standards, its ethics, were in their hands. Equally, today's professors and lecturers in the Universities cannot abdicate from the duty laid upon them by their calling.
Mindless, unsustained, and unresearched, with the authors snatching at possible arguments, only one issue of importance emerges from the black paper: examinations.
Exams are the heart of the class system in education, and the writers realise that the technical problem of efficacity is not central to the problem. On the whole they reject continuous assessment (which is fortunate, as continuous assessment is a terrible form of speed-up, which also gives academic authorites continuous controls), and pose the defence of exams where it belongs, in centre bourgeois life.
C. L. Mowat: Life is a series of tests to which, somehow or other, one must measure up.
C. B. Cox : *All life depends upon passing exams. If you fail at football, they drop you to the reserves. If you fail in business, you go bankrapt. If you fail in politics, you are forced to resign (or, in some countries, get shot).:
Kingsley Amis: To call for the abolition of all forms grading. as the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation is reported to have done, is of course to call for an end to education. And why not??
There is a real problem over examinations The technicist rationalising objection to their inaccuracy, which often carries with it powerful moral protest, and the liberal sentimental objections to all differences between men, both fail to understand the real function examinations. The question is not one of differences between men, but whether a system of social division should be rigidly enforced. The argument against exams is not an argument against training, or proficiency, but against a form of judgment.
A thorough- critique of exams will not ¡ effects are felt as much by those who pass as those who fail. Production for profit, at the expense of others, while destroying the subjects that are being learnt, examinations are indeed a fact of bourgeois life. In one word: terror. Exams are the lowest form of violence, they cause sickness, nervous breakdown, suicide, lunatic hysteria, controlled aggression and humiliation; OlIC moment of is reproduced in a schoolroom of examinees.
Whilst these agencies of oppression exist, we may have to pass through them, but opposition is neither anger or protest; the examination system will be abolished. The opposite of the examination room is a sit-in where instead of the serial negativity of rows of individuals reduced to identical roles, quivering before secret judgment, there are the collective differences of argument, action, and decisions. Soviets will replace examination rooms.
So much for the Critical Quarterly. As C. P Snow has been at pains to point out, we must apply the harsh and objective test. If Britain is to hold her own and maintain a decent international position. she must have back-lash as good as any the world can produce On these grounds alone, thepotage served up by Amis & Co. really won't do. Anthony Barnett The next issue of the Dwarf will carry an analysis of the present backlash and the concerte press campaign wich has brought it into being. Viewers must have been appalledto see the first episode of the new Granada Serial entitled RAJ The intention of the serial is to look back to the glorious days of the Empire when the Englishman ruled India etc There is enough shit taught about the Empire in schools without children and elders being forced to view the same rot on Television. Tariq Ali FAMILY PLANNING DUREX Gossamer 7s. Doz. 75s. gross Fetherlite 10s. Doz., 58s. half gross. Guar