Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/59

Rh, much more likely to injure than to encourage good taste, and patiently submitted to only by those who never read literature as literature at all.

If too precise insistence upon arbitrarily assigned tasks is thus fatal to both vital teaching and scholarly interest, rigid limitation to brief and uniform examination periods is equally fatal to thought. We profess the desire to train students to coherent, logical ratiocination, to supplant the capricious mental spurt with the steady stream of thought. But the written examination, as now carried on, places at a marked disadvantage the intellect that has learned to work with deliberate discrimination. At a given moment the examination athlete darts his eye swiftly through the question paper, searching for some familiar sign, and at its sight dashes off the answer that is waiting for that particular provocation. No adequate time for reflection, no allowance for individual or accidental variations! The mind that refuses to operate in this reckless fashion is not 'ready'! The student who has read widely rather than crammed recently, is not 'ready'! Meanwhile, the sprinter equipped for just these spurts, without real power of thought, observation or concentration, satisfied with superficial compliance with requirement—or less—moves nimbly from topic to topic, touches lightly here and there, and with a 'make-believe' that the stranger can not penetrate, presents as the hammer falls a smooth and more or less finished result.

Such conditions are so far from promoting readiness of thought that they simply negative all thinking. They substitute a lightning reflex for the deliberate working of the higher thought centers. I can not believe that top-speed has, even in practical life, the importance here attributed to it by implication; and if it be urged that only 'average' speed is desired, I answer that the supposed process of averaging is an absurdity. The slower intellects refuse to be averaged with the swifter. Each has the sacred right of individuality, and no educational effort can be considered sound that suffers one to waste part of its natural superiority, while it endeavors to compel the other to be something that it is not and, except in a limited way, can never become. Doubtless speed will increase with the formation of a thorough and logical mental habit. But the seriousness of the occasion, the liability to temporary fluctuation, which the examiner can not distinguish from permanent characteristic, and the importance of ascertaining things of infinitely greater significance than the boy's ability to work under pressure for a time, combine to render the present method both unfair and unwise.

I have referred to the 'Jack-be-nimble, Jack-be-quick,' type of examination athlete; let me not overlook his heavy-laden brother—the hoplite to whom the thing is as earnest and important as it