COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS. 59 



hiatus. The larger the examination specter looms before student and 

 teacher, the more decisive the tendency to neglect individual discipline 

 and development, in order to perfect in their stead an organization 

 calculated to meet the exigencies of a critical moment. Preparation 

 for college entrance examinations, rather than preparation for college 

 or preparation for life, insensibly becomes the educational goal. For 

 clearly, when the whole future is staked on this single throw, the temp- 

 tation to be effectively ready for it is irresistible. I say advisedly — the 

 whole future; since by insistence on an academic degree as a pre- 

 requisite to the pursuit of law or medicine on the most highly favored 

 terms, the professional schools aid in the production of the artificial 

 crisis. Under these conditions, the field for pure educational effort in 

 the secondary period threatens, despite the enrichment of the curriculum, 

 to become steadily narrower. The initial and determining factor in 

 the planning of a student's course of work is neither his endowment 

 nor his opportunity, but the caprice that carries him to one institution 

 rather than to another. This choice once made, it becomes increasingly 

 difficult to persuade him to cooperate with his teacher in the endeavor 

 to sound fully and genuinely his personal power. His absorbing in- 

 terest lies in the statement of the college requirements ; and so marked 

 has this factor become that prominent schools do not hesitate to an- 

 nounce the particular colleges by whose requirements their curricula are 

 regulated, as if any uniform requirements could possibly outline an 

 educational procedure strictly applicable in even a single case. 



Doubtless the secondary teacher will be roundly criticized by his 

 collegiate superiors, just when he has, through the suppression of the 

 student's individuality, succeeded in perfecting the preparatory ma- 

 chinery warranted to turn out the qualities and accomplishments de- 

 manded. For amidst collegiate conditions that begin by conceding to 

 the student the possession of an individuality, which his previous train- 

 ing has, under collegiate compulsion, absolutely denied, it becomes at 

 once manifest that preparation for college entrance examinations is 

 not preparation for college. Indeed, for a college life, offering at the 

 outstart liberal election in the whole field of knowledge and experience, 

 what adequate training can be supposed to reside in the mechanical 

 and uniform drill demanded by the entrance requirements? The 

 articulation that seemed from superficial inspection so neat and com- 

 plete turns out a delusion; the educational sine qua non leads nowhere. 

 In bygone days it may have fitted immediately into the prescribed 

 freshman course. But no such justification now remains. Every- 

 where the developmental idea of power has driven out the superstitious 

 faith that attached magic virtue to certain symbols — everywhere ex- 

 cept in the peculiar domain where the nimble mastery of a few formulae 



