COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS. 57 



the sort of cram that disappears the day after the examination and 

 risks the loss of all pleasure in history will provide instantaneous 

 knowledge of such facts as 'The attitude of the Achsean league toward 

 Perseus of Macedon; punishment inflicted by Eome for this; Polybius, 

 the historian, as connected with this punishment,' etc. All this de- 

 pends on the merest mechanical memory, but there is more to come. 

 In the same thirty minutes, he is to display quick-action historic 

 insight; for, as an original effort, he must 'tell the story of Appius 

 Claudius as his political enemies would tell it, then as his political 

 friends would tell it. ' Now if the answer to this is merely a repetition 

 of a previous attempt it is worse than worthless; if devised at the 

 moment, assuming that the candidate has what he can not have — 

 sufficient information at his command to warrant an honest answer 

 ■ — it must necessarily be superficial. The companion paper, in Greek 

 history, requires the student in an equally brief half hour, after a 

 varied memory performance, to 'argue that the Athenians were or 

 were not wise in their final rejection of Alcibiades in 407,' and to 

 tell 'what was the opinion of the comic poet Aristophanes in 405 about 

 the wisdom of recalling him.' One can hardly go far wrong in recog- 

 nizing the same keen educational intelligence in two previous papers, 

 one calling mainly for the history of Capua, the other for the history 

 of the Messenian wars. The display of such learned and irrelevant 

 trifles is taken to indicate a proper knowledge of Greek and Koman 

 history; and a teacher who is really trying to train boys must employ 

 the history-tool so as to satisfy such tests ! In truth this attempted 

 draft on the historical imagination is but a transparent imposition, 

 deceiving, not the children, who know the hollowness of the 'make- 

 believe,' but the learned scholars who gravely require boys and girls 

 after a study of the outlines of ancient history to 'compare Plato and 

 Aristotle,' and in the same two hours, select and answer eleven other 

 questions out of a paper containing forty, many of the single questions 

 demanding from five to ten distinct answers. 



The English papers present equally pernicious illustrations. ' In 

 these days of the "new' education, prominent educators congratulate 

 us on the 'system' that has unified the entrance requirements in Eng- 

 lish ! A board of experts selects in two groups some dozen or two 

 everything everywhere. Now English A, so-called, consisting of 

 things so appropriate to the universal youthful mind as Tennyson's 

 classic gems, a knowledge of which is required of all candidates for 

 'Princess' and Lowell's 'Sir Launfal,' is to be touched lightly as a 

 mere basis for composition; the examination uses the material thence 

 derived to test the candidate's powers of expression. A process better 

 calculated to torture the teacher and to divorce expression from experi- 

 ence in the pupil could hardly be devised. For the way in which the 



