or for science as reported in St. Louis, where it was required of all and yielded the highest percentage of failures.  Now the teaching of most sciences by the unit plan will comprise no greater difficulty than is involved in overcoming text-book methods and the conservatism of convention.  The project device, as employed in vocational education, will also lend itself in many instances to the unit division of work.  The first consequence of this plan will be a reduction of failures for the pupil in those subjects whose continued pursuit would mean increased failure.  The second consequence may be to relieve teachers of hopeless cases of misfit in any subject, for if the pupils no longer have intolerable subjects imposed on them the teachers will come to demand only tolerable work in the subjects of their choice.  The third consequence will probably be to encourage pupils to find themselves by trying out subjects at less risk of such cumulative failures as are disclosed in section 3 of the preceding chapter.

4.  PROVISION FOR THE DIRECTION OF THE PUPILS’ STUDY

The forms of treatment suggested in the first three sections of this chapter for the diminution of failures will find their natural culmination of effectiveness in a plan for helping the pupils to help themselves.  This has been notably lacking in most school practice.  Every improvement of the school adaptation still assumes that the pupils are to apply themselves to honest, thorough study.  But the high school must bear in mind that good studying implies good teaching.  It cannot be trusted to intuition or to individual discovery.  Real, earnest studying is hard work.  The teachers have usually presupposed habits of study on the part of the pupils, but one of the important lessons for the school to teach the pupil is how to use his mind and his books effectively and efficiently.  Even the simplest kinds of apprenticeship instruct the novice in the use of each device and in the handling of each tool to a degree which the school most often disregards when requiring the pupil to use even highly abstract and complex instrumentalities.  The practice of the school almost glorifies drudgery as a genuine virtue.  E.R.  Breslich refers to this fact,[61] saying, “so it happens that the preparation for the classwork, not the classwork itself burdens the lives of the pupils.”  The indefensibleness of the indiscriminate lesson giving consists in the fact that it is not the load but the harness that is too heavy.  The harness is more exhausting and burdensome than the load appointed.  The destination sought and the course to be followed in the lesson preparation are very many times not clearly indicated, lest the discipline, negative and repressive though it be, should be extracted from the struggle.  The fact is that discouragement and failure are too often the best of testimony that teachers are not much concerned about how the pupil employs his time or books in studying a lesson.  The point is illustrated admirably by the report in the Ladies Home Journal, for January, 1913, of a request from a hardworking widow that the teacher of one of her children in school try teaching the child instead of just hearing the lessons which the mother had taught.