In other words, in order to achieve the semblance of success, he is delivering himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the examiner, and compelling the latter, perhaps against his will, to become a Providence to him and to order all his goings.
This means that his distrust of himself is as complete as his distrust of the child, and that his faith in the efficacy of mechanical obedience has led him to seek salvation for himself, as well as for his pupils, by following that fatal path.
It is in this way that a formal examination reacts upon and intensifies the sinister tendencies of which it is at once a product and a symptom.

The examination system is, as I have said, the keystone of the arch of Western education, crowning and completing the whole structure, and at the same time holding it together, and preventing it from falling, as it deserves to fall, into a ruinous heap.

Education, as it is now interpreted and practised in the West, could not continue to exist without the support of the examination system; but the price that it pays, and will continue to pay, for this deadly preservative, is the progressive aggravation of all its own inherent defects.

The plight of an organism is indeed desperate when the very poison which it ought, if healthy, to eliminate from its system, has become indispensable to the prolongation of its life.
It is notorious that the application of the examination principle to religion--the attempt to estimate spiritual health and growth in terms of outward action--generates hypocrisy, or the pretence of being more virtuous (and more religious) than one really is.

When applied to the education of the young, the same principle generates hypocrisy of another kind,--the pretence of being cleverer than one really is, of knowing more than one really knows.