A RECENT survey has found that one in 10 Britons admitted cheating the system at school by watching film versions of classic novels instead of reading the original texts.

The most frequently watched were Baz Luhrmann's Romeo And Juliet and the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, with both texts regularly figuring in secondary school English classes.

Well, I'm proud to say that I was not one of these "wrong-uns" at school. Not because I didn't think of doing the same, but because it would have been too costly.

Back then, you couldn't buy cheap DVDs online or at the supermarket with your beetroot and jazz apples. No, instead you had to hunt down a VHS video that would cost a small fortune.

As for rentals, strangely my local video library never seemed to stock Alan Bennett's Talking Heads starring Thora Hird and Patricia Routledge.

Besides, watching a video at school was always supposed to be a treat.

The treat being that the teacher would waste most of the lesson trying to get the ancient video player to work. The one time I actually remember being shown a video at school, it was the colourful 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet by director Franco Zeffirelli.

Unfortunately, it had one "colourful"scene that was more soft porn than Shakespeare. A memorable lesson, but we never got to see another one.

No sir, we had to take it in turns reading the set text around the classroom. A sure-fire method of killing any enthusiasm for literature.

Keeping track with the storyline would be near impossible, especially with the monotonous droner, the quiet reader and that classmate who couldn't read so well.

Come to think of it, do schoolchildren still write on bits of lined paper with leaky fountain pens? It's been that long since I've been in a classroom, thankfully.

Schoolchildren today have so much more new technology available to them and that worries me. If I'd have been cryogenically frozen at 14 and then thawed out today, not only would I be shorter but I'd also be a cheating machine.

While I'm not condoning plagiarism, it must be easy for the older generation to assume that anything other than reading books is cheating.

Surely it's common sense and shows initiative to use the massive amounts of information available on the internet?

People forget you still need to know how to read and write to interact online.