World Yearbook of Education 1969

Examinations

Joseph A. Lauwerys, David G. Scanlon, Joseph A. Lauwerys, David G. Scanlon

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136168345
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Bildung
• Thema: Bildung Allgemein

First Published in 2005. Almost everywhere policies designed to broaden access to education and to promote equality of opportunity are now pursued. In consequence the importance of examinations grows, since success in them determines entry to higher education and thus to professional posts. They are therefore a major instrument of social mobility and promotion which affects social structure by applying criteria of selection nearly always accepted unconsciously and uncritically. The aim of this text in selecting Examinations as the theme of the 1969 WORLD YEAR BOOK, was to present a comparative analysis of the way in which examinations are devised, administered and assessed, to find out why we are examining, and to look at the ways in which we examine to see if these are efficient, relevant and reliable.

Section VI: Introduction

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Economic and Social Effects of Examinations

Brian Holmes

Reader in Comparative Education in the University of London

The effects of education on social class structure, economic development and political stability have been studied recently by social scientists using increasingly sophisticated techniques of research. They have concentrated attention on formal education in industrial and developing countries. It is important, however, to realize, as Rosemary Firth points out, that young people have to be initiated into adult society whether that society be a small non-industrial traditional society or a complex modern technological society. The rituals of initiation differ, Western examination systems are ritualized (p. 236) and results can determine the occupation, status and salary of individuals for the rest of their lives.

Considerable attention has recently been given to the economic outcomes of education and L. Emmerij analyses the effects of examinations on the economy while admitting the difficulties of measuring these links, through either the manpower or the rate-of-return approaches (p. 243). Manpower needs do not govern social demand for various types of education. Educational planning should be more concerned than in the past with the factors that govern demand. By implication it is clear that examination success, unless closely related to a realistic economic structure, will not enhance progress. In other words, economic pressures have not yet modified examination systems and until they do the phenomenon of a growing group of unemployed and unemployable graduates will persist.

This analysis is continued in a somewhat similar vein by J. Capelle who sees the French baccalauréat as part of a system of higher and more selective examinations which set apart, on a national scale, an elité whose members form a kind of ‘mutual aid’ society (p. 261). The system, he writes, provides the country with academically brilliant leaders while harming others. Does it contribute to political instability, however? Capelle questions whether the professional diplomas really guarantee professional proficiency (p. 263). For a time at least, they do accurately indicate potential: subsequently the diploma holder has to acquire real professional ability.

H. Leibenstein indeed regards certificates, diplomas, degrees and licences as ‘skill labels’ (p. 267). Many skill-labelling schemes (degree courses, etc.), are economically wasteful and career proficiency in many cases would have been improved if the number of years of education actually spent acquiring the label had been different. Examinations are important determinators of the label, but the label may bear little relation to the tasks which have to be performed. One reason is that examination systems, controlled by educationists, invariably lag behind occupational requirements.

W. R. Niblett analyses and compares in England and the U.S.A. the extent to which the classification of results in degree examinations influences the identification of an intellectual élite. He suggests that in the U.S.A. the aim is to train a professional élite – functionally useful as technologists, scholars and administrators (p. 277). When it is remembered that only 6 per cent of the small group graduating from English and Welsh universities obtain first class degrees, the extent to which the classification of degrees establishes an élite (whose future for the most part is assured) is clear.

The English system was carried to many African countries. S. H. Irvine analyses the relationship in Africa between examinations, wastage and high-level manpower. He points to the high cost, and selection, though valuable, does not effectively reduce wastage.

The desire for academic qualifications persists in Japan, too, in spite of changes since World War II. S. Wada traces this to the samurai tradition and their love of learning. ‘This insatiable thirst for knowledge and education on a national scale has no doubt produced Japan’s amazing industrial and economic developments’ (p. 294). Its effects on political stability in the 1930s needs to be examined, since economic progress at the expense of democracy may be a price few nations wish to pay.

In contrast, K. C. Mukherjee suggests that the examination system in India has strangled economic growth (p. 300). In Iran, too, according to Iraj Ayman, examinations have shaped or limited ‘the rate of social change and progress’ (p. 302). Since the war in Indonesia, writes I. P. Simandjuntak, the educational system has been directed towards ensuring an expansion of educational opportunity ‘solely according to ability’ (P.318).

Examinations in most countries tend, in short, to be the agencies of selection of an intellectual élite, members of which may be included in the political, social and economic élite groups, but the extent to which they test knowledge, aptitudes, and attitudes appropriate to the performance of leadership functions in the modern world, is obviously in doubt. The need for reform in broad social terms is apparent from these articles.

26

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Examination and Ritual Initiation

Rosemary Firth

Lecturer in Education, University of London Institute of Education

It is difficult for us in the twentieth century to see education except as a formal activity which goes on in special places, like a school, college or university; or examination as other than a written test of ability, actual or potential. But if we want to explore the theme of examinations comparatively, and to see its relationship with the educational system of more than one country, we must adopt a wider view of education. We need to look beyond the philosopher’s view that ‘education can have no ends beyond itself’, and try to see it in relation to social ends which may differ from society to society. To the social anthropologist, education is one of the ways in which a society maintains its cultural identity. Technical skills and accumulated knowledge must be handed on, but an attempt must also be made to impose the patterns of behaviour and the values of the past on each succeeding generation, as well as to train them for the future.

A Comparative View of Examinations

Not only societies untouched by Western influence, but European society itself in past centuries had very different ways of doing this. The education of a gentleman in the seventeenth century was partly attained by attachment to the sovereign’s court, and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by travel abroad with a tutor. The learning of certain skilled trades was by apprenticeship in the family of a master of that trade, and skills of agricultural production, hunting and fishing may still be learnt in simple societies by imitation, play and practice, in addition to formal instruction.

Granted that we should expect very different methods of teaching the skills required in a small non-industrial, traditional society; by what methods should we expect them to recognize the difference between the acknowledged and experienced specialist, and the novice under training? For this is at bottom what an examination does for any educational system: it divides those who may practise from those who may not, those privileged to exercise a skill from the mass of unprivileged, the initiated, as we say, from the uninitiated.

Into what then is it that a person is initiated? What does initiation do for those who organize it, those who watch it, and those who undergo it? To what extent are initiation rites mainly formal or mainly symbolic? These are matters with which anthropologists have always been much concerned; for they have implications for every society, and reflect currently held ideas about the nature of social relations, in particular the integration of the individual with the group.

In studying initiation rites and socialization in other societies, we may perhaps see examinations in Western society in a different light, as performing latent or hidden social purposes from their manifest, or publicly admitted ones. This may clarify some aspects of the actual as opposed to the stated nature of the examination system. For the anthropologist is interested in finding out the difference between what people say happens and what can be observed to happen. It is in analysing the discrepancies between these that he gets his most fruitful insights into the workings of the society he is looking at.

Education as Role Learning

The basic task of the educational system in any society is training in institutionally acceptable forms of behaviour. Not only has the child to learn how to speak, act and think in the traditions of his society, he also has to learn how to feel in that society. He has to discover who he is in relation to the people surrounding him, and how he must behave to them. Not only has he to acquire some skills, he has also to appreciate which skills he may appropriately acquire. In some societies men and women both learn to weave, but each weaves a different kind and width of cloth. In all societies some tasks are preferred, some essential and some forbidden to each sex; and similarly there are behaviours appropriate to different age groups, and between different kin groups.

It is here that Ralph Linton’s concept of role and status, first developed in 1936, is useful in understanding how we learn to behave in society. Since status develops in groups, and roles are exercised in relationships, it is possible to look at them as parts played by an actor in a certain social setting. The setting defines the part to be played, and limits the way it is played. The role we play, if not actually given, has always to be recognized by society.

It is here that the classical study of van Gennep on what he called ‘rites of passage’, has illuminated our thinking about the way critical stages of life are socially defined. He showed that birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood and finally death in all societies, classical and Christian, as well as primitive, have been marked by ritual or – as some prefer to call it – ceremony. The ritual calls attention, in a striking manner, to changes in social status and to acceptance of new social roles.

Put into a modern idiom, Meyer Fortes has shown that a person does not just step into a role, or acquire a status as he might a garment, but that they are conferred upon him by society. The ceremony of conferring this new garment upon a person is only performed at the stage when it is supposed that he will be able, or has learnt, to wear it with decorum. The graduation ceremony will illustrate this analogy. It is a rite which endorses what has gone before, the final sign that the candidate has left the general company and has shown by study and by examination that he is fit to be incorporated in the select group of academics. The act of the chancellor in draping the hood over him seals the pact between the admitting university and the young student in public view.

Ritual and Role Changing

It was an essential part of van Gennep’s theory that rites of passage eased a transition from one to another social role, and that they did so by a threefold action: separation rites to remove an individual from his old group, transition rites while he is on the threshold, and finally incorporation rites as he acquires new status.

Thus both mother and new-born child must often be separated from ordinary household contacts and kept hidden until special purification rites, by washing, fire or other ceremonial, enable both to be safely brought back into contact with family and neighbours. The Christian service of the churching of women as well as infant baptism are relics of such rites in our own society.

The bride who goes veiled to church and who must be carried over the threshold of her husband’s house after a honeymoon period of seclusion, as well as various funeral and mourning sequences for widows practised until quite recently in this country, are other modern examples of public rites still used to help in the adjustment of new social and emotional relationships.

Birth, marriage and mortuary ceremonies usually test and testify to the candidate’s ability in role play. In many marriage ceremonies, some attempt is made to determine that the bride is fit for the marriage, by the calling of banns, by ritual demonstrations of virginity, and in other ways. Delay between birth and rites for the new-born give time for the child to ...