e said to have automatically relaxed
itself. What happened--I will not say in all schools, but in far too
many--was that the teaching remained as mechanical and unintelligent
as ever, that the teacher continued to distrust the child and to do
everything for him, but that the child gradually became slacker and
less industrious. Not that his teacher wished him to "slack," but
that the stimulus of the yearly examination had been withdrawn at a
time when there was nothing to take its place. Exercise is in itself
a delightful thing when it is wholesome, natural, and rational;
but when it is unwholesome, unnatural, and irrational, it will not
be taken in sufficient measure except in response to some strong
external stimulus. Under the old examination system an adequate
stimulus had been supplied by the combined influence of competition
and fear (chiefly the latter). When the examination system was
abolished, that stimulus necessarily lost its point. Had it then been
possible for the teacher to make the exercise which his pupils were
asked to take wholesome, natural, and rational, a new stimulus--that
of interest in their work--would have been applied to the pupils, and
they would have exerted themselves as they had never done before.
But it was not possible for the average teacher to execute at a
moment's notice a complete change of front, and it was unwise of the
Department to expect him to do so. Apart from an honourable minority,
who had always been in secret revolt against the despotism of the
Code, the old teachers were helpless and hopeless. The younger ones
had been through the mill themselves, first in the Elementary School,
then in the Pupil-Teacher Centre, and then in the Training College
(both the latter having been in too many cases cramming
establishments like the Elementary School); and when they went back
to work under a head teacher who was wedded to the old order of
things, they found no difficulty in falling in with his ways and
carrying out his wishes. If a young teacher, fresh from an
exceptionally enlightened Training College, became an assistant under
an old-fashioned head teacher, he soon had the "nonsense knocked out
of him," and was compelled to toe the line with the rest of the
staff.

But it was not only because the teachers of England had got
accustomed to the Land of Bondage, that they shrank from entering the
Promised Land. There was, and still is, another and a stronger
reason. Wherever the te