LIKE so many other things, one does not really appreciate school until the school days are long gone. When I was at school I was vaguely aware that lots of people were trying educate me. I did actually get to know that educate came from the Latin to lead and therefore that those educating me were trying to lead me into different levels of knowledge. Or if not different levels, at least greater quantities.

In the Middle Ages nearly everyone able to work, worked on the land. The great majority of the population lived in varying degrees of squalor. Life was nasty, brutish and short. Ever since those days the proportion of the population on the land has steadily, but continuously, fallen. The pace has varied, but the trend has not.

Straightforward economic forces have frequently provided the impetus for such change. Everything else being equal it is more attractive to earn greater rather than smaller quantities of money. As huge industries like engineering and textiles established themselves, they needed staff and had to bid for them.

The urge to better oneself, the thirst for knowledge and the staffing needs of industry are still the drivers they always were. My secondary education was conducted as the structures set up by the 1944 Education Act were coming towards the end of their lives. It was the heyday of selection at age 11. I always thought it less socially divisive to select on grounds of an exam, even a flawed one, than on the basis of ones' parents' ability to pay school fees.

The school in York - Archbishop Holgate's Grammar School - to which I was allocated had been continuously teaching the sons of York and Yorkshire since 1546. It was staffed by a group of serious and dedicated people, many of whom had spent much of their working lives there. The curriculum was broad, and games meant rugby union, cricket and a bit of athletics. I could never see anything wrong with that. The school was, in short, a creature of its time.

The removal of selection at age 11 and simultaneously the abandonment the single sex education, in 1985, was a sea change in the history of Archbishop's as it would have been in any school. But the history of the school is continuous. More changes are now afoot at the school as it attempts to achieve the status of a Specialist Science College. It needs to raise funds for this venture and huge efforts have been going into getting the cash together. Successful or not, the efforts to produce well-rounded, fulfilled scholars will go on, as they do in schools up and down the country.

I was not the only pupil not to fully realise the effort going into my education. Neither was I the only one not to realise how important it was to make the most of the opportunities being presented to me at that stage.

The most important aspect of education is that it offers opportunity. New worlds are opened up. Without education we are forced into the positions which arise. With education we can make choices. The side effect, of course, is that we have the understanding to make those choices. I, and others like me, decided to return to the countryside to try to make a living. At least we did it as one of a series of options, not because it was the only thing available. For that I shall always be grateful.

Updated: 10:45 Tuesday, March 12, 2002