to honest, thorough study. But the high
school must bear in mind that good studying implies good teaching. It
cannot be trusted to intuition or to individual discovery. Real,
earnest studying is hard work. The teachers have usually presupposed
habits of study on the part of the pupils, but one of the important
lessons for the school to teach the pupil is how to use his mind and
his books effectively and efficiently. Even the simplest kinds of
apprenticeship instruct the novice in the use of each device and in the
handling of each tool to a degree which the school most often
disregards when requiring the pupil to use even highly abstract and
complex instrumentalities. The practice of the school almost glorifies
drudgery as a genuine virtue. E.R. Breslich refers to this fact,[61]
saying, "so it happens that the preparation for the classwork, not the
classwork itself burdens the lives of the pupils." The indefensibleness
of the indiscriminate lesson giving consists in the fact that it is not
the load but the harness that is too heavy. The harness is more
exhausting and burdensome than the load appointed. The destination
sought and the course to be followed in the lesson preparation are very
many times not clearly indicated, lest the discipline, negative and
repressive though it be, should be extracted from the struggle. The
fact is that discouragement and failure are too often the best of
testimony that teachers are not much concerned about how the pupil
employs his time or books in studying a lesson. The point is
illustrated admirably by the report in the _Ladies Home Journal_, for
January, 1913, of a request from a hardworking widow that the teacher
of one of her children in school try teaching the child instead of just
hearing the lessons which the mother had taught.

Directing the pupils' study is sometimes regarded as a more or less
formalized scheme of organization and procedure, which requires extra
time, extra teachers, and a lesser degree of independence on the part
of the pupils. But here too the important things are differentiation
and specific direction as adapted to the needs of the subject, the
topic or the pupils. It must be insisted that supervised study is not
the same thing in all schools, in all subjects, or for all pupils. In
other words, its very purpose is defeated if it is overformalized. An
experiment is reported by J.H. Minnick with two classes in plane
geometry,[62] of practically the same size, a