acher looks, he sees that the examination
system, with its demand for machine-made results, controls education;
and he feels that it is only by an accident that his school has
been exempted (in part at least) from its pressure. The Board of
Education still examine for labour certificates, for admission as
uncertificated assistants, for the teacher's certificate. They expect
head teachers to hold terminal examinations of all the classes in
their schools. They allow Local Authorities to examine children in
their schools as formally and as stringently as they please, and to
hold examinations for County Scholarships, for which children from
elementary schools are eligible. Admission to secondary schools of
all grades depends on success in passing entrance examinations. So
does admission to the various Colleges and Universities. In the
schools which prepare little boys for the "Great Public Schools,"
the whole scheme of education Is dominated by the headmaster's desire
to win as many entrance scholarships as possible. In the "Great
Public Schools" the scheme of education is similarly dominated by
the headmaster's desire to win as many scholarships as possible
at the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. In the Universities all the
undergraduates without exception are reading for examinations of
various kinds,--pass "schools," honour "schools," Civil Service
examinations, and the like. Officers in the Army and Navy have never
done with examinations; and there is not a single profession which
can be entered through any door but that of a public examination.
Wherever the teacher looks he sees that examinations are held in high
honour, and that the main business of teachers of all grades is to
produce results which an outside examiner would accept as
satisfactory; and he naturally takes for granted that the production
of such results is the true function of the teacher, whether his
success in producing them is to be tested by a formal examination or
not. The air that he breathes is charged with ideas--ideas about life
in general and education in particular--which belong to the order of
things that he is supposed to have left behind him, and are fiercely
antagonistic to those as yet unrecognised ideas which give the new
order of things its meaning, its purpose, and its value.

How can we expect the teacher to look inward when all the conditions
of his existence, not as a teacher only but also as a citizen and a
man, conspire to make hi