The Evening Star TUESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1934. EXAMINATIONS.

Evening Star, Issue 21620, 16 January 1934, Page 6

The Evening Star TUESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1934. EXAMINATIONS.

Discussion of the examination system never ceases. “ If this were only cleared away,” cry a legion of reformers, “ it would be grand.” The latest attack was made only a fortnight ago by the British Medical Research Council after an examination—or what, hateful necessity, must have amounted to very much the same thing, an investigation—of a few thousand of the system’s products. The council was led to the belief that examinations were given undue importance in the British educational system, a complaint that has been made many times in New Zealand. It was found that while handicrafts, music, physical drill, and training in citizenship were highly approved in theory, they were severely disparaged immediately the first public examination loomed on the horizon. The child with the examination faculty won a reputation at school. Boys and girls who were good at handicrafts were described as dull, or “ without ability except in cookery, needlework, music, and drawing.” One remedy for that might be to give more marks in examinations for the discredited subjects, but the council did not recommend so. It is easier to denounce examinations than to find a substitute for them which will not have worse evils, and the best judgment was expressed by Dr Vaughan, president of the British Union of Educational Institutions, when he said recently that the examination, was a dangerous master

but a necessary servant of education. To quote Dr Vaughan further: Apart from the very real help examinations gave in providing signposts for the learner on his way, they had a knack of finding out the idler, the trifler, the skimmer over the surface. Some teachers did not like them, for with almost uncanny power they exposed the lazy teacher who tended to talk himself and not to teach. Some learners did not like them, for they discouraged deliberate idleness and withheld their best rewards from that most subtle form of sluggard who liked to learn by heart and shirked the labour of understanding. Examinations told the teacher where he had been misunderstood; they told the wise _ employer something, but not everything, about the candidate available; they had saved the State from the old evils of - patronage and favouritism ; they pricked a good many bubble reputations, even if they could not claim to assess the inscrutable elements of human success and human greatness. That they had hitherto failed to do this we should be for ever grateful. The qualities of imagination, of judgment, of self-expression, of rapid decision, of taste, of tenacity, defied all human scales.

Dr Macmillan Brown, in making the contentious question the subject of his address to the University Senate this morning, took for granted the necessity of examinations. His concern was how to make the best of them. As his address was chiefly relevant to the University and dealt, largely with the abstract it was not so easy to follow as Dr Vaughan’s pungent analysis, but it bore the marks of a fine breadth of mind in addition to being the product of Jong experience. The professor scarcely hesitated to lay it down that the essential method of teaching is examination— i.e., testing tho students. There are teachers in secondary schools who would support that judgment wholeheartedly. As the system is practised’by them the pupil is not so much taught as tested continually—on the knowledge, he has “mugged up” for himself the night, before. Their testifig, one imagines, can be as mechanical as their instruction, when that is given. They would scarcely • approve such a test system for Dr Macmillan Brown’s reason, that “ here the minds of teacher and taught come into contact, and. the magnetism of the older and stronger mind and character passes into the life of the taught.” But it is not only in testing what has been learned by the student chat this infection of minds, born, as the Chancellor said, of the teacher’s enthusiasm, comes into play. Certainly it was not so when this professor held his chair. It was an interesting discussion into which the Chancellor entered of the different degrees in which different subjects lend themselves to examination. Without extolling any one subject above another the eloquence of his plea for learning languages, especially the classical languages, treating their study in the widest manner, reflected his teaching prime. But oven here there may" be evolution to check our transports, and the professor was more of a partisan in his book of thirty years ago, * Limanora,’ depicting the ideal race of the future. The Limanorans thpught that language, ■ among Western races, had gone but a little way when so few, people could express it aptly and musically, and only then after so much trouble; and when the great writers made such a small band after all the ages. And of this perfected race it was written further how they had done away with all teaching of mathematics. “ Those who devoted themselves to mathematics and the working of abstruse formulas had been found, able as most of them were, to bo the most rigidly unreasonable in the community; they refused to admit that they could be mistaken in any of their judgments or even their opinions; nothing would move them—neither logical argument nor emotional appeal; they assumed that they had found absolute truth, and refused to have compromise.” So they became an inferior caste, and all the work of mathematics was done by machinery, “ I soon came to see the wisdom of the Limanorans in eliminating the study from their scheme of education.’’ /