L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 199 
of music and drama, the practice of handicrafts, of arts, of gardening, 
of all kinds of performances which are personal, not mechanical. It 
must set before the young the infinitely various ways of spending time 
worthily ; and must encourage an attitude towards books and reading 
which few of our examination-ridden youth attain. For all these things 
are the activities of free minds, not of those which accept unthinkingly 
everything which is superficially attractive and is therefore accepted by 
crowds. Without some such influence from education, we can expect 
only passive minds, barren of ideas, and unable to rise by freedom of 
thinking to meet the perpetually changing needs of the world in which they 
are called upon to live. Moreover, unless our young citizens become 
accustomed to activities worthy of free minds, before the great increase of 
leisure which is commonly predicted is upon us, we are likely then to see 
nothing but greater crowds thronging the picture palaces, dance halls, 
race-courses and football grounds, and degenerating as those must whose 
only interest is in exciting and profitless kinds of pleasure. 
As I have spoken of examinations, I had better say explicitly that I 
rank examinations, not in themselves, but as they are treated in most 
schools at the present time, among the worst enemies to education in 
freedom of thought and independence of judgment. Examinations can 
be, and should be, invaluable aids to education ; but it is a condition 
of this that they should be only an incident in the work of the school, 
testing at convenient points the work of both teachers and pupils, and 
really, and not merely by profession, following and not directing the 
curriculum. ‘Their usefulness is undoubted in training the young mind 
to do what it will continually have to do afterwards—viz. to bring whatever 
knowledge and resource it may have to bear on a particylar point at a 
given moment, and in this both intellectual and moral qualities are in- 
volved. But where the whole work of the school is planned to cover or 
lead up to the syllabus of some particular examination ; where every 
subject is studied at a rush in order to work into the pupils’ minds what 
are virtually prescribed answers to questions which may almost be said 
to be prescribed—so narrow is the range from which they can be drawn ; 
where the teacher does not dare to encourage his pupils to think ; where 
he cannot go at his own pace and cover in his own way the ground which 
he can effectively cover, for fear of the effect on the statistics by which the 
Local Education Authority, knowing little of education, judges the efficiency 
of his school and his own fitness for promotion, or by which the employer, 
knowing even less, judges the suitability of individuals for purposes never 
contemplated by the examination authorities—there examinations are a 
very mischievous thing. Examining bodies may do their best, as those of 
which I know anything honestly and untiringly do, to consult the teachers 
in schools and keep closely in touch with their curriculum, so as to keep 
the examination requirements well within it, and leave ample margin for 
generous methods of teaching and for work altogether outside the examina- 
5 It is painful to think of the thousands of boys and girls whose books are 
taken away from them so soon as the examination, in preparation for which they 
Were used, is over. 
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