Your article “Non-faith schools can be spiritual” (TES, January 18) made me want to cheer. In it, we have the crux of the problem with education: politicians cannot seem to agree on its moral purpose and have allowed its utilitarian outcomes to dominate schools at the expense of what real schools try to do: develop educated and moral human beings by ethical means.
If every child really matters, teachers ought to be encouraged to bring into the classroom every ounce of their humanity and personal vision. If pupils were measured by outcomes such as kindness, neighbourliness, honesty and enthusiasm, we could build the kind of society we crave.
Barbara Curry, Retired head (now an education consultant), Winchcombe, Gloucestershire.
