Adam Trimingham's idea (The Argus, August 24) that the old, discredited selective system of education should be re-introduced in Brighton (or anywhere else) is based on a serious double fallacy.

The system was posited on the ludicrous idea that we all have a fixed potential and, even more crass, that it could be measured and numbered. In other words, we could forecast a person's future development.

If this were the brainchild of some obscure academic with no practical outcome, we could laugh it off.

But it was used (and in some places still is used) to destroy the hopes and blight the ambitions of millions of children, making the job of teaching them and stretching them to their utmost potential that much harder.

What is more, it failed in its stated purpose. The C streams of grammar schools were filled with those who didn't achieve the standard five O-Levels, while more and more secondary modern children, with the help of dedicated teachers, overcame the artificial barriers placed in their way and did achieve that standard.

It wasn't the fault of the tests, which were constantly being refined, but of those who thought they could do the impossible.

A person's development depends not only on their inherited tendencies but also on their total experience and who knows what that is going to be?

Of course, those addicted to theories of a born elite (master race?) will always find excuses for the remarkable success of the comprehensives.

The most recent one is the supposed lowering of exam standards, a complaint based exclusively on anecdotal "evidence".

I can give chapter and verse (and names, too, if those concerned would permit it) of 11-plus "failures" who have gone on to confound the testers and sorters of human beings, even in the academic fields that were supposed to be the exclusive prerogative of the "chosen". And I'm talking about the time when exams were supposed to be harder than now.

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble is reason! How infinite in faculty! ....In apprehension how like a god!" Shakespeare said it and he knew more about human nature than our modern elitists note the word "infinite".

And let's have no more talk about sorting out human beings as if they were coffee beans or horses. They are neither.

-Leonard Goldman, Brighton