ll
perhaps allow me in conclusion to add a few remarks on the safeguards
necessary for the efficient working of examinations.

All examinations are a means to ascertain how pupils have been taught;
they ought never to be allowed to become the end for which pupils are
taught. Teaching with a view to them lowers the teacher in the eyes of his
pupils; learning with a view to them is apt to produce shallowness and
dishonesty.

Whatever attractions learning possesses in itself, and whatever efforts
were formerly made by boys at school from a sense of duty, all this is
lost if they once imagine that the highest object of all learning is to
gain marks in a competition.

In order to maintain the proper relation between teacher and pupil, all
pupils should be made to look to their teachers as their natural examiners
and fairest judges, and therefore in every examination the report of the
teacher ought to carry the greatest weight. This is the principle followed
abroad in examining candidates at public schools; and even in their
examination on leaving school, which gives them the right to enter the
University, they know that their success depends far more on the work
which they have done during the years at school, than on the work done on
the few days of their examination. There are outside examiners appointed
by Government to check the work done at schools and during the
examinations; but the cases in which they have to modify or reverse the
award of the master are extremely rare, and they are felt to reflect
seriously on the competency or impartiality of the school authorities.

To leave examinations entirely to strangers reduces them to the level of
lotteries, and fosters a cleverness in teachers and taught often akin to
dishonesty. An examiner may find out what a candidate knows _not_, he can
hardly ever find out all he knows; and even if he succeeds in finding out
_how much_ a candidate knows, he can seldom find out _how_ he knows it. On
these points the opinion of the masters who have watched their pupils for
years is indispensable for the sake of the examiner, for the sake of the
pupils, and for the sake of their teachers.

I know I shall be told that it would be impossible to trust the masters,
and to be guided by their opinion, because they are interested parties.
Now, first of all, there are far more honest men in the world than
dishonest, and it does not answer to legislate as if all school-masters
were rogues. I