1.  SOME ARE EVIDENTLY MISFITS

There is a strong presumption that many of the 485 pupils who failed in 50 per cent of their school work and dropped out (reported in Chapter IV) represent misfits for at least the kind of school subjects offered or required.  One cannot say that even hopeless failing in any particular subject is a safe criterion of general inability, or that failure in abstract sort of mental work would be a sure prophecy of failure in more concrete hand work.  It is altogether probable that some of the individuals in the above number were not endowed to profit by an academic high school course, and that others were the restless ones at a restless age, who just would not fit in, whatever their abilities.  But even of these pupils a considerable number display sufficient resourcefulness to satisfy many of their failures and to persist in school two, three, or four years.  There are perhaps at least a few others who, without failing, drop out early, prompted by the conviction of their own unfitness to succeed in the high school.  Yet collectively this group is by no means a large one.  This conclusion is in harmony with the judgment of former Superintendent Maxwell, of New York City,[47] who stated that “the number of children leaving school because they have not the native ability to cope with high school studies, is, in my judgment, small.”  Likewise Van Denburg[48] reached the conclusion that “at least 75 per cent of the pupils who enter (high school) have the brains, the native ability to graduate, if they chose to apply themselves.”  With many who fail not even is the application lacking, as the facts of section 2 will seem to prove.

2.  MOST OF THE FAILING PUPILS LACK NEITHER ABILITY OR EARNESTNESS

When we take into account that by the processes of selection and elimination only thirty to forty per cent of the pupils who enter the elementary school ever reach high school,[49] it is readily admitted that the high school population is a selected group, of approximately 1 in 3.  Then of this number we again select less than 1 in 3 to graduate.  This gives a 1 in 9 selection, let us say, of the elementary school entrants.  For relatively few general purposes in life may we expect to find so high a degree of selection.  Yet in this 1 in 9 group (who graduate) the percentage of the failing pupils is as high as that of the non-failing ones, and the percentage of graduates does not drop even as the number of failures rise.  So far as ability is required to meet the conditions of graduation they are manifestly provided with it.  Following this comparison still further, the failing pupils who do not graduate have an average number of failures that is only .6 higher than for the failing graduates (4.9-4.3); but barring those non-graduates considered in section 1 of this chapter, the average is practically the same as for the failing graduates.  Moreover, the failing non-graduates continue in school, even in the face of failure, much longer than do the non-failing non-graduates.  That gives evidence of the same quality to which the manager of a New York business firm paid tribute when he said that he preferred to employ a high school graduate for the simple reason that the graduate had learned, by staying to graduate, how to ‘stick to’ a task.