Behind the Age-Limit
SIR;--Mr. Holland's defence of the age-limit is unconvincing. It is unfair of him to suggest that it is the Conservatives who have made our school examinations a matter of party politics. Who started this unprecedented regulation.? In this context the use of the word "arbitrary" is not, as so often, a term of abuse, but is a statement of fact. I agree that changes in our examination system are so upsetting that• they should not be made frequently or precipitately. But, if there is a wrong restriction on the liberty of the schools, it should be removed at once. We cannot afford to treat a generation of the children in our schools simply as laboratory material.
Mr. Holland has given away his case by admitting that the age- limit operates against the able boy or girl. That is just what We can never afford to do, at this juncture in our affairs least of all. Of course we are agreed about the wrongness of excessive and premature specialisa- tion, but the cure for that lies rather in the examination requirements of universities than in the introduotion of a Wholly irrelevant factor such as a minimum age. If such a factor is introduced there are bound to be gross injustices, as, for instance, to children born on or soon after SepteMber 3rd.
This age-limit is an entirely new departure, one which is unparalleled in the educational systems of other countries, and one which I do not notice lands at present excluded from its provisions, as, for instance, the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland, enviously seeking to acquire.
In fact the operation of the age-limit is impoverishing and restricting rather than enriching the first year in the sixth form, as the time-table from almost any grammar school in England will show. I dare say that boys are doing more subjects than they did, but too often it means just the prolongation of the dim subjects which Mr. Holland and I both want to eschew. I do not regard it as a criterion of a well-educated man simply to have kept up a congerie of unrelated subjects for a long time, and, if I did, I should much resent being told that I could provide any idea of a good education only for pupils who were six feet tall !—Yours
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