PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. GJ5 



the past been enabled to receive an education in the schools, and indeed in the 

 universities, of the rich are, I am afraid, coming to be gravely abused. 

 Scholarships and exhibitions were designed to remedy the disadvantage of the 

 poor, not to accentuate the privilege of the rich. To confer pecuniary rewards 

 upon boys and girls whose parents can well afford to dispense with them is to 

 foster a double abuse. It is to spend money where money is not needed, and 

 to withhold money where it is needed. Yet in the public schools, and to some 

 extent in the universities, scholarships and exhibitions tend to become the 

 perquisites of the rich. In the field of secondary education the competition for 

 scholarships and exhibitions has become so severe that scarcely any boy in the 

 examination for them stands a chance of success, except at the cost of three or 

 four years spent beforehand in an expensive preparatory school. But as rich 

 boys are the only boys whose parents can afford this preparatory expenditure, 

 it follows that rich boys are generally the successful candidates for scholarships 

 and exhibitions. The evil is scarcely capable of exaggeration. It were bad 

 enough that a rich boy, if he competed on equal terms with poor boys, should 

 obtain a pecuniary reward which they do, and he does not, need for educational 

 purposes. But when it is the rich alone who enjoy the opportunity, or the most 

 favourable opportunity, of winning the pecuniary rewards which were justly 

 intended for the poor, a case for drastic reform seems to be made out. 



At the ancient universities the sons of rich parents, although they are 

 generally eligible for such prizes as scholarships and exhibitions, do not possess 

 the same advantage in competing for them. More, too, has been done in the 

 universities than in the public schools to provide means by which the sons of 

 rich parents may enjoy the distinction without the emolument of a scholarship. 

 But it is an urgent matter that alike in the colleges of the universities and in the 

 public schools the pecuniary benefits, by which alone deserving boys can rise 

 above their hereditary surroundings, whether bursaries, exhibitions, or scholar- 

 ships, should be strictly confined to the sons of the poor. 



Here perhaps it is permissible, as it is certainly natural, to enter a protest 

 against the established tyranny of examinations. Examination was once the 

 obvious remedy for favouritism. But a mere examination in knowledge can 

 never test some of the highest qualities which fit men and women for the 

 service of the State. In India even more than in Great Britain the failure of 

 examinations is conspicuous. A facility for answering questions upon paper 

 is easily associated with grave defects of intellect and character. In proportion 

 then as favouritism ceases to be a public danger, examinations will, I think, lose 

 something of their fatal authority. It is difficult to doubt that in the future 

 candidates for public office will be required to pass a qualifying examination, but 

 that the election will, at least in some degree, turn upon qualities which are not 

 so easily tested by examination in writing. 



Nor is this the whole evil. There is only too much danger that examinations 

 may create a false ideal of educational success. The object of all education, as 

 I have said, is to prepare pupils for the civic duties of mature life. It is not 

 the intellectual attainment of the young at the age of thirteen or eighteen or 

 even twenty-two, it is rather the service which they render to the State in the 

 maturity of their powers, which is the proof of the teacher's influence upon 

 their lives. The preparatory schools which have become such important features 

 in the field of secondary education have done much useful work. The decadence 

 of bullying and perhaps of other evils in public schools is largely due to the 

 elimination of quite young boys from public-school life. The years of a boy's 

 life from nine to twelve, but not, I think, to a later age, may well be reserved 

 for the preparatory school, as the years from thirteen to eighteen for the public 

 school. But the forcing process which is sometimes applied to young boys in 

 preparatory schools, not only in their lessons but in their games, is fraught 

 with serious peril. A preparatory-school master, if he thinks of his own school 

 alone, may do even worse harm than a public-school master by sacrificing the 

 future of his pupils to the present. When I was a headmaster, I knew of one 

 preparatory-school master who tried to win boys to his school by offering what 

 he called pre-preparatory scholarships to boys of eight or nine years of age, in 

 the hope that these boys might after a time serve as advertisements for his pre- 

 paratory school by winning scholarships from it at the public schools. But 

 preparatory-school masters are not alone in fault. It is, I am afraid, easy to 



