r, working under the least favourable conditions,
may hope, when his pupils are examined on it, to achieve with decent
industry a decent modicum of success. Under the control of a uniform
syllabus, the schools which are now specialising and experimenting,
and so giving a lead to the rest, would have to abandon whatever was
interesting in their respective curricula, and fall into line with
the average school; while, with the consequent lowering of the
current _ideal_ of efficiency, the level of the average school would
steadily fall. A uniform syllabus is a bad syllabus, for this if for
no other reason, that it is compelled to idealise the average; and
that, inasmuch as education, so far as it is a living system, grows
by means of its "leaders," the idealisation of the average is
necessarily fatal to educational growth and therefore to educational
life.

It was preordained, then, that the syllabuses which the Department
issued, year by year, in the days of payment by results should have
few merits and many defects. Yet even if, by an unimaginable miracle,
they had all been educationally sound, the mere fact that all the
teachers in England had to work by them would have made them potent
agencies for evil. To be in bondage to a syllabus is a misfortune for
a teacher, and a misfortune for the school that he teaches. To be in
bondage to a syllabus which is binding on all schools alike, is a
graver misfortune. To be in bondage to a bad syllabus which is
binding on all schools alike, is of all misfortunes the gravest. Or
if there is a graver, it is the fate that befell the teachers of
England under the old _regime_,--the fate of being in bondage to a
syllabus which was bad both because it had to come down to the level
of the least fortunate school and the least capable teacher, and also
because it was the outcome of ignorance, inexperience, and
bureaucratic self-satisfaction.

Of the evils that are inherent in the examination system as such--of
its tendency to arrest growth, to deaden life, to paralyse the higher
faculties, to externalise what is inward, to materialise what is
spiritual, to involve education in an atmosphere of unreality and
self-deception--I have already spoken at some length. In the days of
payment by results various circumstances conspired to raise those
evil tendencies to the highest imaginable "power." When inspectors
ceased to examine (in the stricter sense of the word) they realised
what infinite mi