The fact that nearly 81 per cent of the non-graduates have only 5 failures or less, taken in comparison with the fact that approximately one fourth of the failing graduates have 8 or more failures, argues that the number of failures alone can hardly be considered one of the larger factors in causing the dropping out.  In a report concerning the working children of Cincinnati, H.T.  Wooley remarks[33] that “two-thirds of our children leaving the public schools are the failures.”  This seems to suppose failing a large cause of the dropping out.  But this investigation of failure indicates that the percentage of failure for those leaving is no higher than for the ones who do not leave.  A similar illustration is credited to O.W.  Caldwell[34], who makes reference to the large percentage of the failing pupils who leave high school, without taking any recognition of the equally large percentage of the failing pupils who continue in the high school.

There is in no sense any intention here to condone the large number of failures simply because it is pointed out that they do not operate chiefly to cause elimination from school.  The above facts may lead to some such conviction as that expressed by Wooley,[33] after giving especial attention to those who had left school, that “the real force that is sending a majority of these children out into the industrial field is their own desire to go to work, and behind this desire is frequently the dissatisfaction with school.”  A somewhat similar conviction seems to be shared by King,[35] in saying that “the pupil who yields unwillingly to the narrow round of school tasks ... will grasp at almost any pretext to quit school.”  W.F.  Book tabulated the reasons why pupils leave high school,[36] as given by 1,051 pupils.  He found that discouragement, loss of interest, and disappointment affect more pupils than all the other causes combined.  Likewise Bronner notes[37] that the ‘irrational’ sameness of school procedure for all pupils often leads to “serious loss of interest in school work, discouragement, truancy, and disciplinary problems.”  Still it may be that the worst consequences of multiplied failures are not to those dropping out.  W.D.  Lewis observes[38] that the failing pupil “speedily comes to accept himself as a failure,” and that “the disaster to many who stay in the schools is greater than to those who are shoved out.”  To the same point Hanus tells[39] us that “during the school period aversion and evasion are more frequently cultivated than power and skill, through the forced pursuit of uninteresting subjects.”  A pupil who acquires the habit of failing and the attitude of accepting it as a necessary evil may soon give up trying to win and become satisfied to accept himself as less gifted, or even to accept life in general as necessarily a matter of repeated failures.  In a similar connection, James E. Russell says,[40] “the boy who becomes accustomed to second place soon fails to think at his best.”  Such psychological results in regard to habits and attitude accruing from repeated failures are both certain and insidious.  And an education which purports to be for all and to offer the highest training to each must abandon the inculcation of attitudes of mind so detrimental to the individual and to the very society which educates him.