I WOULD like to thank Mr Turner for his letter published in the Gazette & Herald (Wednesday, February 23).

The talk given by me to The Charles Dickens (Malton) Society on February 8 entitled “Spare the rod, and spoil the child” focused on the development of educational provision during the 19th, as viewed through the works of Charles Dickens.

These included the Yorkshire schools which Dickens made into Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby, the dame schools in Great Expectations, the ragged schools commented on by Dickens in a letter to the Daily News in 1852 and the factory schools run on the monitorial system, interpreted as the school supervised by Mr Gradgrind in Coketown in the novel Hard Times.

I was not presenting a comprehensive lecture on the history of education.

We all have our individual memories of our school days: some happy, some not so happy. I am pleased that the teaching methods and classroom discipline experienced by Mr Turner were more enlightened than those practised at my inner city primary school in York Road, Leeds, in the 1950s.

Linda McCarthy, Old Malton