3<» PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SECTION D. 



venture to say, is the instinct inherited from our ancestors, an 

 instinct which shows itself more prominently in new and unde- 

 veloped countries where out-of-door habits and comparatively 

 uncivilised life-conditions tend to reproduce the life habits of our 

 ancestors of plain and forest. War, in defence of life and terri- 

 tory and property, the chase in search of food — these were the 

 all-pervading conditions of early human life. Now sport is 

 mimic warfare, and skill in games corresponds to that skill in the 

 chase, the possession of which gave the strongest and most dex- 

 terous the best and most plentiful sustenance, and the absence of 

 which led to degeneracy and decay and extinction. 



To this revival of early instinct I attribute the almost uni- 

 versal desire of South Africans to go farming. The doctor, the 

 professor, the man of business, the lawyer, all seem to have an 

 expressed or unexpressed desire to end their lives on a farm. It 

 is the instinctive hunger of the early man in each to see his crops 

 growing and his beasts increasing in number, to gaze out over 

 land which is his own, and to live untrammelled by the close 

 proximity of his neighbours and possible enemies. 



[ have mentioned the craving for definite results as caused 

 by the modern tendency of education in the concrete. The ex- 

 amination craze follows as a natural event. There must be a 

 definite cut-and-dried result to this cut-and-dried education, and 

 a student's whole career and life-history is to have set upon it the 

 seal of approbation or of damnation by the amount he can repro- 

 duce in eighteen or twenty hours in answer to arbitrary ques- 

 tions sent to him by people who have never seen or heard of him. 

 These results are published broadcast and eagerly devoured by 

 the public, and success falls perhaps to some youth of natural 

 ability, who has been lazy, careless, and even vicious, while failure 

 brings disgrace to one who is immeasurably superior in all the 

 qualities of manhood. 



If only all school examinations in this country could be 

 abolished for five years ! I know that there are vested interests 

 at stake, that certain teachers and professors earning their modest 

 incompetences would severely feel the loss of an annual re- 

 muneration and a fixed method of passing their vacations; but I 

 think that parents and pupils would subscribe the amount in a 

 month, and teachers would certainly subscribe it in a week. In 

 any case the University authorities should be legally restrained 

 from taking up a page and a half of the Cape Times or other 

 papers with the long lists of results. 



Some teachers I know would feel the loss of an annual 

 stimulus, the pitting of their wits against the often unreasonable 

 ingenuity of examiners. But I think this is a poor and unnatural 

 stimulus to the work of education, and it is time that high schools 

 ceased to be looked upon as so many racing stables, classified 



