“Indian Civil Service.—At a meeting of the Indian section of the Society of Arts, under the presidency of Mr. Andrew Cassels, a paper on ‘Competition and its Effects upon Education’ was read by Dr. George Birdwood. In the course of his remarks, he commented at length upon the India Office despatch of Feb. 24, regarding ‘the selection and training of candidates for the Indian Civil Service,’ and feared that it would but serve to confirm and aggravate and rapidly extend the very worst evil of the old system of competition—namely, the degeneration of secondary education throughout England.... The despatch tended to make over all the secondary schooling of the country to the crammers, or to reduce it to the crammers’ system. They were making the entrance examinations year by year more and more difficult—as their first object must necessarily now be, not the moral and intellectual discipline of the boyhood of England, but to show an ever-growing percentage of success at the various competitive examinations always going on for public services. ‘The devil take the hindermost’ was fast becoming the ideal of education, even in the public schools. If they seriously took to cramming little fellows from twelve to fourteen for entrance into public schools, the rising generation would be used up before it reached manhood. A well-known physician, of great experience, told him that the competition for all sorts of scholarships and appointments was showing its evil fruits in the increase of insanity, epilepsy, and other nervous diseases amongst young people of the age from seventeen to nineteen, and especially amongst pupil-teachers; and if admission into the public schools of England was for the future to be regulated by competition, St. Vitus’s dance would soon take the place of gout, as the fashionable disease of the upper classes. This was the inevitable result of the ill-digested and ill-regulated system of competition for the public services, and especially the Indian Civil Service, which had prevailed; and he feared that the recent despatch would only be to hasten the threatened revolution in their national secondary schools, and the last state of cramming under the despatch would be worse than the first.... The best of examiners was the examiner of his own pupils; for no man could measure real knowledge like the teacher. What should be aimed at was regular moderate study and sound and continuous discipline to start the growing man in life in the healthiest bodily and moral condition possible. He objected to children striving for prizes, whether in games or in studies. The fewer prizes won at school, the more would probably be won in life. Let their only anxiety be to educate their children well, and suffer no temptation to betray them into cramming, and the whole world was open to them.”—Daily Telegraph.