EXAMINATIONS
=Prelude.=--When the vitalized school has finally been achieved there
will result a radical departure from the present procedure in the matter
of examinations. A teacher in the act of preparing a list of examination
questions of the traditional type is not an edifying spectacle. He has a
text-book open before him from which he extracts nuts for his pupils to
crack. It is a purely mechanical process and only a mechanician could
possibly debase intelligence and manhood to such unworthy uses. Were it
not so pathetic it would excite laughter. But this teacher is the victim
of tradition. He knows no other way. He made out examination questions
in accordance with this plan fifteen years ago and the heavens didn't
fall; then why, pray, change the method? Besides, men and women who were
thus examined when they were children in school have achieved
distinction in the world's affairs, and that, of itself, proves the
validity of the method, according to his way of thinking.
=Mental atrophy.=--It seems never to occur to him that children have
large powers of resistance and that some of his pupils may have won
distinction in spite of his teaching and his methods of examination and
not because of them. His trouble is mental and spiritual atrophy. He
thinks and feels by rule of thumb, "without variableness or shadow of
turning." In the matter of new methods he is quite immune. He settled
things to his complete satisfaction years ago, and what was good enough
for his father, in school methods, is quite good enough for him. His
self-satisfaction would approach sublimity, were it not so extremely
ludicrous. He has a supercilious sneer for innovations. How he can bring
himself to make concessions to modernity to the extent of riding in an
automobile is one of the mysteries.
=Self-complacency.=--His complacency would excite profound admiration
did it not betoken deadline inaction. He became becalmed on the sea of
life years ago, but does not know it. When the procession of life moves
past him he thinks he is the one who is in motion, and takes great
unction to himself for his progressiveness--"and not a wave of trouble
rolls across his peaceful breast." So he proceeds to copy another
question from the text-book, solemnly writing it on a bit of paper, and
later copying on the blackboard with such a show of bravery and gusto as
would indicate that some great truth had been revealed to him alone. In
an orotund voice he declaims to his pupils the mighty revelations that
he copied from the book. His examination régime is the old offer of a
mess of pottage for a birthright.
=Remembering and knowing.=--In our school practices we have become so
inured to the question-and-answer method of the recitation that we have
made the examination its counterpart. As teachers we are constantly
admonishing our pupils to remember, as if that were the basic principle
in the educational process. In reality we do not want them to
remember--we want them to know; and the distinction is all-important.
The child does not remember which is his right hand; he knows. He does
not remember the face of his mother; he knows her. He does not remember
which is the sun and which is the moon; he knows. He does not remember
snow, and rain, and ice, and mud; he knows.
=Questions and answers.=--But, none the less, we proceed upon the
agreeable assumption that education is the process of memorizing, and so
reduce our pupils to the plane of parrots; for a parrot has a prodigious
memory. Hence, it comes to pass that, in the so-called preparation of
their lessons, the pupils con the words of the book, again and again,
and when they can repeat the words of the book we smile approval and
give a perfect grade. It matters not at all that they display no
intelligent understanding of the subject so long as they can repeat the
statements of the book. It never seems to occur to the teacher that the
pupil of the third grade might give the words of the binomial theorem
without the slightest apprehension of its meaning. We grade for the
repetition of words, not for intelligence.
=Court procedure.=--In our school practices we seem to take our cue from
court procedure and make each pupil who recites feel that he is on the
witness stand experiencing all its attendant discomforts, instead of
being a coöperating agent in an agreeable enterprise. We suspend the
sword of Damocles above his head and demand from him such answers as
will fill the measure of our preconceived notions. He may know more of
the subject, in reality, than the teacher, but this will not avail. In
fact, this may militate against him. She demands to know what the book
says, with small concern for his own knowledge of the subject. We
proclaim loudly that we must encourage the open mind, and then by our
witness-stand ordeal forestall the possibility of open-mindedness.
=Rational methods.=--When we have learned wisdom enough, and humanity
enough, and pedagogy enough to dispense with the quasi-inquisition type
of recitation, the transition to a more rational method of examination
will be well-nigh automatic. Let it not be inferred that to inveigh
against the question-and-answer type of recitation is to advocate any
abatement of thoroughness. On the contrary, the thought is to insure
greater thoroughness, and to make evident the patent truth that
thoroughness and agreeableness are not incompatible. Experience ought to
teach us that we find it no hardship to work with supreme intensity at
any task that lures us; and, in that respect, we are but grown-up
children. We have only to generate a white-heat of interest in order to
have our pupils work with intensity. But this sort of interest does not
thrive under compulsion.
=Analysis and synthesis.=--The question-and-answer method evermore
implies analysis. But children are inclined to synthesis, which shows at
once that the analytic method runs counter to their natural bent. They
like to make things, to put things together, to experiment along the
lines of synthesis. Hence the industrial arts appeal to them. But
constructing problems satisfies their inclination to synthesis quite as
well as constructing coat-hangers or culinary compounds, if only the
incitement is rational. The writers of our text-books are coming to
recognize this fact, and it does them credit. In time, we may hope to
have books that will take into account the child's natural inclinations,
and the schools will be the beneficiaries.
=Thinking.=--In the process of synthesis the pupil is free to draw upon
the entire stock of his accumulated resources, whereas in the
question-and-answer method he is circumscribed. In the question-and-answer
plan he is encouraged to remember; in the other he is encouraged to think.
In our theories we exalt thinking to the highest pinnacle, but in our
practice we repress thinking and exalt memory. We admonish our pupils to
think, sometimes with a degree of emphasis that weakens our admonition,
and then bestow our laurel wreaths upon those who think little but
remember much. Our inconsistency in this respect would be amusing if the
child's interests could be ignored. But seeing that the child pays the
penalty, our inconsistency is inexcusable.
=Penalizing.=--The question-and-answer régime, in its full application,
is not wholly unlike a punitive expedition, in that the teacher asks the
question and sits with pencil poised in air ready to blacklist the
unfortunate pupil whose memory fails him for the moment. The child is
embarrassed, if not panic-stricken, and the teacher seems more like an
avenging nemesis than a friend and helper. Just when he needs help he
receives epithets and a condemning zero. He sinks into himself,
disgusted and outraged, and becomes wholly indifferent to the subsequent
phases of the lesson. He feels that he has been trapped and betrayed,
and days are required for his redemption from discouragement.
=Traditional method.=--In the school where this method is in vogue the
examination takes on the color and character of the recitation. At the
close of the term, or semester, the teacher makes out the proverbial ten
questions which very often reflect her own bias, or predilections, and
in these ten questions are the issues of life and death. A hundred
questions might be asked upon the subjects upon which the pupils are to
be tested, but these ten are the only ones offered--with no options.
Then the grading of the papers ensues, and, in this ordeal, the teacher
thinks herself another Atlas carrying the world upon her shoulders. The
boy who receives sixty-seven and the one who receives twenty-seven are
both banished into outer darkness without recourse. The teacher may know
that the former boy is able to do the work of the next grade, but the
marks she has made on the paper are sacred things, and he has fallen
below the requisite seventy. Hence, he is banished to the limbo of the
lost, for she is the supreme arbiter of his fate.
No allowance is made for nervousness, illness, or temperamental
conditions, but the same measuring-rod is applied to all with no
discrimination, and she has the marks on the papers to prove her
infallibility. If a pupil should dare to question the correctness of her
grades, he would be punished or penalized for impertinence. Her grades
are oracular, inviolable, and therefore not subject to review. She may
have been quite able to grade the pupils justly without any such ordeal,
but the school has the examination habit, and all the sacred rites must
be observed. In that school there is but one way of salvation, and that
way is not subject either to repeal or amendment. It is _via sacra_ and
must not be profaned. Time and long usage have set the seal of their
approval upon it and woe betide the vandal who would dare tamper with
it.
=Testing for intelligence.=--This emphatic, albeit true, representation
of the type of examinations that still obtains in some schools has been
set out thus in some detail that we may have a basis of comparison with
the other type of examinations that tests for intelligence rather than
for memory. For children, not unlike their elders, are glad to have
people proceed upon the assumption that they are endowed with a modicum
of intelligence. They will strive earnestly to meet the expectations of
their parents and teachers. Many wise mothers and teachers have incited
children to their best efforts by giving them to know that much is
expected of them. It is always far better to expect rather than to
demand. Coercion may be necessary at times, but coercion frowns while
expectation smiles. Hence, in every school exercise the teacher does
well to concede to the pupils a reasonable degree of intelligence and
then let her expectations be commensurate with their intelligence.
=Concessions.=--It is an affront to the intelligence of a child not to
concede that he knows that the days are longer in the summer than in
winter. We may fully expect such a degree of intelligence, and base our
teaching upon this assumption. In our examinations we pay a delicate
compliment to the child by giving him occasion for thinking. We may ask
him why the days are longer in summer than in winter and thus give him
the feeling that we respect his intelligence. Our examinations may
always assume observed facts. Even if he has never noted the fact that
his shadow is shorter in summer than in winter, if we assume such
knowledge on his part and ask him why such is the case, we shall
stimulate his powers of observation along with his thinking. If the
teacher asks a boy when and by whom America was discovered, he resents
the implication of crass ignorance; but if she asks how Columbus came to
discover America in 1492, he feels that it is conceded that there are
some things he knows.
=Illustrations.=--If we ask for the width of the zones, we are placing
the emphasis upon memory; but, if we ask them to account for the width
of the zones, we are assuming some knowledge and are testing for
intelligent thinking. If we ask why the sun rises in the east and sets
in the west we are, once again, assuming a knowledge of the facts and
testing for intelligence. If we ask for the location of the Suez, Kiel,
and Welland canals, we are testing for mere memory; but, if we ask what
useful purpose these canals serve, we are testing for intelligence. When
we ask pupils to give the rule for division of fractions, we are testing
again for mere memory; but when we ask why we invert the terms of the
divisor, we are treating our pupils as rational beings. Our pedagogical
sins bulk large in geography when we continually ask pupils to locate
places that have no interest for them. Such teaching is a travesty on
pedagogy and a sin against childhood.
=Intelligence of teacher.=--If the teacher is consulting her own ease
and comfort, then she will conduct the examination as a test for memory.
It requires but little work and less thinking to formulate a set of
examination questions on this basis. She has only to turn the pages of
the text-book and make a check-mark here and there till she has
accumulated ten questions, and the trick is done. But if she is testing
for intelligence, the matter is not so simple. To test for intelligence
requires intelligence and a careful thinking over the whole scope of the
subject under consideration. To do this effectively the teacher must
keep within the range of the pupil's powers and still stimulate him to
his best efforts.
=Major and minor.=--She must distinguish between major and minor, and
this is no slight task. Her own bias may tend to elevate a minor into a
major rank, and this disturbs the balance. Again, she must see things in
their right relations and proportions, and this requires deliberate
thinking. In "King Lear" she may regard the Fool as a negligible minor,
but some pupil may have discovered that Shakespeare intended this
character to serve a great dramatic purpose, and the teacher suffers
humiliation before her class. If she were testing for memory, she would
ask the class to name ten characters of the play and like hackneyed
questions, so that her own intelligence would not be put to the test.
Accurate scholarship and broad general intelligence may be combined in
the same person and, certainly, we are striving to inculcate and foster
these qualities in our pupils.
=Books of questions and answers.=--When the examinations for teachers
shall become tests for intelligence and not for memory, we may fully
expect to find the same principle filtering into our school practices.
It is a sad travesty upon education that teachers, even in this
enlightened age, still try to prepare for examinations by committing to
memory questions and answers from some book or educational paper. But
the fault lies not so much with the teachers themselves as with those
who prepare the questions. The teachers have been led to believe that to
be able to recall memorized facts is education. There are those, of
course, who will commercialize this misconception of education by
publishing books of questions and answers. Of course weak teachers will
purchase these books, thinking them a passport into the promised land.
The reform must come at the source of the questions that constitute the
examination. When examiners have grown broad enough in their conception
of education to construct questions that will test for intelligence, we
shall soon be rid of such an incubus upon educational progress as a book
of questions and answers. The field is wide and alluring. History,
literature, the sciences, and the languages are rich in material that
can be used in testing for intelligence, and we need not resort to petty
chit-chat in preparing for examinations.
=The way of reform.=--We must take this broader view of the whole
subject of examinations before we can hope to emerge from our beclouded
and restricted conceptions of education. And it can be done, as we know
from the fact that it is being done. Here and there we find
superintendents, principals, and teachers who are shuddering away from
the question-and-answer method both in the recitation and in the
examination. They have outgrown the swaddling-clothes and have risen to
the estate of broad-minded, intelligent manhood and womanhood. They have
enlarged their concept of education and have become too generous in
their impulses to subject either teachers or pupils to an ordeal that is
a drag upon their mental and spiritual freedom.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. What purposes are actually achieved by examinations?
2. What evils necessarily accompany examinations? What evils usually
accompany them?
3. Outline a plan by which these purposes may be achieved unaccompanied
by the usual evils.
4. Is memory of facts the best test of knowledge? Suggest other tests by
which the value of a pupil's knowledge may be judged.
5. Experts sometimes vary more than 70 per cent in grading the same
manuscript. The same person often varies 20 per cent or more in grading
the same manuscript at different times. An experiment with your own
grading might prove interesting.
6. Do you and your pupils in actual practice regard examinations as an
end or as a means to an end? As corroborating evidence or as a final
proof of competence?
7. How may examinations test intelligence?
8. Suggest methods by which pupils may be led to distinguish major from
minor and to see things in their right relations.
9. Is it more desirable to have the pupils develop these powers or to
memorize facts? Why?
10. Why are "question and answer" publications antagonistic to modern
educational practice? Why harmful to students?