=Some mistakes.=--Our procedure has often come but little short of an
inquisition. We have followed our own predilections and prejudices
instead of being docile at the feet of Nature and asking her what to do.
We have applied opprobrious epithets and resorted to ostracism. We have
been freely dispensing suspensions and expulsions in a vain effort to
prove that the school is both omniscient and omnipotent. We have tried
to transform a poet into a mechanic, a blacksmith into an artist, and an
astronomer into a ditcher. And our complacency in the presence of the
misfits of the school is the saddest tragedy of all. We have taken
counsel with tradition rather than with the nature of the pupil, the
while rejoicing in our own infallibility.
=Native dispositions.=--Society needs only a limited number of chemists
and only such as have the native tendencies that will make chemistry
most effective in the activities of society. But we have been proceeding
upon the agreeable assumption that every pupil has such native
tendencies. Such an assumption absolves the school, of course, from the
necessity of discovering what pupils are susceptible to chemistry and of
devising ways and means of making this important discovery. Because we
do not know how to make this discovery we find solace in the assumption
that it cannot or need not be made. We then proceed to apply the
Procrustean bed principle with the very acme of _sang froid_.
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