It is indeed striking how failures of the pupils are grouped under particular subjects of difficulty, and how the pupils fail again and again in the same general subject.  No educational expert would seem to be needed to diagnose a goodly number of these chronic cases of failing and to detect a productive source of the whole trouble if only the following distribution were presented to him.

  DISTRIBUTION OF PUPILS ACCORDING TO THE NUMBER OF TIMES THEY HAVE
  FAILED IN THE SAME SUBJECT

  No. of
  Times 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14

Boys    2852  1416  425  196   73   25   2   4   1    1    1    0    1
Girls   2812  1722  501  250   98   31   7   8   3    1    0    3    0

By ‘same subjects’ the same general divisions are designated, as English, Latin, mathematics.  We may be led to note first that a major portion of the above distribution of pupils belongs to those who fail but once in the same subject; but then we note that by far the greater number of failures comprised by that distribution belong to those who fail two or more times in the same subject.  To state that fact more specifically, 68.5 per cent of the total 17,960 failures involved in this study are made by two or more failures in the same subject, while 31.5 per cent of the failures belong to a more promiscuous and varied collection of failures, of not more than one in any subject.  It will be noted here that some subjects do not have a greater continuity than one year or even one semester on the school program.  Such subjects provide the least possibility of successive failures in the same field.  A further analysis shows that the failures incurred by three or more instances occurring in the same subject form 33.6 per cent of the entire number; and that 18 per cent of the total is comprised of four or more instances of failure in the same subject.  There is small probability that such a multiplication of failures by subjects will characterize the subjects which are least productive of failures in general, and such is not the case in fact.  Latin and mathematics are again the chief contributors, and this would seem to be a fact also for those schools quoted from outside of this study, for purposes of comparison in Chapter II.

The above distribution speaks with graphic eloquence of how the school tends to focus emphasis on the subject prescribed and then to demand that the pupil be fitted or become fitted to the courses offered.  Such heaping up of failures will more likely mark those subjects which seem to the pupil to be furthest from meeting his needs and appealing to his interests.