Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/63

Rh hiatus. The larger the examination specter looms before student and teacher, the more decisive the tendency to neglect individual discipline and development, in order to perfect in their stead an organization calculated to meet the exigencies of a critical moment. Preparation for college entrance examinations, rather than preparation for college or preparation for life, insensibly becomes the educational goal. For clearly, when the whole future is staked on this single throw, the temptation to be effectively ready for it is irresistible. I say advisedly—the whole future; since by insistence on an academic degree as a prerequisite to the pursuit of law or medicine on the most highly favored terms, the professional schools aid in the production of the artificial crisis. Under these conditions, the field for pure educational effort in the secondary period threatens, despite the enrichment of the curriculum, to become steadily narrower. The initial and determining factor in the planning of a student's course of work is neither his endowment nor his opportunity, but the caprice that carries him to one institution rather than to another. This choice once made, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade him to cooperate with his teacher in the endeavor to sound fully and genuinely his personal power. His absorbing interest lies in the statement of the college requirements; and so marked has this factor become that prominent schools do not hesitate to announce the particular colleges by whose requirements their curricula are regulated, as if any uniform requirements could possibly outline an educational procedure strictly applicable in even a single case.

Doubtless the secondary teacher will be roundly criticized by his collegiate superiors, just when he has, through the suppression of the student's individuality, succeeded in perfecting the preparatory machinery warranted to turn out the qualities and accomplishments demanded. For amidst collegiate conditions that begin by conceding to the student the possession of an individuality, which his previous training has, under collegiate compulsion, absolutely denied, it becomes at once manifest that preparation for college entrance examinations is not preparation for college. Indeed, for a college life, offering at the outstart liberal election in the whole field of knowledge and experience, what adequate training can be supposed to reside in the mechanical and uniform drill demanded by the entrance requirements? The articulation that seemed from superficial inspection so neat and complete turns out a delusion; the educational sine quâ non leads nowhere. In bygone days it may have fitted immediately into the prescribed freshman course. But no such justification now remains. Everywhere the developmental idea of power has driven out the superstitious faith that attached magic virtue to certain symbols—everywhere except in the peculiar domain where the nimble mastery of a few formulae