56 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tends to be. For him there is no youth; his life is a hard and unre- 

 mitting cram, and he comes out of the ordeal, bereft of spirit, orig- 

 inality, spontaneity, too often of health besides. In exchange for 

 these he carries a premature load of ill-assimilated pedantry, of neither 

 disciplinary nor inspirational value, and destined soon to slip from 

 his all-too-rigid grasp. Often enough, the college years witness a 

 violent recoil — mental and physical. But for the time being he is the 

 idol of the examination boards. He is ready to solve in all seriousness 

 their linguistic and historic puzzles. He will promptly state facts 

 to illustrate any random quotation; he has at his tongue's end 

 a sentence each to describe 'the successive governments in France be- 

 tween 1789 and 1870'; he can mark all the long vowels in 'Csesar,' and 

 tell you what goddess gave any oracle that you can cull from the ' Meta- 

 morphoses ' ! 



I regret that lack of space makes it impossible for me to submit 

 complete specimens of recent examination papers in support of these 

 criticisms; but the system as a whole is condemned by the abso- 

 lute exclusion of all evidence beyond the answers submitted. I insist 

 that it is fit for little more than to measure superficial knowledge ; that, 

 if it pretends to measure thought at all, it does so under conditions 

 that practically forbid thought; that necessarily its influence on 

 previous education tends to develop the external, mechanical and 

 insincerely imitative at the sacrifice of the internal and spontaneous. 

 The erection of so artificial a standard must lead to neglect of the 

 proper educational business of youth, viz., the organization of each 

 individual from within in harmony with his environment. Whatever 

 connection may be charitably supposed to exist between such organiza- 

 tion and the pursuits prescribed for college entrance, it can not be 

 seriously maintained that the correspondence is so definite that it can 

 be described in uniform quantitative terms, applicable to all students 

 in all circumstances. Therefore, howsoever the questions be prepared 

 and appraised, they can not alone be made the means of determining the 

 issue without shifting the pedagogical emphasis from within to without. 



In support of my contention that in its present administration the 

 examination system is needlessly absurd, I have before me a very im- 

 pressive mass of evidence. Here, for instance, is an examination in 

 Roman history covering two printed pages, in which, under eight sub- 

 divisions, of which the candidate must select four, forty-one queries 

 are submitted. ' Time allowed, thirty minutes ' ! Thirty minutes 

 within which the youth is expected to comprehend the way the paper 

 is put, read the questions in order to exercise the privilege of selection 

 and commit to writing the answers to about twenty questions. Some 

 of them are, it is true, mere matters of memory; but in this space of 

 time, the candidate who stops to recollect is lost. Hence, nothing but 



