It is certain that some of the pupils are failures only in the narrow academic sense.  Information in reference to a few such cases was volunteered by principals, without any effort being made to trace such pupils in general.  One of the pupils in this study who had graduated after failing 23 times, was able to enter a reputable college, and had reached the junior year at the time of this study.  Two others with a record of more than 20 failures each had made a decided success in business—­one as an automobile salesman and manager, the other in a telegraph office.  It is not unrecognized that the school has many notable failures to indicate how even the fittest sometimes do not survive the school routine.  Among such cases were Darwin, Beecher, Seward, Pasteur, Linnaeus, Webster, Edison, and George Eliot, who were classed by their schools as stupid or incompetent.[51] In reference to the pupil’s responsibility for the failures, Thorndike remarks[52] that “something in the mental or social and economic status of the pupil who enters high school, or in the particular kind of education given in the United States, is at fault.  The fact that the elimination is so great in the first year of the high school gives evidence that a large share of the fault lies with the kind of education given in the United States.”  Some of the facts for those are not eliminated so early are still more definitely indicative that something is wrong with the kind of education given, as the facts of the following section seem to point out.

3.  THE SCHOOL EMPHASIS AND THE SCHOOL FAILURES ARE BOTH CULMINATIVE IN PARTICULAR SCHOOL SUBJECTS

As soon as we find any subject forced upon all pupils alike as a school requirement we may be quite sure that it will not meet the demands of the individual aptitudes and capacities of some portion of those pupils.  As a result an accumulation of failures will tend to mark out such a uniformly required subject, whether it be mathematics, science or Latin.  It was pointed out in section 4 of Chapter II that Latin and mathematics, although admittedly in charge of teachers ranking with the best, have both a high percentage of the total failures and the highest percentage of failures reckoned on the number taking the subject.  In both regards there is a heaping up of failures for those two subjects, but furthermore there is an arbitrary emphasis culminating in these two subjects beyond any others excepting that English is a very generally required subject.  In reference to these two required subjects the pupils who graduate are not more successful than those who do not.  When the emphasis is on the teaching of the subject rather than on the teaching of the pupil there is no incongruity in making the subject a requirement for all, but both are incongruous with what psychology has more lately recognized and pointed out as to the wide range of individual differences.  A similar situation is evidenced by the percentage of failure in science as reported for the St. Louis high school in Chapter II.  A year of physics had been made compulsory for all, and taught in the second year.[53] Its percentage of failures accordingly mounts to the highest place.  Mr. Meredith, who conducted that portion of the survey, rightly regards the policy as a mistake, and recommends that the needs of individual pupils be considered.