Number of words: 376

The examination is a child of the industrial age. A democratic government must make note of this. Earlier heredity claimed its rewards. If one was born into patronage, he was privileged enough to claim the plums of office. It was only when industrialisation was born, that efficiency took over from privilege. Democracy opened up opportunities for the common man, it also needed experts for its rapidly growing needs. The examination came to be the final arbiter of justice. This partly accounted for the proliferation of the examination system and the fact that it seems to be so crucial to schools today.

The dull uniformity of today can be the result of the creation of a herd instinct. The herd must be trained to believe what others say rather than to find out anything for themselves. The student becomes only a consumer of thoughts he cannot examine. He settles for the illusion of proof quite similar to that of a TV commercial for toothpaste or washing powder. When the school bends to every breeze of public opinion, in the belief that consistency with democratic principles requires it to teach or to teach whatever the public dictates. When the school accepts social conditions as unbearable. When the belief gains ground that knowledge can be obtained without evidence of proof, because standing against the gale of public opinion is preferable than being swept away. Then if the student is left behind, there is little that the school can do.

Democracy, then, is freedom which cannot flower in an education system which demands total conformity, when one’s thinking is done for him by others, when the only currency afloat are borrowed ideas. Is this the freedom proclaimed by our constitution as the vital need of a democratic state? The glory of a free man is the capacity to revel in the adventure of ideas, to solve problems in his own unique way, to find the good and through and beautiful as the result of his own experimentation with ideas. But when examinations imitate the education system and intervene to impose a middle value system on all, then freedom can be stifled and democracy reduced to tatters.

Excerpted from pages 7 to 9 of ‘Examinations: An Informative Update’ by M Mascarenhas.