)

If we turn from the schools to the Universities we find here, too, the
same complaints against over-examination. Now it seems to me that every
University, in order to maintain its position, has a perfect right to
demand two examinations, but no more: one for admission, the other for a
degree. Various attempts have been made in Germany, in Russia, in France,
and in England to change and improve the old academic tradition, but in
the end the original, and, as it would seem, the natural system, has
generally proved its wisdom and reasserted its right.

If a University surrenders the right of examining those who wish to be
admitted, the tutors will often have to do the work of school-masters, and
the professors can never know how high or how low they should aim in their
public lectures; and the result will be a lowering of the standard at the
Universities, and consequently at the public schools. Some Universities,
on the contrary, like over-anxious mothers, have multiplied examinations
so as to make quite sure, at the end of each term or each year, that the
pupils confided to them have done at least some work. This kind of forced
labor may do some good to the incorrigibly idle, but it does the greatest
harm to all the rest. If there is an examination at the end of each year,
there can be no freedom left for any independent work. Both teachers and
taught will be guided by the same pole-star--examinations; no deviation
from the beaten track will be considered safe, and all the pleasure
derived from work done for its own sake, and all the just pride and joy,
which those only know who have ever ventured out by themselves on the open
sea of knowledge, must be lost.

We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the brilliant show of
examination papers.

It is certainly marvellous what an amount of knowledge candidates will
produce before their examiners; but those who have been both examined and
examiners know best how fleeting that knowledge often is, and how
different from that other knowledge which has been acquired slowly and
quietly, for its own sake, for our own sake, without a thought as to
whether it would ever pay at examinations or not. A candidate, after
giving most glibly the dates and the titles of the principal works of
Cobbett, Gibbon, Burke, Adam Smith, and David Hume, was asked whether he
had ever seen any of their writings, and he had to answer, No. Another who
was asked which of the works of Pheidias he