TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L, 621 
the grips of commercialism and, in this respect, as a nation, we stand alone, 
I believe. Scholarships, prizes of one kind or another, examinations are the 
perpetual feast of British education. Examinations, in fact, are a regularised 
and very lucrative branch of industry—mostly in the hands of certain firms 
who diplomatically shelter themselves under the exgis of this or that educa- 
tional body; but the Universities are the greatest sinners. Valuable as examina- 
tions may be within certain narrow limits and for certain definite purposes, there 
is little doubt that our general ignorance is in no small degree determined by 
our worship of the examination fetish. So long as the system prevails, the 
education of our youth will not be in accordance either with their capacity or 
their requirements but on lines corresponding to those by which prize cattle are 
raised for show—they will be trained to develop some specially catching point. 
The examinations are an inheritance from the literary rule. It is possible to 
test on paper whether a man be ‘ well read’ but faculty as distinct from capacity 
cannot be so determined. What is worse, by forcing students to commit a large 
body of doctrine to memory, the attention becomes fixed merely upon what 
others have done and little time or inclination is left them to acquire a know- 
ledge of method—the faculty of thinking for themselves and applying their 
knowledge. No class suffer more seriously than medical students under the 
system—their preliminary training is all but entirely didactic and the time 
spent upon it all but wasted: we need not wonder that medicine has made so 
little advance, the practitioners being in no way trained in the use of scientific 
method. 
That we should so long have suffered so futile a system to prevail is incom- 
prehensible. German higher education has achieved marvellous results without 
any such provision of rewards and prizes as ours and has given breadth to the 
nation in consequence; in fact, science in Germany is all but a household word, 
as every family in the educated classes has one or more of its members trained 
at the University and the primary function of the Universities is to inculcate 
a knowledge of method : they insist that all who take their degrees shall have 
inklings of the art of inquiry, not mere knowledge. 
To improve our educational system we need to get rid of our blind British 
belief in ‘men of affairs,’ especially in the ‘man of business,’ so-called, really 
the man of commerce, as persons capable of ordering everybody’s affairs and 
everybody’s business. The commercial man, the financier or the lawyer, would 
never think of calling us in to manage his proper business—why should he be 
thought competent to manage ours? Results show that he is not, as my 
argument in this address would lead us to expect would be the case. 
No one will seek, for one moment, to minimise the progress made or fail to 
recognise that infinite credit is due to those who have controlled the work of 
education thus far; hitherto, however, progress has been made in providing 
accommodation and getting scholars to school and college: the art of teaching 
has made no corresponding advance—nor will it, I believe, until the onus is 
cast more directly upon the teachers and they are forced to exercise greater 
forethought in the direction of collective action—until they are placed in a 
position to be sole managers of their own affairs and called upon to row together 
as entirely self-chosen crews. At home, excepting at our ancient Universities, 
“Governing Bodies’ are paramount everywhere—not the teachers: and too often 
the sense of responsibility and power of initiative of the teacher are further 
diminished by the interposition of a Principal, who may be a man of all affairs 
except that in hand—the work of teaching. If rumour speak truly, the College 
President is too often the bar to progress in the United States of America. 
It is well known that the exercise of responsibility promotes thought and begets 
the sense and power of accepting responsibility—the opposite is none the less 
true. 
Personally, I have had special experience as to what can be done under a 
system involving collective action and have had foretastes of what might be 
done by sympathetic interlocking and correlation of courses: I have no doubt of 
its superiority : nevertheless, I recognise that such co-operative action may be 
‘agin Nature.’ 
In some way, we must learn to debate our doings more freely and not to 
flinch at fair criticism. Whatever the faults of our English public school 
