ON SCIENCE IN SCHOOL CERTIFICATE EXAMINATIONS. 445 



and Art Department were the most influential — played an essential part 

 in the renascence of secondary education for boys and its virtual creation 

 for girls. At a time when secondary schools were greatly isolated, when 

 inspection was inadequate or non-existent, and when teachers went to 

 their posts without any professional preparation for their work, these 

 examinations performed a very valuable service in defining curricula and 

 setting up standards against which the schools could measure their 

 achievements. In the rapid multiplication of secondary schools brought 

 about by the Education Act of 1902, public examinations continued to 

 perform that service, and performed it still more efiectually when the 

 present scheme of approved First School Examinations brought a degree 

 of order and unity into a field where there had grown up a distracting 

 state of chaos. Nevertheless, there are certain defects inherent in a 

 universal system of external examinations, and the improvement in 

 secondary schools which the English system has done so much to foster, 

 has itself brought those defects into prominence and occasioned a wide- 

 spread demand for their removal. 



The fundamental trouble is that an external examination, especially 

 one intended to be taken in a large number of schools, almost necessarily 

 contravenes the basic principle that examinations should follow and be 

 adapted to the teaching given and not dictate its form and range. While 

 there are, as we have admitted, circumstances in which the inversion of 

 this natural relation may be tolerable and even beneficial, it is bound 

 in the long run to be harmful. It tends (as an experienced critic has said) 

 to ' cramp the style ' of schools in which circumstances favour good and 

 original teaching, and it encourages a wasteful misdirection of effort where 

 conditions are difficult. In short, the best possible external exanunation 

 could be adjusted only clumsily to the widely varying character of the 

 schools in a large area, and would be bound to influence prejudicially the 

 education of many individual pupils. 



The present First School Examination is thought by many competent 

 judges to be seriously defective in both these ways. It has, for instance, 

 been pointed out by the Association of Headmistresses, in a memorandum 

 submitted to the Board of Education in March, 1927, that although the 

 examination is intended to test the successful completion of a general 

 secondary education, large numbers of pupils in most schools never take 

 it, and that if the purpose of the examination is to test the average pupil 

 from the average school at about the age of sixteen years, it does not 

 fulfil its purpose. The memorandum included recommendations for 

 widening the subjects of the examination, for the simplification of the 

 questions and for greater opportunities for practical work. It appears 

 clear from the foregoing that the School Certificate Examination should 

 be so amended as to fit the changed conditions, or, if this be impossible, 

 that the School Certificate in its present form should cease to be the 

 normal objective of the average boy or girl. There can be little doubt 

 that among the factors which have produced this unsatisfactory situation 

 two have special importance. The first is that, in spite of a liberal choice 

 of ' options,' the scheme of the examination presupposes, and accordingly 

 imposes on the schools, a type of education which fails to stimulate the 

 intellectual energies of many boys and girls whose ability is not of the 



