THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 5 



inf which testimonies with kindred ones coming- from students arid 

 professors on all sides, we find the really noteworthy thing to be that 

 examiners are concerned not so much to set questions fit for students 

 as to set questions which make manifest their own extensive learning. 

 Especially if they are young, and have reputations to make or to 

 justify, they seize the occasion for displaying their erudition, regard- 

 less of the interests of those they examine. 



If we look through this more significant and general fact for the 

 still deeper fact it grows out of, there rises before us the question 

 Who examines the examiners ? How happens it that men, com- 

 petent in their special knowledge but so incompetent in their general 

 judgment, should occupy the places they do ? This prevailing fault- 

 iness of the examiners shows conclusively that the administration is 

 faulty at its centre. Somewhere or other, the power of ultimate 

 decision is exercised by those who are unfit to exercise it. If the 

 examiners of the examiners were set to fill up an examination-paper 

 which had for its subject the right conduct of examinations, and the 

 proper qualifications for examiners, there would come out very unsatis- 

 factory answers. 



Having seen through the small details and the wider facts down 

 to these deeper facts, we may, on contemplating them, perceive that 

 these, too, are not the deepest or most significant. It becomes clear 

 that those having supreme authority suppose, as men in general do, 

 that the sole essential thing for a teacher or examiner is complete 

 knowledge of that which he has to teach, or respecting which he has 

 to examine. Whereas a coessential thing is a knowledge of Psy- 

 chology; and especially that part of Psychology which deals with the 

 evolution of the faculties. Unless, either by special study or by daily 

 observation and quick insight, he has gained an approximately-true 

 conception of how minds perceive, and reflect, and generalize, and by 

 what processes their ideas grow from concrete to abstract, and from 

 simple to complex, no one is competent to give lessons that will 

 effectually teach, or to ask questions which will effectually measure the 

 efficiency of teaching. Further, it becomes manifest that, in common 

 with the public at large, those in authority assume that the goodness 

 of education is to be tested by the quantity of knowledge acquired. 

 Whereas it is to be much more truly tested by the capacity for using 

 knowledge by the extent to which the knowledge gained has been 

 turned into faculty, so as to be available both for the purposes of life 

 and for the purposes of independent investigation. Though there is a 

 growing consciousness that a mass of unorganized information is, after 

 all, of but small value, and that there is more value in less informa- 

 tion well organized, yet the noteworthy truth is that this consciousness 

 has not got itself officially embodied ; and that our educational ad- 

 ministration is working, and will long continue to work, in pursuance 

 of a crude and outworn belief. 



