SECONDARY SCHOOLS EXAMINATION.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIV, Issue 13936, 19 December 1905, Page 6

SECONDARY SCHOOLS EXAMINATION.

The examination season is. already well advanced and by the end of the week examinees, both young and old, will bo practising patience while they wait for “ results.” There is, it seems, no escape from the written examination for the apportionment of . offices and emoluments that have to be awarded in competition, but we should be sorry to see the colony more examina-tion-ridden than it is now. Examinations, especially competitive examinations, beget cramming, and cramming is the worst enemy of education. At the same time, we are heartily glad to find that the Government has at last decided to move in the matter of supervising secondary school education. The tendency in the secondary schools has been strongly in the direction of cramming of late. Tlie local High Schools, for example, have for some years past been only partially examined by independent examiners and this year there was no independent test of any kind. The result here, and in other centres, has been that classes preparing for the competitive examinations have received special attention, while the general school classes have been left to drift along. The public, too, have been allowed to judge of the quality of a school by the successes gained in open examinations and have had no means of ascertaining the efficiency of the teaching in the all-important lower grades. There is another aspect of the question, too, that needs attention. The secondary schools have been staffed largely with untrained teachers. Methods and discipline are in many oases had, and just now tho seedhdary institutions of the colony are undergoing a severe test. They are receiving large bodies 'of pupils direct from the primary schools and in a fair proportion of cases the new pupils have not the benefit of strict parental supervision and home training. At the primary schools the excellence of tho discipline no doubt counteracts any tendency to mental or moral slackness on the part of the scholars, but, under the looser discipline of the secondary schools bad, tendencies are not slow to reveal themselves. There is plenty of work, therefore, before the now inspector appointed by the Department. The selection of Dr Anderson, of course, wall bo widely commended. Indeed, we do not know that a bettor appointment could have been made in the colony. We hope that .the inspection to be instituted will be more than formal and that it will involve the testing of teachers’ discipline and methods as well as

the book-learning of the pupils. The tone of a school is always as important as the mental training, because the pupils surely should be sent out equipped with high codes of morality and honour as well as with encyclopedic brains.