Art. 10.-THE NIGHTMARE OF EXAMINATIONS.

IN educational discussions the tone generally adopted towards the institution of examinations is that of men caught in an irresistible current which is bearing them they know not whither. Their freedom of action is almost wholly lost. All that is left is a more or less good-humoured conformity of motion to the onset of the stream, accompanied by unintermittent abortive grumblings. Certain it is that every proposal for an educational reform which bids fair to be at all farreaching and sanative in dealing with sundry deep defects in our intellectual training is sooner or later met by the silencing objection that the examination system would have to be changed. The case for the plaintiff is at once closed. It is as if some one had denounced the proposal for summer hours by insisting that it was based on the assumption of the sun not rising on the following morning.

Nevertheless, while it is assumed that the present-day system of examinations is one of the foundations of the earth which no one may imagine to be out of course, it is in this country at least of very recent growth. Such examinations as were in vogue before Matthew Arnold fulminated about the need for organisation, only affected schools in a mild fashion, though the competition for Honours at Oxford and Cambridge was keen enough among the élite. The majority of the middle and working-class boys-not less than 90 per cent. between 1750 and 1870-were neither taught nor examined, or were only examined in a tender fashion, so that an adverse verdict had little or no effect on the career of the 'student' in his after-life. Briefly, the fact is that the examination system as a means for selecting young people for responsible work in after-life brings into notice and puts a premium on the wrong quality. Further, the system has an injurious effect on the training of character. The following considerations will, I think, show that this double contention is not baseless.

Examinations at the Universities are carefully arranged to test not only memory but grip of facts, breadth of view, freshness of mind, and what we call

originality. They inevitably put a premium on the possession of these faculties at an early age-twenty or twenty-two. But it has strangely escaped notice that the majority of young men so gifted are precocious; and precocity in youth gives no promise of growth and freshness after fifty years or even forty. Unfortunately, the greatest of all gifts required is fresh vigour of mind in later life when responsibility is given. Very often it is remarked how few of our highest honour-men become leaders. Suppose 50 per cent. of the examination élite are instances of precocity the mystery is solved. Especially is this true of originality. A very eminent American educationist told us some thirty years ago that it had been his dreadful lot to read through a mass of truly nauseating literature; to wit, a whole cargo of theses written by German University students who knew that the highest honours could only be gained by those who treated the theme with marked originality. One's imagination reels at the thought! What must be the outpourings of the pertinacious young Prussian who had been commanded to be original? The output was a marvel of ponderous style and the uttermost audacity of conjecture. When Germans blunder their blunders are ugly-so ugly that we fancy they must be unique. Not at all. Their gestures are unique; but the direction they are pursuing, their aim and attention, are much the same as ours to-day.

This subject, the question of the Ethical influence of Examinations, includes not only the working of the examination system where youths of twenty years old are concerned, but the influence of all the stimulus of competition freely and remorselessly applied to children and adolescents in all kinds of schools wherever such things as weekly orders, terminal promotion-lists, prizes for precocity, as well as 'paper-tests' for entrance into various professions have been instituted. It is necessary before considering the matter to remind ourselves that in the training of character the deadly enemy against whom we are engaged is Egoism. We are all egoistical till we are perfect. Many pages-nay, many volumes -might be filled if we were to enumerate fully the evidences of this truth. On its negative side we have often heard that all sin is selfishness. On the positive

side we may notice Emerson's contention that very few of mankind can so far forget themselves as to be really great. In fact, the claims of the ego by persistent but stealthy onsets 'war against the soul.' Hence we may discern the true import, the essential aim of moral education: another expression for character training. It is that each individual be moved to subordinate his natural inclinations to a higher law than that of selfgratification. That higher law would by some be spoken of as obedient to the Law of God; by others in less precise and more secular language. But every educator is engaged, always and everywhere, in pressing the claims of the higher law upon the young mind and heart; so that it shall eventually take the supreme place in the loyalty and reverence of the man. For, all along, the self lives, according to the immortal paradox, by being slain; is enriched by being pruned; waxes in power as it wanes in consideration. During this process, however, it is no passive resister but an active unconscientious objector. It develops powers of increasing subtlety the more its open antagonism is thwarted.

Against the all-pervading pestilence education-that is, spiritual feeding-is the great hope. In a warfare of which the issues are so tremendous the influence of the examination system must be very potent. It can hardly, then, be neutral. On which side does it work? Can it be denied that when a child has his thoughts turned on to a comparison between himself and others he is being taught a lesson-perhaps the first of a life-long seriesin egoism? What other effect on the innocent malleable mind can be looked for from the modern institution of the weekly order in marks, from organised rivalry in prize competitions? Whereas before school life began the most delightful characteristic was his unself-consciousness, before he reaches his teens the novitas florea mundi, the naiveté, has begun to lose its freshness. He has learnt to make comparisons which are odious because they inevitably include the ego. The effect must be, and plainly is, the closing of the shades of the prison-house upon the growing boy; not very unlike the change in the eyes' outlook when the girl-child of twelve first hears some one remark on her good looks, of which she had been before wholly unconscious. If this is so, there

lurks a poison in the examination-system not only potent, though its effects are for a time invisible, but deadly in that it corrupts the very springs of character. Wherever there is rivalry there is a stimulus either to individual or to group-egoism; which begins in comparison and grows either towards arrogance or paralysing self-distrust.

Two inevitable objections to the argument must be dealt with. The first is that in our schools there are numberless influences which check all growth of conceit, vanity, and self-importance; the youthful society being always ready to deal the nascent monster a shrewd blow in time. This is true; the society is ready: but the blow does not always descend. Egoism driven under the surface is strengthened in the dark; and the adolescent acquires enough of dissimulation to escape notice. Moreover, the healthy social antidote is weaker in Day- than in Boarding-Schools-and the mass of English children, so far as eye can see, will be day-pupils. Moreover, it is idle to rely on any antidote when the pestilence after childhood is known to be the deep-seated canker of all that seems most fair, lovable, and vigorous in human life. Also, in a matter so complex and profound we are playing with fire. If there is the slightest foundation for this indictment against examinations of children, the system ought not to be tolerated for another year. In passing from the second to the third of the injurious effects of artificial stimulus, we should note that as in the case of the first we are dealing with a violent and very recent innovation in our educational system. A century ago the important fact was that the mental development of about 90 per cent. of young people was left to take care of itself. In the first place, girls were hardly taught at all, and the same applies to the large majority of boys; in fact, to nearly all the sons of the

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These words are, roughly speaking, true. Class-teaching in 1870 for lads of seventeen in a division near the top of the school meant that an elderly scholar-a foppish and grotesque figure-maundered at the end of the room about the opinion of a German commentator of whom we had never heard on a passage of Sophocles which we had never read. The boys had to sit still, but all except three or four foundationers who had an eye to emoluments could let their minds rove at will. But was the will as 'sweet' as that of Wordsworth's river? The animula was vagula, but was it blandula?

I remember three ways of killing the time: (1) surreptitious

labouring classes and a huge group of the 'lower middle' stratum; the idea-if such a word can be used of a time when nobody thought at all-being the outcome of a blending of piety and laziness of mind. The piety has gone, but the laziness abides. By 1870 a mighty revolution in all departments of national life had set in, and it became evident that an undisciplined swarm of young hooligans in our great towns was a menace to our peace. So compulsory education began; for several years the most woeful travesty of 'spiritual feeding' that the world has ever seen. Meantime the secondary schools were stirred and zeal became the order of the day, showing itself in two directions; the diminution of corporal punishment and the multiplication of subjects. A striking improvement in moral and physical training was to be noticed; but the one question to which nobody gave a thought was the difference between stuffing and feeding in the processes of mental growth. From 1880 till to-day there has been a flood of talk about childpsychology, but in practice the grand failing has been the want of common sense, sympathy, and patience.

At this point we have to take into account the strength of the Public and Grammar-School tradition which had been growing unnoticed for centuries previously to 1880. When it is remembered that from early mediæval times the staple mental nourishment for such boys as were taught at all was the Latin language; that all school premises were rough and many of them squalid -and anything like pastoral care was almost unknownit is no matter for surprise that the mass of boys hated their lessons and stoutly resisted all efforts to make them learn. Teachers in those schools were engaged in a struggle against what they fondly imagined to be a deeply rooted lethargy in their pupils. From this struggle the mass of the boys emerged victorious. That is to say, barring the linguistically gifted minority, they might or might not drudge at Cæsar and Eutropius according as they were frightened into it; but no power can make young boys gain nourishment from analysis. In

reading of Byron; (2) carving the desks with our names; (3) studying the master's idiosyncrasies with a view to subsequent mimicry out of school; an accomplishment practised with real diligence; for unlike the Greek vocabulary it had an obvious relation to the needs of ordinary life.