the
pupil ought to learn to overcome difficulties for himself, and how can
he learn unless real difficulties are presented?

The great trouble with this teacher is that his policy does not work out
in practice. A small minority of his pupils are strengthened by it; the
majority are weakened. He is right when he says that a pupil gains
strength only by overcoming difficulties, but he neglects a very
important qualification of this rule, namely, that a pupil gains no
strength out of obstacles that he fails to overcome. It is the conquest
that comes after effort,--this is the factor that gives one strength and
confidence. But when defeat follows defeat and failure follows failure,
it is weakness that is being engendered--not strength. And that is the
trouble with this teacher's pupils. The majority leave him with all
confidence in their own ability shaken out of them and some of them
never recover from the experience.

And so while I insist strenuously that the most useful lesson we can
teach our pupils is how to do disagreeable tasks cheerfully and
willingly, please do not understand me to mean that we should go out of
our way to provide disagreeable tasks. After all, I rejoice that my own
children are learning how to read and write and cipher much more easily,
much more quickly, and withal much more pleasantly than I learned those
useful arts. The more quickly they get to the plane that their elders
have reached, the more quickly they can get beyond this plane and on to
the next level.

To argue against improved methods in teaching on the ground that they
make things too easy for the pupil is, to my mind, a grievous error. It
is as fallacious as to argue that the introduction of machinery is a
curse because it has diminished in some measure the necessity for human
drudgery. But if machinery left mankind to rest upon its oars, if it
discouraged further progress and further effortful achievement, it
_would_ be a curse: and if the easier and quicker methods of instruction
simply bring my children to my own level and then fail to stimulate them
to get beyond my level, then they are a curse and not a blessing.

I do not decry that educational policy of to-day which insists that
school work should be made as simple and attractive as possible. I do
decry that misinterpretation of this policy which looks at the matter
from the other side, and asserts so vehemently that the child should
never be asked or urged to do somethin