Errors in school : their causes and treatment / by John Adams.

  • John Adams
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Errors in school : their causes and treatment / by John Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/344 page 7
    entitled to howler rank in the class-room. Indeed, it is sometimes hinted that schoolmasters are so keen for relief of this kind that they actually lay themselves out to cultivate them. It is suggested that those General Knowledge papers, that bring such a crop of amusing answers to the columns of the newspapers, owe their existence in some part at least to the relief the funny answers give to a jaded staff towards the end of a long term. It is perhaps hard to account otherwise for this sort of examination. The old-fashioned examiners were accused of having an altogether wrong aim in their work. Instead of trying to find what the candidates knew, it was maintained that the examiner set out to discover what they did not know. In other words, the examinations were mistake-traps. There was not even the justification that the traps were set so that the resulting errors might be corrected. This use of such traps will be dealt with later. In the meantime it is enough to point out that the old examinations had no such deep purpose. Once the examination was over, and the results published, the candidates had either passed or failed, and that was all about it: the incident was closed. The General Knowledge paper is now, however, getting a certain amount of support from the psychologists, who themselves use this form of test for the purpose of estimating the intelligence of persons handed over to them for mental evaluation. It is found that there is a high correlation between wide general information and good mental capacity. In plain English, it appears that well-informed people
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