IN regards to the letter from David Diment (View Points, August 28) and his reference to the reintroduction of national service to ‘teach the nation’s youth’.
These calls for national service reintroduction are fairly common and are connected to today’s youth problems. However, no one takes into consideration how and why national service worked.
It worked because prior to being called up, every young person had been exposed to a very rigorous teaching system in our state schools, giving our youth in the 1950s a very high rate of literacy and an understanding that discipline works.
Today, we have approximately one in five leaving school illiterate and these victims would be entirely unsuitable for national service.
Today’s forces would simply reject them outright.
Before we reintroduce national service we should reintroduce rigorous infant school literacy teaching.
S NICHOLSON (Mr)
Campbell Road
Oxford
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