Welsh Journals

his summer holiday, not to seeking know- ledge in Germany or health in Tyrol, but to filling his scanty purse. He has read through ten thousand pages of script at so many pages per minute for so many pence per script, while before his dim eyes the names-or is it the index numbers-of the bodiless pupils pass impartially. The Central Welsh Board is the most perfect machine in the world was the recent boast of one of its admirers. If this be true, then it is most important that the nation should think and speak of it in terms of machinery and mechanical values, and not in terms of character and human values. The damaging thing is not its competitive examinations, but the popular exaltation of them in a hundred annual prize distri- butions as the supreme test of educational excellence. We have read hundreds of testimonials given by teachers of primary, secondary, and university grade, but we hardly recall one where it was frankly and without apology stated that the bearer had failed to pass most of his examinations. There is always a sub-conscious attempt to gloss over such failure, and an implication that the examination was the crucial test of the candidate's quality to fill the desired post. The examinational success is always in the forefront of the testimonial. This mental attitude leads in turn to further damage. There is a tendency to regard the children of the nation as falling into two classes on the results of written examinations, and to imagine that one-a small percentage-is "fit for secondary education and that the other is not. There are some 400,000 children in Wales receiving primary education, and some 15,000 receiving secondary educa- tion. The enormous shrinkage at the second stage is not a matter mainly of brains but mainly of money. Tens of thousands of those who drop out could profit by adolescent education were they given the chance. Our elementary system rests on a democratic basis, but the founda- tion of the secondary system is financial and examinational, and has little direct relation to the educational needs of the nation as a whole. In a true democracy there would be a highway not a ladder. A further effect of the present selective stress laid upon written examinations is that education is regarded not as a discipline of mind and character, nor as a lever wherewith to raise a whole class, but as the most effective instrument for lifting a child of the working-class into the middle- class. There is an implied grievance against Society if a bright boy from a secondary school fails to find a soft-handed job and has to resume his father's pick or plough. Similarly the attainment of a degree, the fond mother believes, should and must inevitably lead not only to respectability but to remunerative respec- tability. Surely, she urges, that is what degrees are for. The commercial value and the educa- tional value of education, if we may so put it, are constantly being confused, and there is a strong economic temptation to subordinate the lower to the higher for the sake of immediate gain and distant loss. Here is the melancholy confession which Sir Edward Anwyl made last month Possibly it (i.e. the passion for the intellectual life) is not so strong among the rank and file of Welsh students as a superficial observer might imagine, for the vast majority of students in Wales are primarily anxious to obtain their degrees or similar credentials. They are often, when most conscien- tious in their studies, exceedingly averse to the study of anything that appears to be outside their course, and the minds of many of them consequently tend to remain, while they are in college, in much the same grooves as when they were at school. This is one reason why the great majority of Welsh students are entirely indifferent, for example, to philosophy and to Greek and Celtic studies, unless