Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/61

Rh the sort of cram that disappears the day after the examination and risks the loss of all pleasure in history will provide instantaneous knowledge of such facts as 'The attitude of the Achæan league toward Perseus of Macedon; punishment inflicted by Rome for this; Polybius, the historian, as connected with this punishment,' etc. All this depends on the merest mechanical memory, but there is more to come. In the same thirty minutes, he is to display quick-action historic insight; for, as an original effort, he must 'tell the story of Appius Claudius as his political enemies would tell it, then as his political friends would tell it.' Now if the answer to this is merely a repetition of a previous attempt it is worse than worthless; if devised at the moment, assuming that the candidate has what he can not have—sufficient information at his command to warrant an honest answer—it must necessarily be superficial. The companion paper, in Greek history, requires the student in an equally brief half hour, after a varied memory performance, to 'argue that the Athenians were or were not wise in their final rejection of Alcibiades in 407,' and to tell 'what was the opinion of the comic poet Aristophanes in 405 about the wisdom of recalling him.' One can hardly go far wrong in recognizing the same keen educational intelligence in two previous papers, one calling mainly for the history of Capua, the other for the history of the Messenian wars. The display of such learned and irrelevant trifles is taken to indicate a proper knowledge of Greek and Roman history; and a teacher who is really trying to train boys must employ the history-tool so as to satisfy such tests! In truth this attempted draft on the historical imagination is but a transparent imposition, deceiving, not the children, who know the hollowness of the 'make-believe,' but the learned scholars who gravely require boys and girls after a study of the outlines of ancient history to 'compare Plato and Aristotle,' and in the same two hours, select and answer eleven other questions out of a paper containing forty, many of the single questions demanding from five to ten distinct answers.

The English papers present equally pernicious illustrations. 'In these days of the "new' education, prominent educators congratulate us on the 'system' that has unified the entrance requirements in English! A board of experts selects in two groups some dozen or two everything everywhere. Now English A, so-called, consisting of things so appropriate to the universal youthful mind as Tennyson's classic gems, a knowledge of which is required of all candidates for 'Princess' and Lowell's 'Sir Launfal,' is to be touched lightly as a mere basis for composition; the examination uses the material thence derived to test the candidate's powers of expression. A process better calculated to torture the teacher and to divorce expression from experience in the pupil could hardly be devised. For the way in which the