Efforts to adjust Instruction to Pupils
The conditions shown in the figure are paralleled in many school systems. The result is that school officers, seeing the difficulty of doing justice to the pupils, have made radical changes in the grading system in order to meet individual needs. Two extracts from reports by superintendents will show the extent to which school systems will go.
A study of the performances of the failures in Boise has convinced the entire force that the repeater is generally a quitter, and does about as poor work in his second attempt as in his first trial at the work of a given grade. The stamp of disapproval has been placed upon him. He starts on his second attempt with a grievance against the teacher and the entire institution. The parents as well as the child feel injured, so that the teacher must combat both the antagonism of the home and the hostility of the pupil, who has been trained for failure and not for success, and who becomes either morbidly sensitive or brazenly indifferent. What the laggard would probably do as a repeater is therefore quite definitely known. If he were permitted to advance, he could hardly do worse and he might do better. It is less expensive and more human to promote him than it is to degrade him. This view of the situation is generally accepted in Boise. The standard for promoting the dull pupil is entirely individual. He is not compelled to do all the work of his present grade before he is permitted to pass to the next. He is even allowed to pass on without manifesting enough ability to justify the hope that he may be able to do the work of the advanced grade. The question is reduced to the one consideration: Would he do better if advanced than he would as a repeater?[36]
Ten years ago no pupil could enter the Newton High School, no matter what his age or educational need, who had not completed satisfactorily all the work of the grammar schools; and a considerable portion—probably one-third to one-half—of all Newton children were then leaving school at fourteen to sixteen years of age with only part of an elementary school education. To-day any boy or girl who needs secondary school instruction—and most boys and girls of high school age, fourteen or fifteen, do need such instruction—may enter some department of the Newton high schools, whether grammar school work has been completed or not; and nearly all—probably from eighty to ninety per cent—of our children are now getting secondary training before leaving school.[37]