Ordeal in London

"Subtract 8 days, 23 hours and 31 minutes from 29 days, 15 hours and 7 minutes.

"If HMFL spells JOHN in a particular code, how does that code work?

"Four men, Smith, Robinson, Jones and Brown, all grow vegetables. All four grow lettuce. All but Smith and Robinson grow potatoes. Smith and Brown grow cabbages. Robinson grows peas. Which two vegetables does Robinson grow? Which two does Smith grow? Which man grows Potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, but no peas?"

For 2 1/2 hours, one day last week, 32,000 little Londoners, aged 10 1/2 to 11 1/2, sat at their school desks puzzling over such questions as these. Their puzzlement was fierce, as if they thought their very lives depended on their answers. In their estimate of the seriousness of the test, the young Londoners were pretty much right.

The examinations they were taking were the awesome "selection tests"--Britain's new way of finding out just what sort of secondary education each child should have. If he does well, he will win a coveted "place" in one of the "grammar" schools, and there he will get a solid academic education that may eventually lead him to a university. If he does not do so well, he will be sent to a "central" or "secondary technical" school where he will spend more time on vocational training. The bottom 60% of the children will end up in a "secondary modern" school. There, formal academic training is at a minimum.

So Worked Up. The selection system started in 1944, when the British government decided that every child should get a free secondary education. Before that, parents paid the bill, and most children merely stayed on in elementary schools until they could legally drop out at 14. Now all children must go on to secondary school at eleven. Since too few grammar schools exist, the government has had to set up a rigid system of selection. But by last week, as the London exams fell due, some Britons were asking whether the system is really worth while.

Teachers were willing to admit that the tests could winnow out the bright and the quick. But they still did not pick out the hard-working or the talented. They gave no quarter to the late bloomers, made no allowances for children who happened to be overwrought during the exam. Cried one parent last week: "The test gets the child so worked up. My Patricia went out of the house white as a sheet, and couldn't eat any breakfast." Added another: "It's terrible to think that what a boy does at eleven will govern his whole life."

Is It Right? Some officials were ready to agree. Even the Labor Party, with its Socialistic love of the tidy plan for everything, had worried over the fact that "the three types of schools are bound to inherit the old traditions of class segregation . . . [with] some children resentfully concluding that they are inferior to [those] attending grammar schools." Last week the controversy boiled up anew when A. G. Hughes, chief inspector in the Education Officers' Department of the London County Council, published a book with some severe words for the whole tripartite idea.

"It is very doubtful," said he, "whether on the basis of tests we ought ever to dare to decide, at the age of ten, whether an intelligent boy with practical aptitude is destined to become an academic scientist via a grammar school or a practical engineer via a secondary technical school ... Is it right to segregate . . . dull and bright, bookish-minded and practical-minded pupils . . . during the impressionable and formative period of adolescence? ... Is it right to determine the type of education so early without reference to the changes of interest that so often develop during adolescence?"

Apparently some Britons thought it was not right. The trouble is that until the nation can afford enough "comprehensive schools" to accommodate everyone, eleven-year-olds will have to go through the same ordeal that hit the little Londoners last week.

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