102 



NA TURE 



\Nov. 29, 



agonists as the Eugimer, were they to come, like sorrowe, 

 "in battalions": — but what of those many humble but ardent 

 students who have had no scientific instruction, and who have 

 been led by circumstances to rely upon such scientific informa- 

 tion as tbey can pick up from the technical or professional 

 journals, too often the only sources available to them ? 



That such a question can be asked, and with good reason, in 

 Britain and in this nineteentli century, is a matter for profound 

 humiliation. 



How correct is the remark of Paulus Pleydeli : — "There are 

 folks before whom one should take care how they play \he 

 fool " ! The gigantic joke perpetrated in the recent Presidential 

 address to the British Association has been too often taken in 

 earnest, and is already bearing fruit of a very different kind from 

 any that could have been contemplated by the witty author. It 

 is recorded that a practical joker once n anaged to block up the 

 Strand with gaping idiots, simply by staring at the lion on 

 Northumberland House, and muttering to himself, "It did 

 wag." What a comment on this is furnished Ijy the never-to-be- 

 excelled discovery recently made by the Engineer that "the 

 Engineer and the Engineer alone is the great civilizer," in who e 

 train "the man of scierce follows"; with its correlative and 

 complementary theorem " The world owes next to nothing to 

 the man of pure science " ! 



^)\t. Engineer ra2i.y read orce more, and (I will hope) with 

 profit, that memoir of Kankine which he has so strangely mis- 

 quoted. I would commend to his special notice the following 

 lines : — 



"(Rankine) did not, indeed, himself design or construct 

 gigantic structures, but he taught, or was the means of teaching, 

 that invaluable class of men to whom the projectors of such 

 works intrust the calculations on which their safety as well as 

 their efficiency mainly depend. For behind the great architect 

 or engineer, and concealed by his portentous form, there is the 

 real worker, without whom failure would be certain. The 

 public knows but little of such men. Not every Von Molike 

 has his rervices publicly acknowledged and rewarded by his 

 Imperial employer ! But he [i.e. the man of pure science) who 

 makes possible the existence of such men confers lasting benefit 

 on his country." P. G. Tait. 



The Great Modrrn Perversion of Education. 



I THINK Mr. Victor Dickins will admit on second thoughts 

 that he has hardly taken pains enough to slay the dragon that 

 confronts him. In his letter to you he says, " I have shown 

 above that competition does not produce any of the evil results 

 complained of in the protest," but the special— if not the only — 

 point to which he addressed himself was, I think, to show 

 that the great prize-winners carried on their success into after- 

 life. Now, the protest never asserted or ionplied that manv 

 prize-winners did not succeed fairly well in after-life. Could 

 this be asserted, the charge against such examinations would 

 be so overwhelming and so easy of proof, that the hours of 

 their survival would be few to count. What the protest asserted 

 was that from time to time—" fairly often," might perhaps stand 

 as the translation of the words "agoiu and again " — the great 

 promise of the brilliant young man comes to nothing ; that is 

 to say, this happens sufficiently often to warn us, even if no 

 other warnings existed, that our system may be injuring instead 

 of benefiting, may be restricting and destroying mental powers 

 instead of enlarging ihem. 



The point, however, is not the mcst fruitful one to discuss. 

 It occupied but an in ignificant position in the protest — I think 

 less than six full lines in a paper amounting to about three 

 hundred — and, as far as I know, is not a point on which any one 

 of the assailants of competitive examinations has laid much 

 stress. And ore reason s plain. We should all differ so much 

 as to what is success. If you pointed me out either a lawyer 

 who successfully stated his case, a public man who got up a ques- 

 tion in a few days, and at the end of the time embodied his remedy 

 in a popular Bill to be laid before the House, or a journalist 

 who came down to his office and wrote a brilliant article upon 

 both the evil and the remedy, v\ hil.-t admitting the useful quali- 

 ties that each possessed, I should not consider that such qualities 

 —however vigorously and effeciively displayed— neces-arily 

 afforded any justification of a particular course of educational 

 training. The world has need of such qualities ; it rewards 

 them liberally ; and whether competitive examinations exist cr 

 no^, such qualities will abound quite sufficiently under our 

 present condilicns. 



If, on the other hand, it could be shown that Mr. Robert 

 Browning, Lord Tennyson, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Darwin, 

 Mr. Huxley, Mr. J. S. Mill, Mr. Buckle, the two Stephensons, 

 the Duke of Wellington, and many such another, had been 

 the product of competitive examinations, I should at once admit 

 that the defenders of the system had greatly strengthened their 

 case by showing that such training could — if not produce — at 

 least not de-troy some of the higher excellencies of mind. But 

 I am afraid that no li^t of fairly successful politicians or lawyers 

 or doctors enjoying fair practice will affect the case in a vital 

 way. Success of an ordinary kind indicates certain valuable 

 qualities, but they are not the qualities, I submit, that should 

 indicate what form the higher education should take. 



If Mr. Dickins writes to arrest the movement that has begun, 

 there are certain points to which I think he should address him- 

 self, — points, that if he can successfully deal with, he will de- 

 prive us remonstrants of much public sympathy. We charge 

 competitive examinations with lowering the higher motives that 

 belong to education, and exercising a bad intellectual and 

 moral influence upon both pupil and teacher. Admitting a 

 good side, — admitting that success in examination implies self- 

 denial and perseverance, and probably such qualities as quick 

 perception, readiness, and good memory, — we still say that 

 in presence of these great examinations the student learns much 

 of what he has to learn in the wrong way. He cultivates 

 what has been called the portative memory. He learns so as 

 to forget. He loads himself with an immense quantity of de- 

 tailed knowledge that no rnan in practical life desires to possess. 

 He learns so as to make a display of knowledge rather than to 

 be the real master of it. He strains after effect. He gives 

 himself up to calculations and dodges. He studies the question 

 of marks. He is learned in summaries, footnotes, and manuals. 

 He does not follow out for himself the points that arouse his 

 intellectual interest, but he throws himself as much as possible 

 upon skilled guidance. He works under pressure, assimilating 

 but a small part of what he takes in, and looking intently for- 

 ward to the day of relief. He is without the great ideals that 

 belong to learning. He is not primarily influenced by the 

 desire of cultivating his own faculties, of learning how to know, 

 of understanding the world in which he has to live ; but by the 

 desire of obtaining a favourable verdict from the man who holds 

 the scales by which his success or his failure is to he determined 

 It is a highly artificial system, and gives throughout a wrong 

 twist to the student's mind, just like the older system of disputa- 

 tion^, which is said to have lowered the sacredness of truth, and 

 ti have led men into every shift and wile to disallow their 

 ignorance or the weakness of their cause. 



Now, these are general statements, and therefore they apply 

 more to certain kinds of examinations than to others ; and to 

 certain characters than to others. It is perfectly true that what 

 Mr. Latham calls art-matter can be tested with less injury to 

 the student than knowledge-matter. That is to say, that you 

 can examine a student more profitably to him- elf in the arts 

 of playing an instiument, performing a dissection, working a 

 mathematical problem, or translating a language, than you can 

 examine him as regards his knowledge of history, literature, 

 philosophy, or natural science. But, in the first place, he would 

 be a bold man who would propose to fashion education accord- 

 ing to the necessities of examination, and only to teach those 

 subjects which lent themselves to examination. In the second 

 place, all arts and all knowledge are so intirnctely allied, that it 

 is easy to see what a narrowing and stunting influence, as re- 

 gards intellectual development, there would IjC in a system that 

 demanded anatomy without physiology, a power of trunslating 

 a language without other knowledge of the history or literature 

 or genius of such language, that demanded even in music simply 

 a powfr of execution, and in mathematics simply an ur.limi'ed 

 ingenuity in working problems on paper. Let anyone think 

 steadily of such treatment of any of these subjects, and he will, 

 I suspect, escape with difficulty from a sense of nightmare ; 

 especially if he think of a whole generation of young minds 

 so manipulated for the sake of the examiners. In the third 

 place, of all the undesirable things to achie. e, a generally recog- 

 nized standard of how to do a thing is the most undesirable. 

 Such a standard you must have, wdren the examined are brought 

 together from all parts of the kingdom to compete in the same 

 examination ; and a better-laid plan for the gradual degradation of 

 an art can scarcely be conceived, \^'e ought by now to have 

 learnt this geat truth, that standards which make for uniformity 

 are the greatest enemies of improvement. 



As regards the teachers, the effect must be as disastrous as 



