A pamphlet on pharmaceutical education : more especially on the relation to each other of pharmaceutical education and the pharmaceutical examinations with an introduction and appended letters from leaders in pharmacy / [John Attfield].

  • Attfield, John, 1835-1911.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A pamphlet on pharmaceutical education : more especially on the relation to each other of pharmaceutical education and the pharmaceutical examinations with an introduction and appended letters from leaders in pharmacy / [John Attfield]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to them for having studied the technical part of their pharmaceutical education at properly conducted dispensing establishments; and if in¬ stead of no direct credit, as at present, full credit could be given to them for having studied the general part of their pharmaceutical education at a properly supervised public school of pharmacy. Examination would probably then be doing the maximum of good within its sphere. The Edinburgh Review for April, 1874, in an article on “ Com¬ petitive Examinations,” in relation to the Indian Civil Service, condemns the system of adapting education to examination :— “The system is sufficiently condemned by these facts. We have no wish to disparage the exertions of gentlemen who deserve all credit for the intelligence with which they have perceived how the forms of these examinations would give a practical monopoly of success to a particular sort of educational article, and the address and energy with which they have set about producing it. But the fact being thus, that in order to obtain an appointment in the Indian Civil Service you must put yourself in the hands of one of two or three particular tutors living in London—and practically no young man of ordinary talent has a chance of success unless he does so obviously amounts to this, that however much the truth may be disguised under a specious appearance of open competition, the service under the new conditions has become just as much a monopoly as before. In former days you had to get a nomination from a director ; now you have to spend a couple of years with one or other of the * crammers’ whose names are familiar to the public through the advertise¬ ment columns of the papers. The facts being so, the present mockery of an open competition stands condemned by a mere statement of them. That the solemn machinery of a Civil Service Commission, with all its attendant expense, should be set in motion merely to record the comparative merits of the pupils turned out by two or three private establishments, for this is what the examination really amounts to would be simply ludicrous if it were not for the serious interests involved. Such being the facts, and anyone who cares to be at the trouble may easily verify them, what, it will be asked, are the reasons for this extraordinary result, and what should be the remedy ? We believe that both these questions admit of a simple answer. This competitive examination has thus become a virtual monopoly, and the crammers have been able to drive all other competitors out of the field, because the preparation for it involves a kind of education utterly different from anything actually pursued at any public institution, and consequently is quite out of gear with the general educational machinery of the country.To have a fair chance of success a man must leave his university or college, in whatever part of the kingdom it may be, and betake himself to the ‘ crammers ’ who have made it their special function to run candidates for this particular examination. Not that these gentlemen have any special dispensation for imparting knowledge, or that the art of ‘cramming,’ as the process is styled, is peculiar to their establishments. At Cambridge, where the college lectures are of but little account, and the university lectures of still less, the