by the frank statement of a
teacher who had used this weapon; another, by the ready advice of an
older to a younger teacher, in the midst of recording marks, to fail a
boy "because he was too fresh." The advice was followed. Such a
practice, however prevalent, is intolerable and indefensible. If the
school failure is to be administered as a retaliation or convenience by
the teacher, how is the moral or educational welfare of the pupil to be
served thereby? It is certain to be more efficacious for vengeance than
for purposes of reforming the individual if employed in this way. The
Regents' rules take recognition of this inclination toward a perversion
of the function of examination by forbidding any exclusion from
Regents' examinations as a means of discipline. Many teachers cultivate
a finesse for discerning weaknesses and faults, without perceiving the
immeasurable advantage of being able to see the pupils' excellences. In
one school there was employed a plan by which a percentage discount was
charged for absence, and in some instances it reduced a passing mark to
a failing mark. This comes close to the assignment of marks of failure
for penalizing purposes, which is unjustified and vicious.

It is certain that some of the pupils are failures only in the narrow
academic sense. Information in reference to a few such cases was
volunteered by principals, without any effort being made to trace such
pupils in general. One of the pupils in this study who had graduated
after failing 23 times, was able to enter a reputable college, and had
reached the junior year at the time of this study. Two others with a
record of more than 20 failures each had made a decided success in
business--one as an automobile salesman and manager, the other in a
telegraph office. It is not unrecognized that the school has many
notable failures to indicate how even the fittest sometimes do not
survive the school routine. Among such cases were Darwin, Beecher,
Seward, Pasteur, Linnaeus, Webster, Edison, and George Eliot, who were
classed by their schools as stupid or incompetent.[51] In reference to
the pupil's responsibility for the failures, Thorndike remarks[52] that
"something in the mental or social and economic status of the pupil who
enters high school, or in the particular kind of education given in the
United States, is at fault. The fact that the elimination is so great
in the first year of the high school gives evidence that a large share