Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/250

236 child without the slightest authority. The teacher knows that the pupil is tortured as he stands blushing and perspiring before him. The teacher himself finds it wearisome and difficult, but he has a rule, in accordance with which he must accustom his pupil to speak alone.

But no one knows why he must teach the pupil to speak alone. Perhaps it is in order to set him to reading a fable before his or her excellency. I shall be told perhaps that otherwise it is impossible to determine the degree of his attainments. But I reply that it is really impossible for a stranger to determine within an hour the knowledge of a pupil, while the teacher, even without any verbal or written examination, is always conscious of the measure of these acquirements. It seems to me that this plan of individual interrogation is a relic of ancient superstition. In the old times the teacher, compelling his pupils to learn everything by heart, could not judge of their attainments in any other way than by setting them to repeat the whole lesson word for word. Then it was found that a parrot-like repetition of words was not education, and they began to make pupils tell in their own language what they had learned; but they have not changed the custom of calling up individual pupils and making them recite whenever the teacher desires.

It was entirely lost from sight that you may require from the scholar who learns by heart the repetition of certain passages from the Psalter or fables at any time and under all conditions; but that in order to be in a condition to appreciate the sense of any passage, and to give it in his own words, the pupil must find himself in a condition fitted for this exercise.

Not only in the lower schools and gymnasiums, but also in the universities, I understand that examinations based on questions are nothing else than tests on the learning of passages or propositions, word for word. In my time—I left the university in 1845—I did not prepare for the examinations by learning by heart word for word, but paragraph by paragraph, and I received the