meagerly supplied with innate possibilities. Heredity therefore dictates the function of education; and the school-master can only fashion the picture put there. If the ancestral blocks are not there with which to make an elaborate picture he must content himself with what is there,—he or his art cannot create others. When he congratulates himself on achieving a wonderful result in graduating a particularly brilliant student, he is taking to himself unmerited honors. If his individual ability is responsible in one instance, why not apply the same system to all pupils? If this system is responsible for the brilliancy of one pupil, why does not the same system make all brilliant? The reader knows the answer,—because heredity did not endow them equally. Men are not born equal, despite the Declaration of Independence.
The school-master is not responsible for the apt and the inapt pupil. He is responsible for his system which dictates how he will differentiate between the apt and the inapt pupil, in order to achieve the best results without injustice to either.
The inefficient teacher is a dangerous equation in the school system. I mean by inefficiency, the quality of being temperamentally unsuited to the profession. There are a large number of anemic, hysterical young women teaching in the public schools of our cities who should not be there. They should not be there in justice to themselves, nor should they be there in justice to their pupils. A strict, yearly medical examination should be made of the teachers to decide their physical and psychical fitness to fill their positions adequately. One teacher, physically or psychically inefficient, can do an inconceivable amount of harm in one school term. We cannot afford to experiment along this line. It means too much, and even at the price of one unhappy child it is too much to pay. The teacher who feels that she is not suited to the work; who has constantly to hold herself and her temper under control; whose nerves are such that she cannot do justice to herself, whose sense of justice is capable of perversion on purely sentimental grounds; or who has lost—or never possessed—the gift of maintaining discipline, should promptly find another
position. She is earning her salary under false pretenses, and that alone condemns her. I believe, that a large percentage of the inefficiency of the New York Schools is due, not to the academic or scholastic inability of the average teacher, but to the average female teacher's physical, and especially her psychical unfitness to teach. We must concede, however, that in many instances the teacher's unfitness is a direct product of the pernicious system itself.
From "The Village of a Thousand Souls," Gesell, American Magazine
Evidence of a Feeble Mind
A dirty shack in a mud hole in the country is merely another reflection of the same condition that causes the slums of the city. In our glowing spirit of humanity we cry out to raise up "the submerged tenth." Rather, should we not stamp them out of existence—treat them as a menace, and not as a thing of pity?
Men, in general, rise; their minds are subjectively or objectively educated to their mental limit. They cannot go beyond it. "The submerged tenth" exists because its mental limit is low—often close to the upper margins of feeble-mindedness—and because it is mentally incapable of rising to anything else.
