MATRICULATION.

Putaruru Press, Volume VI, Issue 266, 13 December 1928, Page 4

MATRICULATION.

It is impossible to feel very enthusiastic over the thought that some thousands of secondary school pupils all over the Dominion will enter examination rooms to-day in the hope of matriculating. Although it is brutal to say so, it is almost the case that it would be absolutely dismaying if it were likely that all or nearly all would succeed. What is going to happen to higher education within the next ten or fifteen years no one can say, since the Universities, like the schools, hardly know where they are; but it is quite clear that if this enormous number of young men and young women qualify for entrance each year the University will become something that it has never been before. Nor is it quite certain that , the Matriculation examination itself is too easy. Ir. theory at least it represents the result of four years’ work in a secondary school, and it would hot have to be stiffened much to be too difficult to be passed in less than four years by the average boy or girl. But the trouble is that it no sooner became a universal examination than its prescription became dulled and flattened in practice to the level of the universal mind. Examiners and teach ns all know that if 75 per cent of those answering a set of questions answer them badly, the answers of the remaining 25 per cent will get less relatively than their full value and those of the 75 per cent more. It is almost impossible to draw up any prescription that will be an equally good test of bright and of dull minds, and yet that is what the University is trying to do in the case of Matriculation. The purpose of such an examination ought to he to test the fitness of a comparatively small number ‘of secondary school pupils to benefit by more advanced studies still at a University, hut it is quite impossible to feel that this test under present conditions is being applied. It is not an exaggeration to say that 50 per cent of those who matriculate each year will not benefit by Univeisity studies (except in a narre w technical sense) and should not therefore enter the University at all. This does not mean that their education should end with their period at a secondary school, and far less that it should not he carried past the primary school stage, but it should not be carried on in an institution whose primary purpose is to guide a few choice minds through the higher regions of knowledge and thought. Christchurch Press.