher of Genesis, in which Genesis is written. These 22 symbols are used to designate different states or structures of the one cosmic energy which is both essence and appearance of all that exists.

My understanding of the Qabala is very tenuous, but enough to convince me that taking the conventional interpretation of Genesis at face value is at least misleading and probably dangerous. It gives rise to all kinds of silly beliefs, which lead to the bitter conflicts between rival sects with which we are beset.

Those who wish to investigate further might wish to read The Cipher of Genesis by Carlo Suares. The deep study of religion should, however, come with a health warning. Unless you are serious, leave religion alone, for it will demolish all your cherished beliefs. And if you try to persist in them, it will ultimately destroy you or the mind-forged construct you fondly believe to be you.

PHILIP WARREN, Gosforth, Newcastle

Don't let the South drown out our voice

SOME people are advocating an English parliament. I think this would be bad for the North-East.

The population of London and the South-East is far greater than that of the North-East, therefore it follows that the interests of the South would dominate such a body. And London already has an assembly to represent its interests.

In elections and opinion polls, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have done better in the North while the Tories have done well down South, therefore it follows that an English parliament would be full of Southern representatives while we would be marginalised.

And such a body would be divisive for other reasons. For a start, it could be a dangerous step on the road to the death of Great Britain. And because different regions within England have different voting patterns, an English parliament could lead to the existing North/South divide becoming a permanent break.

Not one of the three main political parties are interested in creating such a parliament for very good reasons. An English parliament could at best be an irrelevance to the North-East region and at worst would prove to be very detrimental to our interests.

PAUL RIVERS, Wallsend, North Tyneside (http://northumbria.b-logging.com/)

Silly stories that are doing a lot of damage

WHY does the Labour Party in Newcastle hate the city so much? First they seem to have invented the story about Hinny and Pet, and now they seem to have invented a story about conkers.

Both stories are untrue, but they've been in all the papers and on the telly. As a result, Newcastle is a laughing stock all over the country.

Don't they realise how much damage this is doing to the city? Businesses won't come to a place that's a laughing stock.

We need more businesses and jobs in Newcastle, and these silly stories are doing a lot of damage. I call on the leaders of the Sour Grapes Party (Labour) to get a grip on their members, bring them into line and stop this silly inventing of untrue stories about what's happening in Newcastle.

ALLAN B CUTHBERT, Gosforth, Newcastle

Closures weren't so wonderful, were they?

WHILE extolling the wonderful projects of the Conservative government, Mr Ian A Armstrong (Voice of the North, October 10) omitted two very important projects: the closing of Consett Iron and Steel Works ( 20,000 immediate jobs lost with lots of ancillary firms closed ( and the closing of all our mines, with another 20,000 jobs gone and again many ancillary jobs too. What can they close now?

Mrs B M WILLIAMS, Consett, County Durham

P.S. Are we still importing coal from Australia?

Big thank you to Vicky and her helpful staff

ON behalf of the members of the physiotherapy class which takes place on Tuesdays at the Jubilee Day Centre at North Tyneside Hospital, I should like to say a big thank you to Vicky Rudd and her lovely, helpful staff. After just three weeks I was able to discard my walking stick, thanks to the gentle but effective exercises.

But not only that: the girls are also attentive and such bundles of laughs that the whole experience becomes an uplifting one and the highlight of the week for many lonely people.

So thanks to Vicky, her staff and the laugh-a-minute ambulance crews. Keep up the good work.

M MANN, Tynemouth, North Tyneside

Foxes can't resist the survival impulse

I SEE Richard Dodd of the Countryside Alliance trots out the tired old myth about foxes killing for pleasure (Voice of the North, October 9), so let's spell out some basic biology.

Foxes, like all predators, are programmed to react swiftly and instinctively to nearby prey. This is because, in the wild, the prey has every chance of escaping and if the fox pauses to think about striking, the dinner is gone and it starves.

In an artificial situation, where the prey is confined, the fox is still wired to strike when it sees movement in close proximity. It can't resist what is a natural and a survival impulse. The only species gifted with reason and which kills for pleasure is man and especially, it seems, members of the Countryside Alliance with their thirst for hunting.

BRIAN HARVEY, Ponteland, Northumberland

How about a few drastic measures?

HOW about tied dwellings as a partial solution to global warming? Come dire necessity, we should aim to stop private cars wasting petrol and emitting carbon dioxide on journeys to work, shop and school, by using contracts of employment to require employees to live within walking distance of their workplace.

To enable that to happen, the state should take control of half the housing stock so that employees get a nearby semi, terrace house, flat or lodging according to income and preference. Many could possess second homes for weekends and such like.

Smaller supermarkets should be placed within walking distance of all urban homes, then shopping by car can be made illegal.

We could phase in townships with schools and and townships without schools. Schoolchildren (with parents) could inhabit the former and enjoy healthy walks to school. Business journeys by car should be limited by environmental petrol rationing.

All the above leaves us with motoring for pleasure within environmental limits on uncongested roads. Better legitimate compulsion than the primrose path to climate ruin.

ROY HILTON, Spital Tongues, Newcastle.