314 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien 

15 December 1969

As to your last paragraph! I am wholly in favour of the 'dull stodges'. I had once a considerable experience of what are/were probably England's most (at least apparently) dullest and stodgiest students: Yorkshire's young men and women of sub-public school class and home backgrounds bookless and cultureless. That does not, however, necessarily indicate the actual innate mental capacity – largely unawakened – of any given individual. A surprisingly large proportion prove 'educable': for which a primary qualification is the willingness to do some work (to learn) (at any level of intelligence).¹²³ Teaching is a most exhausting task. But I would rather spend myself on removing the 'dull' from 'stodges' – providing some products of β to β+ quality that retain some sanity – a hopeful soil from which another generation with some higher intelligence could arise. Rather – rather than waste effort on those of (apparently at any rate) higher intelligence that have been corrupted and disintegrated by school, and the 'climate' of our present days.¹²⁴ Teaching an organized subject is simply not the instrument for their rehabilitation – if anything is. Give me one little stubby root, which possibly in a better soil will send out some leaves, and even eventually produce some seed, rather than a large pink root rotten with carrot fly! Amen. But I am old, and probably unable to envisage the appalling situation now existing. Worse even than the soft roots rotten with disease, are (I imagine) the inferior ones that in my time would have been probably sound, but are now equally rotten, but meaner and nastier.