Bernie Evans asks a vital query of approximate students from underprivileged backgrounds and indicates a greater beneficial path into college (Letters, 29 June). We have been in this example before, decades ago, in the context of adult training. By specializing in women’s return to getting to know and then getting right of entry to better schooling, we found that their children followed them.
The answer seemed to lie inside the home as a great deal as college. None of my mother and father, or grandparents went to university. After leaving the faculty, I accompanied my father into shipbuilding and coal mining. After 15 years of nighttime colleges, weekend colleges, and university extramural classes, I gained scholarships to Ruskin College and Magdalen College, Oxford. My children each went on to college and expert careers. Those systematic pathways for adults had been lost. Alan Tuckett, a person schooling expert, has asked: “Why has England apparently got down to break grownup gaining knowledge of opportunities?” He would possibly have delivered that for decades the Guardian provided systematic guide and insurance of grownup schooling. What occurred?
David Browning Huddersfield, West Yorkshire
• There may additionally be a privately educated bias in admissions to the former guys’ Oxbridge faculties; however, there are honorable exceptions. As a gauche, just 17-12 months-antique in 1964, I went to Somerville (Oxford) and Girton (Cambridge) for interviews from a tiny Pembrokeshire grammar college. I didn’t get an offer from Oxford. But two of my interviewers at Girton have been scarily glamorous and highbrow Americans with no time for the British class gadget; another, Dame Gillian Beer, explicitly said that they continually discounted for “the Roedean impact.” And yes, they did provide me a place.
Daniel Francis Tunbridge Wells, Kent
I can simplest believe the extent of pointless waste throughout the UK. • During those changeover days for student-rented homes in many college cities and cities, we witness the spectacle of perfectly usable gadgets dumped, expecting collection and onward passage to incinerators and landfill websites. Last week in a single scholar area, I saw plastic kitchen bins and washing-up bowls, pots and pans, framed photos, a pc monitor, and a hairdryer. Have other communities with pupil populations located a solution to this?
Leila Seals Sheffield, South Yorkshire
• Jeremy Hunt has said he will cancel pupil mortgage debt for folks who set up a hit company. What approximately student teachers and nurses? Are they not essential enough? My entire existence has been dominated by one simple question, “How did all of this begin”? By all of this, I, of course, am referring to our entire universe. I have pondered this question for over 25 years, and I am 31 years old now. Science was always my favorite subject. When I was growing up. I spent hours in high school discussing my own thoughts and theories with my science teachers after school. I continued to do so even when I attended University. I learned the three most popular and accepted theories of the day. The most popular of which is the Big Bang Theory. The only credit I am willing to give the Big Bang Theory is that it is possible, however; improbable it may be. What keeps the Big Bang Theory alive is that there seems to be scientifically proven evidence that points to it as the only explanation. I would argue that all of the very same evidence that seemingly supports the Big Bang could also support another hypothesis. The one sticking point for me is the “Before Period.” What existed before the singularity exploded?
Where did all of that energy come from? We are talking, after all, about all of the energy contained within all of the matter in the universe, as well as all the free energy traversing this expanse. The Oscillating Universe Theory is nice, but it suffers the same problem, assuming there ever actually was a beginning. If the universe has always existed, then it is a plausible theory. The same holds for the Steady State Universe Theory. The notion that the universe has always existed and will always exist as it has forever and ever. The only change in this model is the distances between galaxies and other objects increase with the new matter being created; so that the universe continues to look the same in all directions. The big problem with this theory is that we know the universe is not unchanging. It is expanding and does change. We know that stars explode, exhaust their fuel, fade away or crush themselves down into a singularity. This universe we live in is a very dynamic place. Galaxies collide, solar systems collide, planets and moons, and a whole host of objects can smash into one another at any moment. All of it dancing to the gravitational music of the heavens. All of which points to anything but a steady-state.