In the Universities all the undergraduates without exception are reading for examinations of various kinds,--pass "schools," honour "schools," Civil Service examinations, and the like.

Officers in the Army and Navy have never done with examinations; and there is not a single profession which can be entered through any door but that of a public examination.
Wherever the teacher looks he sees that examinations are held in high honour, and that the main business of teachers of all grades is to produce results which an outside examiner would accept as satisfactory; and he naturally takes for granted that the production of such results is the true function of the teacher, whether his success in producing them is to be tested by a formal examination or not.

The air that he breathes is charged with ideas--ideas about life in general and education in particular--which belong to the order of things that he is supposed to have left behind him, and are fiercely antagonistic to those as yet unrecognised ideas which give the new order of things its meaning, its purpose, and its value.
How can we expect the teacher to look inward when all the conditions of his existence, not as a teacher only but also as a citizen and a man, conspire to make him look outward?
But if the Fates are against his looking inward, to what purpose has he been emancipated from the direct control of a system which had at least the merit of being in line with all the central tendencies of Western civilisation?
How does it profit him to be free if, under the pressure of those tendencies, the chief use that he makes of his freedom is to grind out from his pupils results akin to those which were asked for in the days of schedules and percentages?
Freedom was given him in order that he might be free to take thought for the vital welfare of his pupils.

Or, if freedom was not given to him for that purpose, it were better that it had been withheld from him until those who were able to give or withhold it had formed a juster conception of its meaning.
The truth is that the exemption of the elementary school, and of it alone among schools, from the direct pressure of the examination system, is an isolated and audacious experiment, which is carried on under conditions so unfavourable to its success that nothing but a high degree of intelligence and moral courage (not to speak of originality) on the part of the teacher can make it succeed.

Can we wonder that in many cases the experiment has proved a failure?
At the end of the previous chapter I asked myself whether the education that was given in the ordinary elementary school tended to foster self-expression on the part of the child.