TRIAL BY ORDEAL TO GO

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 575, 30 January 1929, Page 10

TRIAL BY ORDEAL TO GO

•TRIAL by ordeal lias been eliminated from the judicial system * for many years, but it survives in the examination system of the schools. The tangible stepping-stones to knowledge are attained only by a laborious testing process to which boys and girls submit themselves year after year. The result for most children is an appalling prospect of interminable examinations, and when a child’s whole career is determined by one crucial examination, there is often the risk that the nervous or highlystrung may fall by the wayside. A growing lack of confidence in the matriculation and University entrance examinations as the deciding assessors of intellectual fitness has at last impelled the University Council to approve the principle of accrediting. Though many thoughtful educationists have little faith, in this scheme, there exists a widespread belief that the authorities of a school where a student has been trained for three, four or five years should know his talents and capacities well enough, without submitting him to the ceremonious ordeal in an examination room.

In the meantime the principal purpose of accrediting is to provide a standard by which students may go on from the secondary schools to the University. Obviously, therefore, a far closer bond than now exists between the Universities and the schools is demanded. As the accrediting principle becomes more widely accepted, the certificate of a secondary school headmaster may be accepted by prospective employers, instead of the University’s formal voucher that the student has matriculated. Since it is in the meantime hinted that the number of accrediting schools may be limited, the danger of injustice to the excluded schools and their pupils, as well as to parents in the districts so excluded, is foreshadowed. The differentiation between the schools will have to be undertaken with the utmost care, so that no semi-private Church school, technical school, or country high school is unfairly treated. There is also the danger that the easier paths of the accrediting system may flood the Universities with students whom their chosen professions cannot absorb. This is a problem, the solution of which lies in the hands of the schoolmasters. Theirs will be a vast responsiblity. It is a pity the institution of accrediting could not be accompanied by a scheme for providing billets for the finished products.