EXAMINATIONS

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 September 1928, Page 10

EXAMINATIONS

PREMIUM ON MENTAL PRECOCITY

Writing in the “Quarterly Review, the Rev. the Hon. Edward Lyttelton, says:—-“Two most capable and enlightened ladies run a school of high repute. (I mean by the last words a school where the evil effects of hustle,’ racket and over-pressure are so far as possible mitigated.) They discoursed with eloquence and conviction on the mental dissipation, the want of leisure, or of any quiet time for growth. Does it need a profound study of psychology to pronounce such a travesty of education to be sheer insanity? Why, then, does it continue., There are several influences at work, but the most baneful and potent is the parents’ insistence that their girls shall pass the School Certificate. “But what of the boys? The difference is this: Boys, who have always refused to be crammed, secretly despise education except, as a means of pelf. Girls, who have accepted cramming and are damaged by it, believe in it and become teachers. It is to be noted that, the mischief of a congested curriculum leading up to an important examination consists not only in general mental dissipation, but more definitely in the necessity, for practical purposes, that the pupils should qualify for the examination, not by a tranquil, joyous process of selffeeding, but by being forced to imbibe facts prematurely; that is, before the mind can relate them to experience. .

“That is called cramming, and it is the most serious and the most univeisal mischief of the helter-skelter multiplication of subjects; and the mischief would tell upon boys just as much as upon girls, were it not. thal. the loimei are endued with a greater power of resistance fostered by a, long tradition of antagonism between teacher and class. “When he is bored by being crammed, a young Anglo-Saxon of the male sex can and does shut his mind and takes refuge in torpor. Thus he is saved most effectually from overstrain; so much so that I doubt if there is any authentic record of one of our boys overworking himself at school. But along with a grand heritage of strong nerves he grows to hate learning. Everything possible is done to make his school life happy and healthy; but by seventeen years of age the love of learning foi its own sake has well-nigh disappeared for OVGT. “The precise effect on girls is first that cases of overstrain are not unknown; but everyone is on guard against the danger. Next, they are singularly free from the traditional indocility which most middleaged Publie School men look on as part of the nature-of things. Girls allow themselves to be crammed without a murmur of protest. The result is hai.dly to be described as mental indigestion, for indigestion suggests pain, and the grievous fact is that a sort of intei - nal chaos is induced which is accompanied not by pain but by a dim sense of dutifulness. “Morally there is something heroic about their endurance; but at the age of eighteen the High School product is a maiden whose mind has never never been allowed to assimilate naturally and repeatedly the varied knowledge which has been piled upon it. It is true that as the months go by the silent priestess, Oblivion, stealing in upon the disorder, performs her task of ‘pure ablution’ like the sea. around ‘earth’s shores’; and ,by twenty-five the young women are as ignorant as the young men. But their minds have lost freshness. “They bear the marks of a long and unavailing struggle; and even where the positive evidence is. less decisive there is no doubt whatever about the negative failure. The facts—the information —have not been retained; if they had been, the results would have been more deplorable still. In any case, it is a sorry defence of a system to say that its main object has not been achieved.

“As to the remedial measures, there is little danger, indeed, of any overprecipitate reform. It is not that educationists are unable in theory to contemplate change, or that there is any general contentment with things as "they are: bu’t there is a widespread moral paralysis in presence of an organised system of examination tests so complicated and inelastic, so buttressed up by recent tradition and apparently symptomatic of efficiency, that any change has come .to be regarded as quixotic and utopian. But if. permanent immobility in this grave matter comes to be taken for granted, we are undone. .

“The evils may be classified thus: (1) A spirit of rivalry and self-con-sciousness is engendered among children and continues to poison the true motive and the actual process of learning all through adolescence. (2) Duradolescence the training is chaotic and meaningless for the boys, and. often overstrains the girls, and for both produces a shallow and superficial mentality. (3) As selection-tests for professions, examinations inevitably pyt a premium on precocity .... “So ' far as possible, every pupil should be allowed to imbibe knowledge at his own pace: that is, the one salutary safeguard against over-pressure and distaste for learning is that the mediocre and the slow should be allowed to take in what they can with, out. being buffeted, chaffed, penalised, or convinced of their inferiority by recurrent competitions. As to the constitutionally inert boys, a certain number of whom at fifteen will probably be irresponsive, a policy allowing of some temporary marking-time will be advisable.

“The slow boy, too, though he will not be a monument of learning when he reached eighteen, will know something; and what he knows will be naturally and spontaneously acquired. The faculty of apprehending, which no boy is wholly without, and which is entirely distinct from the faculty of being passively crammed, will have been continuously exercised instead of being atrophied. “Above all, they will go out into the world with a reasonable amount of confidence in themselves and with some disposition to go on learning, by using their minds in the right way, linking the new to the old. On girls the effect will be no less beneficial; indeed, much more so, as the mischief has told more banefully upon them. In short, the time has come for a clear and decisive choice between two psychological theories offered for our acceptance. The child’s mind is either a. passive receptacle into which unsorted facts may be poured to be retained for subsequent, use, or it is a delicate and mysterious organism con-, structed so as to be injured by cramming, and boundlessly benefited by. self-activity .... “Examinations must be employed for purposes of selection; but. it is a mere counsel of prudence that they should never again afford the only criterion of a young man’s fitness for important undertakings,”