Leading Articles in the Reviews. 



83 



EXAMINATIONS AND EXAMINERS. 



Where the Evils of the System Lie. 



The Principal of the Derby Training College— the 

 Rev. A. B. Bater— contributes to the May number 

 of the Parents' Review a. sensible article on examinations 

 and examiners. 



LIFE ONE LONG EXAMINATION. 



The beginnings of the examination system, he says, 

 are to be traced back to the Garden of Eden, .^dam 

 and Eve fell below the standard required. Cain and 

 Abel likewise underwent an ordeal of some kind. 

 Every test which life generally puts before us is, in its 

 way, an examination. 



THE DEAD LEVEL OF UNIFORMITY. 



Teachers dealing with pupils cannot pass them from 

 stage to stage without tests of some kind, but the 

 formal examination imposed by some outside authority 

 is open to grave objections. In the first place, they are 

 apt to produce a dead level of uniformity in the matter 

 of the syllabus, and a system of uniformity is not con- 

 ducive to national greatness. The best safeguard 

 would be a large number of examining bodies. A 

 graver danger is uniformity in method. .Schools are 

 judged by their success in these examinations, and 

 teachers are forced more or less to become crammers. 

 A third danger is the crushing out of originality. The 

 number of questions set should be doubled or trebled, 

 so that the examinees could find a sufllcient number 

 to allow them to show that their time had not been 

 wasted. This would prevent a teacher trying to touch 

 on every point and allow him leisure to deal satis- 

 factorily with the portions of the work in which his 

 special interest or that of his pupils lay, and thus 

 learning would be pursued rather for its own sake than 

 for an examination. 



THE WRONG TYPE OF QUESTION. 



Another evil is the danger of the clever pupils 

 receiving most attention. Mr. E. Holmes says the 

 present system of examinations tends to deceit. He 

 condemns the practice of studying the questions set at 

 previous examinations, but if examiners are so incom- 

 petent as to set similar questions year after year, why 

 keep such examiners ? 



In many subjects the tendency of the examiner is 

 to overlook the fact that true education is to call out 

 thought and give power to the mind. The questions 

 ask for mere facts, but facts are valueless unless the 

 learner is trained to reason with them. Examinations 

 should not concern themselves so much with facts, as 

 with the power to use them. 



WANTED— TRAINED INSPECTORS AND EXAMINERS. 



Teachers are obliged to undergo courses of training ; 

 i)Ul what of examiners ? How many of them could 

 pass such an examination as that for the Teachers' 

 Diploma of the University of Ciunbridgc ? How many 

 have made any study of foreign methods of education ? 



The great majority undergo no training before begin- 

 ning their work. No examiner or inspector should be 

 allowed to start his official life till he had had some 

 practical experience in teaching, and had studied the 

 works of great educators, and had given some guarantee 

 that his work had been well done. Mr. Bater is a 

 believer in inspections and examinations, but thinks 

 they should be of a reformed type, and carried out by 

 regenerated inspectors and examiners. 



THE RULE OF THE FAT AND 

 THE THIN. 



In the Lady's Realm for July Mr. Mostyn Bird 

 writes on fat and thin. He says : — 



The Finger of Fate is stretched out to touch one here and 

 there, and the decree has gone forth that such an one s/ia/l if 

 Fat. There are qualities, attributes, ambitions, preferences 

 that must be encased in granules and globules or they perish. 

 There are tempers, enthusiasms, energies that cannot subsist 

 under a blanket of granules. The Fat and the Thin are far 

 apart as the poles in tastes and ideas. If they are of the 

 opposite sex they instinctively gravitate together ; and if of the 

 same sex they swing violently apart. It is they who have 

 moved the world : it is their loves and their rivalries that have 

 beaten out history. 



Why should we be surprised when we find th.-it Fatness is a 

 distinguishing mark of the Great Man among sav.age tribes?' 

 We may confidently predict that astuteness will always be a 

 quality that goes with Fat. Besides this, there is a certain 

 decorative fitness about fat Princes. 



THE RF.STLESS THIN MAN. 



The Thin Man is emotional, enthusi.istic. lie spares neither 

 himself nor others in his unceasing quest for Truth and Beauty. 

 The Thin have been the firebrands of the world. Bu Idha, who 

 set the feet of the East upon the Perfect Road to Heaven : 

 Mohammed, who proclaimed the Holy War, and the virtue of 

 deeds : I.uther, who preached the virtue of faith — all these are 

 of the type. While Don Quixote was thin, and still is thin 

 wherever we find him in the world of to-day. 



But was Luther thin ? 



We sec that our greater Kings have been fat. William the 

 Conqueror was a large man ; the corpulent Ilcnty VIII. 

 was one of our most astute rulers ; Elizabeth w.is a stout 

 woman, so was Queen Anne, and Queen Victoria. In our 

 days of prosperity we have been ruled by fat people. The 

 unprepossessing Henries were not fat, the Stuarts were thin, the 

 Hanoverians were of medium size ; our troublous times have 

 come when such were on the Throne. 



Cardinal Richelieu was the thin man ; Louis Grand 

 the plump man. Napoleon, with his short bull neck, 

 broad shoulders, protruding paunch. w;is toppled over 

 by three thin men — Pitt, Nelson, Wellington. 



FAT AND THIN ON THE ENGLISH THRONE. 



The writer concludes by saying : — 



For long now our English Throne has witnessed an unequal 

 mating of avoirdupois. Though William III. was thin, .Mary, 

 his wife, was plump as a pigeon ; while William IV. was 

 round and rosy-faced, Adelaide, his spouse, was thin and flat 

 as a pancake : Queen Victoria's Consort was a spare man ; 

 King Eilwaril VII. mated his heaviness with the slim grace o( 

 Queen Alex.andria. Ami it .ilmost seems as if some mysterious 

 result of the limiting of the powers of the monarchy under 

 modern conditions were at work in Europe to-day, when one 

 notes the thin Kings and their large and buxom (Juccns who 

 adorn the Thrones of Great Britain, Italy, Spain and Germany. 



