pupils accordingly, equipping them (if he is an
expert at his work) with a stock of superficial intelligence as well
as of information, and putting them up to whatever knacks, tricks,
and dodges will enable them to show to advantage on the examination
day. In his desire to outwit the teacher, the examiner will turn and
double like a hare who is pursued by a greyhound. But the teacher
will turn and double with equal agility, and will never allow himself
to be outdistanced by his quarry.

The more successful the teacher is in keeping up with the examiner,
the more fatal will his success be to his pupils and to himself.
In the ardour of the chase he is being lured on into a region of
treacherous quicksands; and the longer he is able to maintain the
pursuit, the more certain is it that he will lose himself at last
in depths and mazes of misconception and delusion. It is only by
stripping himself of his own freedom and responsibility that the
teacher is able to keep pace with the examiner, and each turn
or double that he makes involves a fresh surrender of those
prerogatives. In consenting to work on a prescribed syllabus he has
given up the idea of planning out his work for himself. In attempting
to adapt his teaching to the questions set by the examiner, he is
allowing the latter to dictate to him, in the minutest detail, how
each subject is to be taught. In other words, in order to achieve the
semblance of success, he is delivering himself, mind and soul, into
the hands of the examiner, and compelling the latter, perhaps against
his will, to become a Providence to him and to order all his goings.
This means that his distrust of himself is as complete as his
distrust of the child, and that his faith in the efficacy of
mechanical obedience has led him to seek salvation for himself,
as well as for his pupils, by following that fatal path.

It is in this way that a formal examination reacts upon and
intensifies the sinister tendencies of which it is at once a product
and a symptom. The examination system is, as I have said, the
keystone of the arch of Western education, crowning and completing
the whole structure, and at the same time holding it together, and
preventing it from falling, as it deserves to fall, into a ruinous
heap. Education, as it is now interpreted and practised in the West,
could not continue to exist without the support of the examination
system; but the price that it pays, and will continue to pay, for