Abstract
THE public schools and the great day schools of the nineteenth century were inspired both in regard to curriculum and method by Oxford and Cambridge, and they were largely classical; a reaction against this undue narrowness led to the experiment of the organised science schools of the last ten years of that century. These in their turn certainly carried the reaction too far, and produced juvenile chemists and physicists without culture or general education. In 1904 the Board of Education issued its first regulations for secondary schools, and sought something broader than either of these two rival institutions; they established a four-year course in which English, geography, and history, at least one language other than English, mathematics, science, and drawing should be studied, together with manual work, physical exercises, and, for girls, housewifery. As that course has been worked in practice in the last twenty-five years, it has been in the main academic in spirit, and the important subjects have come to be the native tongue, the foreign language or languages, and mathematics and science; the schools have continued to look to the universities, and to the development of those advanced courses which lead up to university studies. All this effort has been directed and stabilised, and some would say stereotyped, by the setting up of the system of school certificates, for which in England and Wales eight university authorities examine. All the secondary schools, therefore, have in the main the same outlook, which is primarily that each pupil should at the end of the first stage of the course be able to matriculate at a university; the school certificates have been brought into relation with the matriculation examinations, and the system is now organised in all its details.
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NORWOOD, C. Secondary Schools and Examinations1. Nature 122, 446–448 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122446a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122446a0