Non pas Charlie

Sir: Like many people I too was shocked and horrified at the attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo and other French nationals. I too said and posted: Je suis Charlie.

Then I became very angry that while 17 French nationals received French and international memorial recognition, thousands of victims continue to be forgotten by France and other nations.

These are the thousands who were and continue to be kidnapped, raped, tortured, sodomised, brutalised, crucified and beheaded by Isis and related groups, in Syria, Afghanistan and Nigeria, who are clearly not as important as 17 French nationals.

Je ne suis pas Charlie.

Je suis Syria, je suis Afghanistan and je suis Nigeria.

In Australia we have the Sydney Anglican Archbishop’s relief fund – I hope others who feel as I do will donate to it, or to a similar and dedicated Christian organisation working to relieve those in Syria, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
(Mrs) Vivienne Harrod
Ballina NSW

What’s a degree worth?

Sir: Mark Mason’s article (‘Uni’s out’, 24 January) hits the nail on the head. A brief addendum: it is generally stated that graduates earn more over a lifetime than non-graduates — obviously a selling point to would-be students. This claim may be true in a very crude sense, but is meaningless without certain crucial caveats.

The main caveats are so obvious they barely need stating. It depends what you study (e.g. medicine vs media studies) and what university you go to. It depends on what class of degree you get (a lower second or less may prove a disqualification for entry to many professions and jobs). Finally — an obvious piece of economics — the more graduates there are, the lower their value is likely to become. To ignore these factors gives an inaccurate if not dishonest picture of the supposed financial benefits of a university education. Sadly many students are likely to end up with nothing more than a horrendous debt hanging over their heads and a loss of three or four years of earning capacity and real world experience.

Education, if it is anything, is a lifelong process of self-development which comes from many sources. As someone once put it — the only education worthy of the name is the one you give yourself.
Michael Towsey
London

Churchill’s education

Sir: Mark Mason asserts that Churchill did not go to university. This is only partially correct. He went to Sandhurst, considered by many employers to be a highly exacting degree-level course and intended for future army officers. Its motto is ‘Serve to Lead’. If all politicians were required to pass out of Sandhurst before being permitted to stand for election, we might well have better government. Can anyone imagine Cameron, Miliband or Clegg passing such a rigorous test of character?
Jeremy M.J. Havard
London SW3

Two-dishwasher solution

Sir: Alexander Chancellor bemoans the dishwasher (Long life, 24 January) but the solution is not to get rid of it, but to double up. With two dishwashers, side by side, one serves as a clean crockery and cutlery cupboard — items are drawn out when needed, used and once dirty are put into the adjacent dishwasher. Once full it can be turned on, and then it becomes the new cupboard, with the other dishwasher returning to its intended role. And so on. A dishwasher need never be emptied again.
Gordon Wilson
London SW11

The linking comma

Sir: Like Ysenda Maxtone Graham (‘Lapsing into a comma’, 24 January), I objected to the sequential use of commas when teaching A-level students at a London crammer in the early 1970s. Those students must by now be in their late fifties, and nearly all of them had been to ‘good’ schools. When I suggested punctuating long narrative sentences with semicolons, they looked blank. Full stops are perhaps less intimidating; and the linking comma can even be quite endearing in (for example) the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald.
Brigid Allen
Charlbury, Oxfordshire

Irregular meals

Sir: Matthew Parris’s piece (24 January) about mutual unpleasantness at charitable meetings reminds me of talking to a woman who organised the distribution of meals on wheels by paid staff on weekdays, but by volunteers at weekends. She said that weekends were a nightmare, as she could not trust the volunteers to turn up or stick to their schedules. Charitable help tends to be patchy. Voluntary service can sometimes occasion carelessness in the giver and disappointment in the intended recipient.
Ron Farquhar
London SW10

Not just boys

Sir: I have always enjoyed John Sutherland’s critical work but was bewildered by one comment in his review of David Lodge’s memoir, Quite a good time to be born (Books, 24 January). Sutherland refers to the 1944 Education Act, which affected for the better the lives of so many of us born in the years before, during or just after the second world war. He asserts that the Butler Act ‘gave clever boys (but only clever boys) what was grandly called a “scholarship”.’ My understanding, as a beneficiary of that Act, is that however deliberately discriminatory it was, it did not exclude girls.
Gillian Healey
Sheffield