Pleiades
On Examinations IT seems a forbidding subject ; and perhaps it ought to be confessed that it actually is forbidding. None the less, and at the same time, it is a subject of importance. There is a sentence in Plato which, with a little twisting, can be trans- lated to mean : " The life withcut examination is a life that cannot be lived." England seems to have been acting upon this dictum for nearly a hundred years. Just as Plato wished to test and examine the citizens of his heavenly city, in order to decide whether they were fit to rise from the iron class to the silver, and again from the silver to the gold, so England tests and examines her citizens in order to decide whether they are fit for employment in the public service, alike in its higher and its lower grades, and whether, again, they are worthy of scholarships and other emoluments which will lift them up into the higher stages of education. It all began about 1854, when a committee, over which Macaulay presided, recommended that appointments to the Civil Service in India should be made " on the basis of an open competitive examination of a scholastic character." A year later a body of Civil Service Commissioners was created, to examine candidates for junior posts in the Civil Service in England ; and in 1870 an Order in Council introduced a general system of open competition. The competition was doubly open : it was open in the sense that it was free to all corners : it was open, again, in the sense that the examination was not based on any special and limited knowledge, which had to be specially amassed for the purpose, but was adjusted freely to the open and ordinary course of studies in English schools and Universities. In this way, during the reign of Victoria, the public service, at home and abroad, began to be recruited by way of examination ; and a little later—more especially during the reign of Edward VII, and after the great Education Act of 1902—a general movement may be traced towards the public award of scholarships, on a basis of examination, with a view to opening Secondary Schools and Universities to children of capacity. There had always been scholarships in some of the northern counties which would carry the children of poor parents to the old local Grammar Schools ; but those scholarships had generally depended on the existence of private endowments. After 1902 (we may roughly say) the nation began to shoulder the burden. Chil- dren of the age of eleven began to be examined for scholarships which would carry them forward into the new Secondary Schools that had begun to arise ; and boys and girls of the age of eighteen began to receive, on the results of examinations, the higher scholarships which would lift them still farther into the life and opportunities of the University. Finally, on the eve of the War, there was a sort of nationalization of school examinations, which has had for one of its results a growing recruitment of the professions, and even of business, on the basis of success in these examinations. Under the stimulus of the Board of Education the Universities of the country all undertook the task of awarding, on more or less uniform lines, certificates of performance in the school examinations which they conducted ; and the winning of such a certificate, and still more the winning of it on a high level, became a passport which employers desired, and were willing to accept, from candidates for employment. And so examination, after becoming an " open sesame " • into the public service, became also a key to unlock the doors of Secondary Schools and Universities, and finally a passport over the frontiers and into the country of business and commerce.
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There is both black magic and white magic in examinations. Their white magic is that they unloose the ice of society and ease the flow of its waters—that they are fatal to castes and heredity, and open a career for talents wherever talents are found. When the service of the Crown, in the days of the first four Georges and William the Fourth, was recruited by pat- ronage and nomination, it became the privilege of a limited aristocratic circle—the paradise of younger sons who, dis- barred by the law of primogeniture from any part or parcel of the paternal estates, received a provision from the nation.
They constant: 1 a public service which had no doubt its merits, but had also its undoubted defects. They were not corrupt ; but neither were they industrious or incisive. Readers of Trollope will remember Johnny Eames and his colleagues : readers of Greville's Memoirs will remember his lamentations. The Civil Service which to-day is justly our national pride—some would even say our national danger, because it is so efficient that it is erecting " The New Des- potism " by the orders it makes in lieu of Parliament and the decisions it gives in lieu of judges—that Civil Service is the product of examination. Every man has access to it, even to its highest peaks ; you may find an engine-driver's son at the head of one great department, or a quarryman's son con- trolling another. All this is a sort of white magic : it means a dissolution of the old solidified strata of class ; it means a new and pervious world, in which ability finds its vents and runs readily to and fro. It means a free course for that Wisdom of which Solomon wrote that she has become " more moving than any motion : she passeth and goeth through all things."
But there is also a black magic in examination. China has long had a system of examinations ; and with it China enjoyed for centuries a government of Mandarins. Will England ever have her Chinese age, or become a country of Mandarins ? We are beginning to examine enough, in all conscience. And examinations, when much hangs upon them (" does anything hang upon it ? " asked Hallgerda in the Saga : " Yea," said Gunnar, " my life ") may well breed drilled personalities, ready to run the steady round with a quiet docility. We talk of the red tape of offices ; but red tape haunts examination rooms, and perhaps breeds there. We may even dream of hereditary examinees—as if examinations, after all, should breed their own caste, even though they destroyed others : we may " entertain conjecture of a time " when civil servants, who know the ropes, breed civil servants for the State. And anyhow we may say to ourselves that the perfect examinee is not the whole man. There arc things such as character and judgment, which matter vastly in every responsible office and service ; and how shall any examination, except the rude test of life itself, appraise such things as these ?
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There is an answer to these doubts. Any good examination, after all, is a test of character and judgment, as well as of industry (which in any case is itself a part of character) and the attainments which industry brings. To face the test, to see the point, to judge the requirements—these are the qualities needed in the examination room ; and they are also, in very large measure, the qualities needed in life. We are always being examined or tested—the barrister in the Court, where he has to meet a sudden demand on his judgment ; the merchant in his counting-house, where he has to honour a sudden draft on his insight—and it is the continuation of tests which insures the continuation of fresh and vigorous life. That is perhaps what Plato meant when he said that the life unexamined was the life that could not be lived. And the curious thing is, that the way in which we have responded to our first test—the examination pure and simple—is generally a true enough index of the way in which, " twenty and thirty and forty years on," we shall face the long testing of life. When a man who is nearing sixty looks back upon the careers of his contemporaries at school and at the University, he generally finds that they are what they were, or at any rate have become what he expected them to become. The heads of the Sixth in his day are now great figures in journalism or in education : the men who were in the First class of his old University, in his own year, are now prominent in Church or State—bishops, organizers of parties, heads of colleges, chiefs of departments ; busy in all walks of life, and leaders of men in their walk. Men can indeed falsify their examination record (Deo Gratias); but on the whole, in the main, and in the way of that average truth which is never the whole truth, the record sticks faithfully, like a following shadow, d raro
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