SCHOOL DEMONSTRATIONS AND THEIR VALUE.

Lake County Press, Issue 34, 26 January 1872, Page 2

SCHOOL DEMONSTRATIONS AND THEIR VALUE.

The following remarks on public school examinations are from the Melbourne Age, and deserve attention : It may be seiiously doubted if the public examination of schools is not an injury rather than a benefit to the large majority of scholars, for whose ostensible glorification such exhibitions are got up at this season of the year. Anything to which the forcing system is applied has necessarily an unhealthy growth, and education is no exception to the rule. It is quite as easy in youth to excite the brain to unnatural activity to accomplish some difficult school task, as it is in later life to stimulate a dormant faculty to unwonted effort to compass a great mental design. But if it be easy, it by no means follows that it is desirable to probe young brains too deeply, to bring to the surface for private profit and public gratification valuable resources that would certainly bs ths better for slower deve'o rvn m ori * Many a promising lad has ruined his constitution and made for himself a miserable manhood by a long and arduous mental struggle to realise all that exacting masters have required of him. It is the grand object of a teacher's life to obtain possession of an active youthful mind that is capable of being worked up to any degree of pressure. It is upon such subjects that a master employs the full measure of his ability , because, in the first place, they are taught more easily than lads whose brain power is less easily excited and secondly, because it is desirable the •chool should furnish to the world

brilliaut examples of its roaster's skill, and here are the best and easiest materials to hand for the purpose. We shall, no doubt, be told that this is an unjust aspersion on the general character ofteuchers, and a defence of the lazy fellows who refuse to have their mental growth forced, in much the same manner as giant melons and cucumbers are produced by ambitious cultivators in another soil. It is no aspersion on the teachers, save in so far as they may be affected by the larger and more important question at issue. Learning is a trade that is carried on under similar conditions to every other trade. Teachers, like gardeners, have to compete keenly with each other, and he who can produce to the public the most showy article is the man who obtains the largest share of patronage. • • • • li ' be were to pick out for public exhibition lads whose qualities were not brilliant, but who may nevertheless, have valuable menial* powers that lie dormant, simply because contact with the world's affairs has not yet called them into play, he would find it said of him » That man is no teacher, if the miserable exhibition we have just witnessed is all the result of his labors." Teachers know this and perfectly understand tbat they must, at any cost, make a brilliant show, or their bread will assuredly pass away from them. It is .society that is responsible for the system, and teachers are less to be condemned than are parents and guardians who demand educational results that, so far as bovs concerned, are only to be gained for the tew at the expense of the many. The public examination aud speech-day is the\great school advertisement of the perhaps no better means could be found of exhibiting to the world a teacher's qualifications. But it has a demoralising effect on the bovs themselves. It leads them to attach'a fictitious value ,to public applause, to feel that they are cut out for the bar, the pulpit, politics, or the stage, when probably they would fail in any one of th-se pursuits, yet make successful tradesmen, or clever mechanics, or artisans. .... So longas school examinations were conducted on the old method there was a better guarantee that lads would become in their day good citizens, and according to their natural abilities take their proper places in soc.ety. The teacher had no inducement to bestow more care upon a genius than a dullard, and therefore whatever ability the latter possessed had a better chance of being brought out and cultivated, wh le industry aud intelligent application to st-uly carri-d us own reward more surely then than uow. If the dux of the school received m those days no public eclat, neither did the equally hard working, but less successful boy Hud himself on the same corner of the public platform with leliows who had possibly m:,de no effort to distiogui>h themselves, nor was he subject to unmerited parental censure because he made possibly a less brilliant appearance beforeu fashionable audience than some of his more polished and conhdeut contemporaries. If , arents in this matter, brought to bear the same rules of analysis that they apply to the ordinary affairs of life, they would soon see that, so far as their children are concerned, public examinations and juvenile speech-making are conductive neither to their mental, moral, nor physical advantage.