Public and prepatory school heads
objected
to an examination
which they thought too difficult
for the average 13-year-old
TROUBLES surrounding the introduction of the new common entrance examination for
the public schools emerged over the weekend at the annual conference in
Cambridge of the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools.
Mr William Stewart, Master of Haileybury and
chairman of the Common Entrance Board, told the conference that the papers set
in June, sat by nearly 6,000 pupils aged 13, were too difficult for many of the
average candidates.
He also disclosed that the board agreed that
the passage set for English comprehension was too difficult and too long, and
that it had led to a drop of 15 per cent in the average mark.
Some of the marks on the total examination were so low, according to one
headmaster, that standards of entry to the public schools would have appeared
“ludicrously” low if they had been disclosed.
Mr Stewart said that the troubles had undermined confidence at a psychological
moment and had caused the doubters to conclude that the new examination would
never compare with the old as a selection test. The doubts were shared both by
the preparatory schools and the Headmasters’ Conference.
He had even heard it said that if the marks were going to be so low, more
schools would be forced to follow Winchester and Westminster in setting their
own examination.
He added: “In my opinion, we have merely encountered a temporary setback. I
think too much has happened too quickly . . . I am sure the direction is right
and that the examination as established can do all the things we require of it.”
Life in the twentieth century for the children of the poor is still a dangerous
business: how dangerous the figures of child mortality and, still more, of child
sickness, reveal. Now, up to six, in colliery village and factory town, in
overcrowded tenement and foetid slum, they are to scramble along unaided.
All the delicate skill which was gradually laying the foundations of a new way
of life for young children is to be suddenly demobilised. All the recent
improvements in the primary schools are to be swept away.
The abolition of all free places above 25 per cent in secondary schools will
ruin the pioneer work of a score of enlightened authorities. That, with higher
fees and fewer schools, will go far to make secondary education what it was
before 1902 — the privilege of the rich. Nor, once the programme is put into
force, will matters stop there. Education is not a machine which can be taken to
pieces and then re-assembled. It is a living organism. When it is starved it
dies. The whole moral of public education will run down.
The Report confronts the nation with a moral issue of a very searching
character. It does not actually state that the children of the workers, like
anthropoid apes, have fewer convolutions in their brains than the children of
the rich. It does not state it because it assumes it. Its authors lament that
'children whose mental capabilities do not justify higher education are
receiving it' — though I do not observe that they propose to reserve endowed
schools and universities for 'children whose mental calibre justifies it.' While
most decent men have viewed with satisfaction the recent considerable
development of secondary education, they deplore it as a public catastrophe.
They think it preposterous that the reduction in the size of classes should give
common children the chance of individual attention. They propose to increase
them, to raise fees, to convert what are now grant-aided secondary schools into
private schools, to abolish the state scholarships which have recently made it
possible for a slightly increased — though still very small — number of
working-class children to pass on to the universities. Their programme in short
is 'back to 1870.'
Swift once suggested killing babies and tanning their skins, which, he shrewdly
observed, would make excellent leather, and could be sold at a profit. Is it
much more humane to 'save' money by reducing height, weight, vitality, and
mental development of children between 5 and 14?
A London secondary school has decided that it
can no longer put up with the "board school" scholarship boy, and has renounced
a considerable annual grant from the London County Council paid for the
education of these boys.
The school is the University College School at
Hampstead, and apparently it has taken action at the behest of the parents of
the paying boys themselves. We are afraid that there is only one explanation
possible. There is a fear, no doubt, among the parents that the "board school
boys" may communicate to the other boys some taint of faulty pronunciation or
inelegant manners.
It is a pity. If these parents valued the right things they would be only too
glad of a stiffening of scholarship boys - that is, picked boys of special
ability from the popular elementary schools. They would see in it a guarantee
that their boys would have the stimulus of a keen intellectual rivalry and a
high standard of earnestness and accomplishment.
One would not like to see our chief Manchester secondary school deprived of the
scholarship boys from the elementary schools. The superficial elegancies and
refinements of life are only too easily learned by boys in and out of school. In
the serious things, they should learn from the beginning that the realm of
intellect and endeavour is a democracy.
The republic of letters, in the widest sense, should be a conception familiar to
them as soon as they are introduced to the world of letters. In the United
States a piece of news like this would arouse vehement public indignation, and
any of the parents and authorities responsible who had any part in public life
would be made to pay the penalty.
The son of the president is expected to sit down on the same public school bench
as the son of the bootblack. It would probably be the better for us if there
were the same democratic jealousy here. For with the attempt to keep particular
secondary schools a preserve of a particular class will always go the attempt to
keep the higher walks of life in the professions and the public services a
preserve for the same class.
Apart from this material danger, the caste system in education is a bad ideal.
It would be far better if the Spartan ideal of poverty were imposed on all the
youth of the nation until their education was finished.
- The 1870 Education Act - which set a leaving age of 12 -
created primary board
schools funded from the rates.
