Segregation, Apartheid or Classification?

Segregation, apartheid, or the more neutral word classification, is what you call it.  From 1863 to 1898, children in English elementary schools had to take an annual examination in the 3 R's.  The examination was held by Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, and the size of the teacher's salary depended, in part, upon on the results.

This appalling system was believed to ensure continuous effort on the part of the teachers, and thus the best possible education for children.  The objections to it were obvious to perceptive people like Matthew Arnold from the start, and by 1898 they had become so manifest to all that it was abandoned.

John Blackie
Introduction to Space, Time and Grouping
Citation Press, NY 1971



And what exactly did Matthew Arnold write in his Reports On Elementary Schools 1852 - 1882?

Well here goes and strangely it sounds an awful like 2013 in our good, old USA.

Payment By Results fosters teaching by rote.  The school exams are a game of mechanical contrivance in which the teacher will and must more and more learn how to beat us.  It is found possible, by ingenious preparation, to get children through the Revised Code examination in reading, writing, and ciphering without their really know how to read, write, and cipher.

To take the commonest instance: a book is selected at the beginning of the year for the children of a certain standard.  All the year the children read this book over and over again, and no other.  When the inspector comes they are presented to read in this book.  They can read their sentences or two fluently enough but they cannot read any other book fluently.

Yet the letter of the law is satisfied and the more we undertake to lay down to the very letter, the more do managers and teachers conceive themselves to have the right to hold us to this letter.  The circle of the children's reading has thus been narrowed and impoverished all the year for the sake of a result at the end of it and the result is an illusion.