The day I was asked to write this article, I was visited by an old friend. ‘Look at this Geoff’, he cried, showing me a periodical from a sister association in which a university mathematics lecturer told how he had solved a trigonometrical problem which had baffled all his engineering colleagues. ‘It’s the kind of thing we used to do when we were fourteen!’ Actually, this was not strictly true: I did it at fifteen and I was running a year in advance of my age group. It is indeed very easy to throw up one’s hands in despair about the deficiencies of today’s students and teachers. Yet, while there is much to cause concern, it is important that, if we are to take a historical view, as your editor requested, then we should bear many facts in mind other than what was achieved fifty years ago by a restricted number of pupils in a small part of our educational system.