We all know that during VDT, Peter went to Professor Kirke's cottage for tutoring so he could prep for entrance exams. During my first read through the Chronicles, I decided Peter was 14/15 in LWW. Thus, he was (in my mind) 16/17 in VDT. Made sense to me because I naturally am familiar with the schooling system of my present day and country, and entrance exams for post-secondary education at that age is normal for me. (When I later found out that Peter is canonically 12 in LWW, I willfully ignored it. I’m the type of reader who requires information like age and appearance early, and once I have a mental image firmly set in my head, I can be pretty inflexible about correcting said notion. I saw no reason why LWW Peter and Susan shouldn’t be in the 13-15 range, so that is how I perceived them, and anyway, I don’t think that perceiving them as a couple years older is really an issue… until something like WWII British education becomes a topic of interest.)
Somewhat to my surprise, though it really shouldn’t have been because of course Lewis knew what he was writing about, I found my long-time willful assumption of Peter’s age to be truly wrong. From what I can see from a not-super-in-depth look at pre-1944 British education (because VDT is in 1942, and 1944 saw some changes made to the system after the war), compulsory education covered ages 5-14. Peter, canonically, is exactly at the end of this range. Society deemed him mature enough to enter the world, at least to the extent of being employed full-time.
However, I can’t seem to find anything about post-secondary education from that time, at least, not anything pertaining to things like entrance exams or accepted ages or whether one had to go to a different type of post-secondary school before university. Does anyone know anything about that side of Peter's entrance exams?Statistics: Posted by Ariel.of.Narnia — Mon Jul 29, 2019 8:02 pm
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