schief the yearly examination had done. The children,
the majority of whom were examined in reading and dictation out of
their own reading-books (two or three in number, as the case might
be), were drilled in the contents of those books until they knew
them almost by heart. In arithmetic they worked abstract sums, in
obedience to formal rules, day after day, and month after month;
and they were put up to various tricks and dodges which would, it
was hoped, enable them to know by what precise rules the various
questions on the arithmetic cards were to be answered. They learned
a few lines of poetry by heart, and committed all the "meanings and
allusions" to memory, with the probable result--so sickening must
the process have been--that they hated poetry for the rest of their
lives. In geography, history, and grammar they were the victims of
unintelligent oral cram, which they were compelled, under pains and
penalties, to take in and retain till the examination day was over,
their ability to disgorge it on occasion being periodically tested by
the teacher. And so with the other subjects. Not a thought was given,
except in a small minority of the schools, to the real training of
the child, to the fostering of his mental (and other) growth. To get
him through the yearly examination by hook or by crook was the one
concern of the teacher. As profound distrust of the teacher was the
basis of the policy of the Department, so profound distrust of the
child was the basis of the policy of the teacher. To leave the child
to find out anything for himself, to work out anything for himself,
to think out anything for himself, would have been regarded as a
proof of incapacity, not to say insanity, on the part of the teacher,
and would have led to results which, from the "percentage" point of
view, would probably have been disastrous.

There were few inspectors who were not duly impressed from 1895
onwards by the gravity of the evils that inspection, as distinguished
from mere examination, revealed to them; but it may be doubted
if there were many inspectors who realised then, what some among
them see clearly now, that the evils which distressed them were
significant as symptoms even more than as sources of mischief,--as
symptoms of a deep-seated and insidious malady, of the gradual
ossification of the spiritual and mental muscles of both the teacher
and the child, of the gradual substitution in the elementary school
of machinery for li