SCHOOL DEMONSTRATIONS AND THEIR VALUE.

Thames Guardian and Mining Record, Volume I, Issue 94, 27 January 1872, Page 3

SCHOOL DEMONSTRATIONS AND THEIR VALUE.

It may be seriously doubted if the public examinations of schools is not an injury rather than a benefit to the large majority of scholars, for whose ostensible glorification such exhibitions are got up at this season of the year. Anything to which the forcing system is applied has necessarily an unhealthy growth, and education is no exception to the rule. It is quite as easy in youth to excite the brain to unnatural activity to accomplish some difficult school task, as it is in later life to stimulate a dormant faculty to unwonted effort to compass a great mental design. But if it be easy, it by no means follows that it is desirable to probe young brains too deeply, to bring to the surface for private profit and public gratification valuable**esources that would certainly be the better for slower development. Many a promising lad has ruined his constitution and made for himself a miserable manhood by a long and arduous mental struggle to real’se all that exacting masters have requited of him. It is the grand object of a life to obtain possession of an "active youthful mind that is capable of being worked up to any degree of pressure. It is upon such subjects that master employs the full measure of his ability, because, in the first place, they are taught more easily than lads whose brain power is less easily excited .and secondly,because it is desirable the school should furnish to the world brilliant examples of its master’s skill, aqjjl here are the best and easiest materials to Jiand for the purpose. We shall, no doubt, be told that this is an unjust aspersion on the general character of teachers, and a defeuce of the lazy fellows who refuse to have their mental growth forced, in much the same manner as giant melons aud cucumbers are produced by ambitious cultivators in another soil. It is no aspersion on the teachers, save in so far as they may be affected by the larger and more important question at issue. Learning is a trade that is carried on under similar conditions to every other trade. Teachers, like gardeners, have to compete keenly with each other, ai.d he who can produce to the public the most showy article is the man who obtains the largest share of patronage. A gardener will certainly not take to a horticultural exhibition fruit or flowers of an inferior character. He will select the most promising stocks that lie has in his garden, and by artificial culturo and every art that he is master of bring those particular sorts to perfection, and so obtain the highest meed of public praise for his exhibit. The school-teacher acts in precisely the same grooves, and so long as parents and guardians demand certain public results from him, lie would show hut little worldly wisdom were ho to act otherwise. If he were to pick out for public exhibition lads whose qualities were not brilliant, but who may, nevertheless, have valuable mental powers that lie dormant, simply because contact with the world’s affairs lias not yet called them into play, he would find it said to him “ That man is no teacher, it the miserable exhibition we have just witnessed is all the result of his labours.” Teachers know this, and perfectly understand that they must, at any cost make brilliant show, or their bread will assuredly pass away from them. It is society that is responsible for the system, and teachers are less to be condemned than are parents and guardians who demand educational results that, so far as boys are concerned, are only to be gained for the few at the expense of the many. The public examination and speech-day is the great school advertisement of the year, and perhaps no better means could be found of exhibiting to the world a teacher’s qualifications. But it has a demoralising effect on the boys themselves. It leads them to attach a fictitious value to public applause, to feel that they are cut out for the bar, the pulpit, politics, or the stage, when probably they would fail in any one of these pursuits, yet make successful tradesmen, or clever mechanics, or artisans. It creates in them a craving for public excitement when as they are about to leave school and commence the battle of real life it is desirable that the mind should be free from all foreign influences, and be concentrated on that pursuit which parents may have determined their sons should follow. So long as school examinations were conducted on the old method, there was a better guarantee that lads would become in their day good citizens, and according to their natural abilities take their proper place in society. The teacher had no inducement to bestow more care upon a genius than a dullard, and therefore whatever ability the latter possessed had a better chance of being brought out and cultivated, while industry and intelligent application to study carried its own reward more surely then than now. Jf tho dux of the school received in those days no public eclat , neither did the equally hard working, but less successful boy find himself on the same corner of the publie platform with fellows who had possibly made no effort to distinguish themselves ; nor was he subject to unmerited parental censure because he made possibly a less brilliant appearance before a fashionable audience than some of his more polished and confident contemporaries. If parents in this matter brought to bear the same rules of analysis that they apply to the ordinary affairs of life, they would soon see that, so far as their children are concerned, public examinations and juvenile speech-making are conducive neither to their mental, moral, or physical advantage. Boys are none the less worthy recipients of school honors because they are ostentatiously presented to them in public; but owing to the vicious sysleAi of teaching which this practice encourages hundreds of worthy lads are unjustly set down as dullards, simply because it is found unprofitable by teachers to spend time in developing mental qualifications which at their best would perhaps never make a brilliaut show on the public platform,