Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/509

Rh to all the best traditions of school teaching, and to the often-expressed desire of the universities to insure a good general education in those whom they admit. There should, I think, be no scholarship examination which does not include several of the subjects of a normal school curriculum, however much additional weight may be given to any of them. Although it may be necessary that university entrance scholarships in one subject should be given either to encourage its study or to discover those who have a special aptitude, yet, so far as scholarships are intended to be rewards for intellectual preeminence, they should, I think, be directed to general capacity, and not be used as an encouragement to limited study. From what I have already said it will be clear that I do not attach much importance to special preparation at school for those who intend to proceed to the university. If a boy has a very special taste or aptitude, it should have abundant opportunity for displaying and exercising itself at the university, provided only that it has not been stifled, but has been given some encouragement in the school curriculum. I understand, for example, that those who teach such a subject as physiology at the university would prefer that their pupils should come to them from school with a general knowledge of chemistry and physics rather than that they should have received training in physiology. With the present modern differentiation into a classical and modern side, or their equivalents, the ordinary school subjects should be sufficient preparation for any university course if they are not mutually strangled in the pressure of an overcrowded curriculum.

To be fair, however, I must state another view. A very experienced college tutor who has had previous valuable experience as a master in a public school tells me that in his opinion the real problem of the public schools is the "arrest of intellectual development that overtakes so many boys at about the age of sixteen." "There are few public schools," he says, "whose fifth forms are not full of boys of seventeen or eighteen, many of them perfectly orderly, well-mannered and reasonable, in some sense the salt of the place, exercising great influence in the school and exercising it well, with a high standard of public spirit, kindly and straight-living, in whom, nevertheless, it is difficult to recognize the bright, intelligent, if not very industrious, child of two or three years before."

He thinks that there is a real danger of degeneration at this age, owing, for one thing, to the manner in which the boys are educated en bloc; up to a certain age boys can be herded together and taught on the same lines without great harm being done, but after a certain time differentiation begins to set in. The school curriculum, however, does not admit of being adjusted to suit the dawning interests of a couple of hundred boys; and he sees no cure for this difficulty except a considerable increase in the staff and a corresponding reduction in the size