which focalizes the teachers' attention and energy chiefly on the
subject. Certain basic assumptions, now pretty much discredited, have
led to the avowed teaching of the subject for its own sake, and often
without much regard to any definite social utility served by it. This
charge seems to find an instance in the handling of the subject of
English so that 16.5 per cent of all the failures are contributed by
it, without giving even the graduate a mastery of direct, forceful
speech, as is so generally testified. Strangely enough, except in the
light of such teaching ends, the pupils who stay through the upper
years and to graduate have more failures in certain subjects than the
non-graduates who more generally escape the advanced classes of these
subjects. The traditional standards of the high school simply do not
meet the dominant needs of the pupils either in the subject-content or
in the methods employed. Some of these traditional methods and studies
are the means of working disappointment and probably of inculcating a
genuine disgust rather than of furnishing a valuable kind of
discipline. The school must provide more than a single treatment for
all cases. In each subject there must be many kinds of treatment for
the different cases in order to secure the largest growth of the
individuals included. This does not in any sense necessitate the
displacement of thoroughness by superficiality or trifling, but on the
contrary greater thoroughness may be expected to result, as helpful
adaptations of method and of matter give a meaningful and purposeful
motive for that earnest application which thoroughness itself demands.

SUMMARY OF CHAPTER VI

The pupil is but one of several factors involved in the failure, yet
the consequences are most momentous for him.

The pupils who lack native ability sufficient for the work are not a
large number.

The high school graduates represent about a 1 in 9 selection of the
elementary school entrants, but in this group is included as high a
percentage of the failing pupils as of the non-failing ones.

The success of the failing pupils in the Regents' examinations, and
also in their repeating with extra schedules, bears witness to their
possession of ability and industry.

In the semester first preceding and that immediately subsequent to the
failure, 72 per cent of all the grades are passing, 20 per cent are A's
or B's. Many of them "can if they will."

The early elimination of pup