USEFUL EXAMINATIONS
Sta,—The watchword everywhere in this country today is " security?' Economically, there must be security against poverty, no matter how this may have arisen: industrially, even the laggard must be assured of an adequate dole, although he may be unemployable, not through mis- fortune, but entirely because of this own incompetence. It is not sur- prising, therefore, that steps are being taken in the sphere of education designed to screen failure and to make it as difficult as possible to dis- criminate between the pupil who has made the most of his educational opportunities and the one who, whether from laziness or incapacity, has done nothing of the kind. Hence the popularity of the outcry against public examinations which Dr. Norwood was one of the first to raise at Headmasters Conferences in the 'thirties.
The chief argument against standardised external examinations is that they lead to cramming and narrow the scope of teaching by discouraging profitable digressions which may have no examination value. Surely the true remedy for such a defect should be, not to abolish examinations, but to improve them. It might be a good thing, for instance, to include a compulsory general information paper in every certificate examination. There is, however, no getting away from the fact that in subjects of a purely academic kind, such as Classics or Mathematics, definite ground has to be covered in laying the foundation for future work, and that no other instrument so efficient as a written examination has yet been dis- covered, for testing whether or not this foundation has been well and truly laid.
But, it will be said, it is not proposed to do away entirely with exami- nations, but to have them conducted internally at every school by the teachers themselves. This would simply mean a reversion to the prac- tice in vogue a century ago and which still survives where masters at the fag end of a term hays to toil at the correction of papers well into the small hours of the morning in order to have the results ready for the reports and the " breaking up" proceedings. Contrast this with the meticulous care taken by a university board in the setting and marking of its papers, of which I can testify from personal experience, not merely as a headmaster, but as an examiner for one of them.
Even when I was a boy at school in the last tentury the old form master who taught every subject was disappearing in favour of the specialist. Now, apparently, it is proposed to put the clock back again. In this case,' of what use will it have been for a prospective teacher to have taken a three or four years' course at a university in some particular branch of academic learning if he is subsequently to spend his days in teaching subjects of which he may really know little more than some of his pupils? Mr. Gladstone would have made a magnificent teacher of classics ; but It is dubious whether he would have gained any medals as one of arithmetic. So my criticism of much of the Norwood Report is that it is retrograde rather than progressive.—Yours faithfully,
J. H. SHACKLETON BAILEY.
The Vicarage, Sr. Michaels-on-Wyre, Preston.
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