STRICTER TESTS FOR DANISH UNIVERSITY

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6867, 23 March 1929, Page 3

STRICTER TESTS FOR DANISH UNIVERSITY

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES IN SCHOOL S/STEM ALSO INTRODUCED BY GOVERNMENT. COPENHAGEN, Jan. 22. M. Byskov, Minister of Education, is introducing sweeping reforms in the Danish school system. It is generally admitted that the present law, of April 24, 1903, works unsatisfactorily in several respects. Tho new plan, which is under tho consideration of a representative committee, will make access to matriculation at the University of Copenhagen more difficult by a more stringent examination, thereby automatically reducing the number of students, which is admittedly excessive at present. A serious drawback to the present intermediate school regulations is that the parents, when the child is only 11, shall decide upon the course of the child’s future, more especially as regards the four years of the intermediate school. According to the new plan, parents need not decide this till tho child is 14. The teaching of the intermediate school pupils according to tho new plan, ends at the fourteenth year, as in the national school without any examination enabling them to enter the non-academic school (two years') or the gymnasium (four years), and it is intended that this examination shall be sufficiently stringent so as to bring about a more careful sifting of the “candidates,” and in consequence a reduction in the number of students. At present any fairly clever pupil can pass straight from the national school into intermediate school and from there to the gymnasium. This very democratic system has proved itself to have some drawbacks.*