59 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



give it according to some such system of results as exists at present 

 with us. Payment by results has the merit, as a system, of being 

 simple, easy to administer, and fairly equal ; but it necessarily re- 

 stricts and vulgarizes our conceptions of education. It reduces every- 

 body concerned, managers, teachers, pupils, to the one aim and object 

 of satisfying certain regulations made for them, of considering success 

 in passing standards and success in education as the same thing. It is 

 one long, unbroken grind.* From boyhood to manhood the teacher 

 himself is undergoing examinations ; for the rest of his life he is re- 

 producing on others what he himself has gone through. It is needless 

 to say that the higher aims of the teacher, methods of arousing the 

 imagination and developing the reasoning powers, which only bear 

 fruit slowly and can not be tested by a yearly examination of an in- 

 spector whose fly will be waiting at the school-door during the few 

 hours at the disposal of himself or his subordinate new attempts to 

 connect the meaning of what is being learned with life itself, and to 

 create an interest in work for work's own sake instead of for the inspect- 

 or's sake, above all, the personal influences of men who have chosen 

 teaching as their vocation, because the real outcome of their nature is 

 sympathy with the young, and have not been drilled into it through a 

 series of examinations owing to some accident of early days, all these 

 things must be laid aside as subordinate to the one great aim of driv- 

 ing large batches successfully through the standards and making large 

 hauls of public money. In our ignorant and unreasoning belief in ex- 

 aminations we have not perceived how fatal the system is to all origi- 

 nal talent and strong personality in the teacher. Whether it be a 

 professor at a university or a master in a board school, this modern 

 exaggeration of the use of examinations makes it impossible for him 

 to treat his subjects of teaching from that point of view which is real 

 and living to himself, or to follow his own methods of influencing his 

 pupils. In all cases he must subdue his strongest tastes and feelings, 

 and recast and remodel himself until he is a sufficiently humble copy 

 of the inspector or examiner, upon whose verdict his success depends. 

 Any plan better fitted to reduce managers, teachers, and pupils to one 

 level of commonplace and stupidity could scarcely be found. The 

 state rules a great copy-book, and the nation simply copies what it 

 finds between the lines. 



I cannot escape a few words on the much-vexed religious question. 

 Under our present system the Nonconformists are putting a grievous 

 strain upon their own principles. Whoever fairly faces the question 

 must admit that the same set of arguments which condemns a national 

 religion also condemns a national system of education. It is hard to 

 pronounce sentence on the one and absolve the other. Does a national 

 -Church compel some to support a system to which they are opposed? 



* See an article bearing on this point by Mr. Fitch. I have not the reference by me 

 at this moment. 



