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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



therefore take the liberty of making his speech in 

 some degree my text. " Examination is not educa- 

 tion," he said ; " you require a great deal more 

 than that. As well as being examined, you must be 

 taught. ... In the great scramble for life, there 

 is a notion at the present moment of getting hold 

 of as much general superficial knowledge as you 

 can. That, to my mind, is a fatal mistake. On 

 the other hand, there is a great notion that if you 

 can get through your examination, and ' cram 

 up ' a subject very well, you are being educated. 

 That, too, is a most fatal mistake. There is 

 nothing which would delight me so much, if 

 I were an examiner, as to baffle all the ' cram- 

 ming ' teachers whose pupils came before me." 

 (Laughter.) 



Let us consider what Mr. Cross really means. 

 Examination, he says, is not education ; we re- 

 quire a great deal more — we must be taught as 

 well as be examined. With equal meaning, I 

 might say : " Beef is not dinner; we want a great 

 deal more — we must have potatoes, bread, pud- 

 ding, and the like." Nevertheless, beef is a prin- 

 cipal part of dinner. Nobody, I should think, 

 ever asserted or imagined that examination alone 

 was education, but I nevertheless hold that it is 

 one of the chief elements of an effective educa- 

 tion. As Mr. Cross himself said, in an earlier 

 part of his speech : " The examination is a touch- 

 stone and test Which shows the broad distinction 

 between good and bad. . . . You may manage to 

 scramble through your lessons in the 'half,' but 

 I will defy you to get through your examinations 

 if you do not know the subjects." 



Another remark of Mr. Cross leads me to the 

 main point of the subject. He said : " It is quite 

 necessary in the matter of teaching that whatever 

 is taught must be taught well, and nothing that 

 is taught well can be taught in a hurry. It must 

 be taught not simply for the examination, but it 

 must sink into your minds, and stay there for life." 



Both in this and his other remarks, Mr. Cross 

 commits himself to the popular but wholly erro- 

 neous notion that what boys learn at school and 

 college should be useful knowledge indelibly im- 

 pressed upon the mind, so as to stay there all 

 their lives, and be ready at their fingers' ends. 

 The real point of the objections to examination 

 commonly is, that the candidate learns things for 

 the examination only, which, when it is safely 

 passed, he forgets again as speedily as possible. 

 Mr. Cross would teach so deliberately and thor- 

 oughly that the very facts taught could not be for- 

 gotten, but must ever after crop up in the mind 

 whatever we are doing. 



I hold that remarks such as these proceed 

 from a wholly false view of the nature and pur- 

 poses of education. It is implied that the mind in 

 early life is to be stored with the identical facts 

 and bits of knowledge which are to be used in 

 after-life. It is, in fact, Mr. Cross and those who 

 think with him who advocate a kind of " cram " 

 enduring it is true, but still " bad cram." The 

 true view of education, on the contrary, is to re- 

 gard it as a course of training. The youth in a 

 gymnasium practises upon the horizontal bar, in 

 order to develop his muscular powers generally ; 

 he does not intend to go on posturing upon hori- 

 zontal bars all through life. School is a place 

 where the mental fibres are to be exercised, 

 trained, expanded, developed, and strengthened, 

 not "crammed" or loaded with "useful knowl- 

 edge." 



The whole of a youth's subsequent career is 

 one long course of technical " cramming " in 

 which any quantity of useful facts are supplied 

 to him nolens volens. The merchant gets his 

 technical knowledge at the clerk's desk, the bar- 

 rister in the conveyancer's offices or the law 

 courts, the engineer in the workshop and the 

 field. It is the very purpose of a liberal educa- 

 tion, as it is correctly called, to develop and train 

 the plastic fibres of the youthful brain, so as to 

 prevent them taking too early a definite "set," 

 which will afterward narrow and restrict the 

 range of acquisition and judgment. I will even 

 go so far as to say that it is hardly desirable for 

 the actual things taught at school to stay in the 

 mind for life. The source of error is the failure 

 to distinguish between the form and the matter 

 of knowledge, between the facts themselves and 

 the manner in which the mental powers deal with 

 facts. 



It is wonderful that Mr. Cross and those who 

 moralize in his strain do not perceive that the 

 actual facts which a man deals with in life are 

 infinite in number, and cannot be remembered in 

 a finite brain. The psychologists, too, seem to 

 me to be at fault in this matter, for they have 

 not sufficiently drawn attention to the varying 

 degrees of duration required in a well-organized 

 memory. We commonly use the word memory 

 so as to cover the faculties of retention, reproduc- 

 tion, and representation, as described by Hamil- 

 ton, and very little consideration will show that 

 in different cases we need the powers of reten- 

 tion, of suggestion, and of imagination, in very 

 different degrees. In some cases we require to 

 remember a thing only a few moments, or a few 

 minutes ; in other cases a few hours or days ; in 



