Illegitimate Reasons for promoting Pupils
The problems which have been pointed out will perhaps be seen most vividly if some types of promotion are cited which are likely to interfere with instruction.
Sometimes the school allows a pupil to move up a grade or class, although it is known that he has not done the work below, because the parents of the child have influence and it does not seem safe to antagonize them.
Sometimes the pressure of numbers in the lower grades or classes is so great that the teacher sends a pupil on in order to make room for the younger pupils, even when it is evident that the pupil will not be able to carry the higher work.
Sometimes the teacher in a given grade is anxious to unload the backward or disorderly and therefore incompetent pupil on someone else, and since the open road is into the next higher grade, the child is sent on.
Promotion is sometimes controlled by the calendar. Because the date for closing the schools has arrived, and the long vacation is at hand, pupils are declared to have completed the work whether they have or not.
Sometimes it is more or less explicitly argued that the backward pupil is larger than the other children of like intellectual attainments and he should therefore be sent to the upper-grade room where the seats are larger.
When such reasons for promotion are deliberately set down in black and white, they are evidently not legitimate reasons. Many a pupil has, however, been dealt with on exactly such grounds.
Experiments and Studies which aim to supply both Individual Instruction and Class Instruction
The indefensible reasons given above for advancing pupils ought to make anyone who expects to become a teacher the more ready to turn to the careful study of the problem. It is undoubtedly a social and financial necessity that pupils be grouped in classes. It is equally necessary for purposes of administration that the groups have some kind of permanency and some degree of internal uniformity. It is certainly legitimate that the individual’s needs be asserted to the extent of freeing him from absolute subordination to the interests of the group.