CHINESE PUZZLES. Mr. Seddon on School Examination Papers.

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 194, 19 March 1904, Page 6

CHINESE PUZZLES. Mr. Seddon on School Examination Papers.

ME,. Seddon didn't win a scholarship by answering questions about stupid things that were not required to boost him up into the highest position (bar one) in the colony. If he could answer all or any of the questions put to children sitting for the late National Scholarship examinations, he wouldn't be the least bit fitter to "roll the old chariot along" than he is without any knowledge of the unpractical kind upon which your average examiner sets such great store. Therefore, King Dick has made up his mind there shall be no' more Chinese puzzles set for school children. • • • Recently, when some sample questions of more than ordinary uselessness were being exposed by the press, the Lance made a suggestion. Here it is : — "We submit that future examination-papers for scholarship entrants should be prepared by a Board composed of the ordinary intellectual giants who have, up to now, set them, helped by men of commonplace attainments, who hold the highest positions in the business, social, and economic life of the colony." Unquestionably, the men holding the highest positions in the colony are men who have gathered in their education after school years. # • » Which will make the educationists who love posers for young brains interrupt that, if a person can rise to eminence without juvenile education of a high order, how much more quickly might the eminence be gained if the eminent one had started younger? As a matter of fact, young brains are stewed in such a mass of theoretical unnecessary knowledge that the practical part of their mentality hasn't a chance. * * * It seems to us that the setting of a modern examination paper gives the festive ogre who sets it a chance to display a great deal of useless learning that places him quite in a class by himself. Many of the questions asked m examinations seem to be designedly set to entrap or confuse the candidate # * * If the questions to be asked at future National Scholarship examinations are confined to matters affecting the possioie career of the scholar, and if the examiners will set them with the object of finding out not what a scholar doesn't know, but to gauge the measure of what he does know, the threat made by King Dick that he wouldn't have any more "Chinesepuzzles" will have some effect.