HOW WAS FRENCH EXAMINED ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN 1858?

In 2008 when I was on an Examiner’s meeting in Cambridge, I picked up a book written by the Cambridge Assessment team to commemorate 150 years of assessment. It contained examination papers in a number of subjects dating to 1858, and provided a fascinating opportunity to compare what pupils of similar ages to our pupils in Key Stages 4 and 5 today were expected to deal with a century and a half ago.

The book’s introduction sets out the context quite clearly. ‘For 130 years, until a National Curriculum was introduced, examination syllabuses were the most comprehensive statements about what sixteen-and-eighteen-yearolds should learn in British schools. The Local examination papers below, for 1858, give a unique insight into what leading university teachers thought should be taught to secondary school pupils. At the time these papers would have been seen as modern. There would have been many secondary schools then which did no more than give their pupils a little Latin and no Greek. The option to be examined in French and German, modern languages, was thus significant.’

I begin this item with comments from a member of today’s examination body, and then include papers for local examinations in French at Junior and then Senior level. Similar papers for German, Latin and Greek are available should any reader be interested to see them.

'Between 1858 and 2008 there is one significant change and one sempiternal similarity. The first examination reflects the content of the French textbooks used in schools for decades, in which (a) the French are depicted as barbaric and/or wildly eccentric and (b) the textual content (here belligerent Turks and an enigmatic analogy between the moral state of France and the aftermath of the eruption of Vesuvius) is gloriously remote from the daily lives of the candidates and their French counterparts. The sempiternal similarity is the examiners’ complaint that candidates’ grammar is weak. It would be interesting to compare the scripts.’

Reproduced by kind permission of Cambridge University Press and Assessment Archives and Heritage. Source: 1858 Question Paper Book produced in 2008 to commemorate 150 years of Cambridge Assessment (1858-2008). Ref. UCLES examination question papers, Cam.c.11.51.1.

Mr G Stephenson