LORD PALMRRSTON ON HIGH-PRESSURE EDUCATION.
ITT is easy to see that Lord Palmerston has never coached a dull and backward man for his.degree. Had he ever done so, there is, we think, some question whether he would feel the enthusiasm which he now professes about the ge- neral adoption of a high-pressure system of education, espe- cially looking to the fact that the faculties thus elaborated under the weight of several intellectual atmospheres are to furnish us, under the competitive system, with the public ser- vants of the country. Lord Palmerston is himself emi- nently a man of sagacious intellect, of shrewd humour and savoir faire,—he has, in short, the kind of intellect which could not well have been formed under a pressure of several examinations to the square inch. He underrates, as such men do, the value of the light-of-nature understanding. He thinks a mind which has once had its loose interstices well and tightly packed with useful information, must be the better for it. The mind, he says, is thus exercised ; and scraps of know- ledge linger in the crevices as well. It is not a bottle, he tells us, which you can fill and empty again without leaving a drop behind. Surely not ; if it were, we should not talk of cramming it ; for fluids are not easily compressed, and the glass would break if the attempt were made. Grant, too, that there are some adhesive powers spread over even the dullest man's mind, which, like the stuff with which Coja Hassan, in the Arabian Nights, daubed his measure, may detain a few shining fragments of the gold which is measured through it. • Still, unfortunately, the cramming may sometimes strain the mind as well as exercise it; and the fragments which adhere when the pressure is removed will too often be the least useful ones,—mere capricious re- mains of an unwelcome process. We should not write or speak in this way of a forced march for an-ordinary degree examination, which generally concludes a leisurely education with a little very wholesome stimulus. But we must remember that it is the tendency of the growing competitive system which Lord Palmerston eulogizes so highly, to bring an increasing number of candi- dates into the educational field expressly as candidates for small Government appointments. Now, those who are looking to these examinations as the final effort of a tran- quil course of study are in an exceedingly different position from those who are constantly reminded by their friends and parents that on its result hinge their professional pro- spects. M. de Tocqueville, in a striking letter, from which we extracted last week, has described very graphically the result of this process on the French race of competitors for office. " Continued application," he says, "to a small number of subjects, and those always the same, not selected by the student, but imposed on him by the inflexible rule of the establishment, without reference to his tastes or to his powers, is as bad for the mind as the constant exercise of one set of muscles would be for the body. We have a name for those who have been thus educated [in the ecole .Po- lytechnique.] They are called Polytecknises. If you follow our example, you will increase your second-rates and extin- guish your first-rates ; and, what is perhaps a more impor- tant result, whether you consider it a good or an evil, you will make a large stride in the direction in which you have lately made so many, the removing the government and the administration of England from the bands of the higher classes into those of the middle and lower ones." There can be no doubt that if the competitive system for our civil service is pushed much further, this class of Polytech- nized youths will grow very large in England. As yet, education is an intellectual discipline which is no practical anxiety or wearing care to the mass of men, and is therefore education, and not cram. If lads are taught under the natural influence of school ambitions and nothing more, their inborn faculties are elicited ; they turn eagerly to what incites them most, and are content with acquiring languidly what does not interest them. But as soon as the pressure of a superincumbent livelihood shall be added to the neces- sities of the case, and all the home authorities are formally and vitally interested in securing the best possible result for the coming examinations, the boy works under a very dif- ferent pressure ; the grain of his mind is compressed by the burdens put upon it into a regulation shape, and we see the same class of phenomena, though not in the same degree, with which every one is familiar who has known a dull boy designed by poor parents for the Church, and on whose academical success all his future prospects depend. If he had anything of practical original power in him, it runs much chance of being pressed out in the packing process which Lord Palmerston so much admires.
We must say, therefore, that even on intellectual grounds we look with no satisfaction to the gradual spread of intel- lectual tournaments for the young, in which the prizes are to be livelihoods, and the blanks parental losses and displeasure. We do not believe that we shall get thereby bad public ser- vants. They will have no doubt competent knowledge, in- dependence, and capacity, and that amount of practical shrewdness which is generally requisite even for success in examinations. But we shall not have, even in the majority, better, if so good, instruments with regard to the special work. This kind of carefully selected and anxiously packed know- ledge is not what best sharpens a man's general faculties. Lads with inflexible faculties, who do not adapt their minds easily to the tests in view, will be deterred or beaten by their rivals ; yet such lads would often turn out the most valuable public servants. If three or four hundred can- didates are to compete for each moderately desirable ap- pointment —and it may soon come to this—the winner must necessarily have a very carefully got up, intellect of that neat kind which examiners love. Now, are these the class of men best adapted for practical work ? You may call it fair competition ; but fair competition usually means unrestrained rivalry between the sellers of that class of goods which the buyer wisheS to buy. No one would call it free competition if Government ordained that all corn merchants should be examined in agricultural sta- tistics, and then their corn bought by the public in the order of .merit. Yet this is what the unlimited competitive system for English civil appointments implies. The com- petition is in book-knowledge—the demand is for good judg- ment and sound clerkly habits. The reply is that you cannot test what you really want to see free competition in ; and that the next best thing is to take the lad who has most of the next best thing you can test—knowledge. We say, No ; the next best thing is to take average men who can prove that they are certainly not incompetent, without any com- parative test at all. If we cannot test for the thing we want, why should we teat for another thing which is not necessarily related to it ? Exclude by all means all real incompetence, but do not demand excellence in one thing when you are looking for excellence in a very different thing. The effect of grafting a simple but rigidly exacted pass- examination on the old patronage system has never been given a fair trial. It is fast passing into the very different French system without any sincere resolve on the part of the people to see it fairly tried. For ourselves we have little doubt that it is the true system. There must be no jobs : but there is good reason why men, who come up to the re- qtusite standard, should owe their career to personal influ- ence rather than to mere academical ability. Ignorance and imbecility must be rigidly excluded : but for the rest the privilege of advancing others in the world is one which the ruling classes ought to possess. A strong social tie between the rulers and their subordinates is far from undesirable. It is a privilege which rulers always covet, and will always endeavour—as American experience shows—to exercise, even under the most democratic institutions. We honestly believe that there would be a larger number—never of course absolutely large—of remarkably efficient civil servants, if they were chosen in the ordinary way, by mere appointment, subject to a common pass-examination, than we shall over get by putting up such appointments to an intellectual auction. The rulers would then be men distinctly respon- sible for their subordinates, and the subordinates would feel more closely identified with their rulers. And above all, and beyond all, we should no longer have a rapidly growing class of speculative candidates for office, nine-tenths of whom must not only be beaten, and their parents disappointed, but must also look back to a fruitless high-pressure educa- tion, deprived of its natural freedom, elasticity, and joyous- ness, by the premature anxiety of an overhanging domestic care. To be examined for a livelihood is the next torture to being tried for your life. It is very undesirable for England that this shadow should be thrown over the education of hundreds of unsuccessful competitors for every one who passes successfully this worse than Athenian scrutiny.
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