DISPLACING THE PROFICIENCY EXAMINATION

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 23, 22 October 1936, Page 10

DISPLACING THE PROFICIENCY EXAMINATION

In the Education Act Amendment Bill, introduced in the House of Representatives yesterday, there is a clause which may give rise to considerable discussion. The general effect of it is to abolish the qualifying examination • for free secondary education, and, with.it, certificates of proficiency or competency. In future the qualification . will be that the pupil has “qualified in accordance with regulations. These regulations have yet to be made, but it may be presumed that head-teachers will be invested with power to say whether a pupil s general record entitles him to go forward to the secondary school stage of his education. In effect, it is the substitution of the accrediting system for the examination system, a desirable reform. Comparisons made of the results of experiments in the method of accrediting, and of the proficiency examination, revealed that a greater number of pupils were* rejected under the accrediting system than under the examination fest.' This is a reform upon which teaching opinion is united, and is in line with modern developments. It should enable the primary school teacher to reorientate his work, and liberalise his methods within the framework of the syllabus. From this state of freedom, however, the pupil will pass into the secondary stage of his school years only to experience conditions from which the Bill proposes to relieve the primary stage, and so on into the university stage. . It is perhaps as well that a reform to which the Bill is a concession in principle should evolve slowly. The emancipation of education in general from the routine prescribed by examination syllabuses should, however, be the aim. Until it has been achieved both teacheis and school inspectors, themselves the product of routine study, will be unconsciously inclined toward the old methods. What is required is a recalibration of teaching mentality, an objective only to be reached by an extension throughout the whole system of the reform now proposed for the primary schools. The process would require at least a generation for its completion.