Excerpt from The Canada Educational Monthly and "School Magazine", Vol. 6: January to December, 1884
An essential element in modern school education is the annual torture of examinations. This is a pinchbeck form of the doctrine of the "survival of the fittest" applied to schools, for on the results of these examinations depends the question of promotion of the pupils and efficiency on the part of teachers. The percentages obtained in these examinations are taken as the indices of the pupil's intellectual growth, and of the power of the teacher to foster and promote such growth.
The highest value is thus affixed to such educational agencies as are able to formulate their results completely at the end of a single term, and the same spirit and principle reach into each day's achievement, each recitation and each single effort on the part of pupil and teacher.
The educational process thus becomes a wrestle with words and formulas that the memory may subject them to its uses for recitation and examination. The age is full of the spirit of reform, but educational reform will be an idle dream so long as reformers and critics laud the successes wrought out by pernicious methods, and, while declaiming against "cramming," adjust their eyeglasses with great complacency, and commend in the highest terms those types of perfection which can only be attained by the most persistent and deadly cramming.
So long as the teacher's professional status with directors and parents depends on the number of pupils promoted and the value of their averages, i so long we may expect that young eyes, opening to a vision of the world and life's possibilities, will be blinded by the dust of words ; so long the vitality of the future will be sacrificed to this much of folly in the schoolroom.
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