THE first riposte to Ray Honeyford's exam doubts (Yours Truly, August 22) is that if you lay-in materials to make 500,000 cars you expect all of them to work and sell, or your accountant and shareholders will transfer elsewhere.

A sailing ship needs only two or three mathematicians to navigate and a hand of warrant officers for other roles. A modern ship needs officers for the engines, the electrics and management, and every crew member is a technician.

Education has always been part of society's "rigging" and it changes because the economic roots of society change.

Till the late 1940s, school certificates were only for the top half of the top fifth of pupils who went to grammar school, courtesy of daddy's purse and some scholarships, and you had to pass the full clutch of subjects. The war showed that the demand for trained brains was bottomless. There are slots for those who can do maths but find Latin pointless, or vice-versa. This is why the Butler Act cut secondary fees, and the GCE gave a certificate for each subject success, but raised the pass to "merit" and dropped "credit".

In the 1950s and 1960s secondary modern schools put ever more pupils through ULCIs, RSAs etc. so sharpening the "what you know" instead of "who you know" entry to apprenticeships, college and professional courses. This was regularised by CSE, comprehensives and GCSE. It boosted the middle bulk of the ability range.

Ironically for social and professional conservatives, it was the "mad monk" Keith Joseph who switched grading from "norm" to "criterion" referencing. As for bureaucracy, it is always with us but if you centralise it in a silly war on local authority and college independence, it becomes obvious rather than discreet.

In "norm" grading, you fail the bottom third to "encourage the others" then give out As to the top five per cent, Bs to the next 15 per cent, Cs to the middle 60 per cent, Ds to the next 15 per cent, and Es to the last five per cent. Under this league table system, the numbers in any grade stay in line with the number of candidates entered, which is what the complainers are out of their depth about. It grades the candidates' abstract (social?) ability more than their absolute subject knowledge. It does not necessarily encourage application to the subject.

"Criterion" grading gives marks for what syllabus items you know. If you conscientiously cover the whole syllabus of knowledge, skills and understanding, you score high. This can be damned as cramming -- or, charitably, skill at casing the syllabus and past papers. But that is what the private sector and grammar schools have always done.

For "control group" corroboration, look at the Royal family and the scripture-orientated non-conformists, Scots, Welsh and Jews.

The Scots, Welsh, non-conformists and Jews all have traditions of status by learning besides coming from what were social fringes for most of recent history. They would only make it by what they knew and could do, rather than by who they knew. Accordingly, they gave their children great encouragement in education. Understandably, those whose noses were put out by meritocratic arrivals dished out resentments to the Welsh in Tudor times, the Scots in the 1700s and the non-conformists and Jews until living memory. They also sneered at Americans, where every family started on the immigrant ground floor and rose by commercial or educational merit.

Traditional socio-economic certainty from land, industry, commerce or wire pulling, has vanished under the discipline of technical competence and accountancy. The whole of English society has learned what the fringe knew centuries ago, and they have set about it with the same buccaneering vigour that did great things in the past, and will do so again in the future.

FRANK ADAM