Nor have I much sympathy with that extreme view of this matter which asserts that we must go out of our way to provide distasteful tasks for the pupil in order to develop this ideal of persistence.  I believe that such a policy will always tend to defeat its own purpose.  I know a teacher who holds this belief.  He goes out of his way to make tasks difficult.  He refuses to help pupils over hard places.  He does not believe in careful assignments of lessons, because, he maintains, the pupil ought to learn to overcome difficulties for himself, and how can he learn unless real difficulties are presented?

The great trouble with this teacher is that his policy does not work out in practice.  A small minority of his pupils are strengthened by it; the majority are weakened.  He is right when he says that a pupil gains strength only by overcoming difficulties, but he neglects a very important qualification of this rule, namely, that a pupil gains no strength out of obstacles that he fails to overcome.  It is the conquest that comes after effort,—­this is the factor that gives one strength and confidence.  But when defeat follows defeat and failure follows failure, it is weakness that is being engendered—­not strength.  And that is the trouble with this teacher’s pupils.  The majority leave him with all confidence in their own ability shaken out of them and some of them never recover from the experience.

And so while I insist strenuously that the most useful lesson we can teach our pupils is how to do disagreeable tasks cheerfully and willingly, please do not understand me to mean that we should go out of our way to provide disagreeable tasks.  After all, I rejoice that my own children are learning how to read and write and cipher much more easily, much more quickly, and withal much more pleasantly than I learned those useful arts.  The more quickly they get to the plane that their elders have reached, the more quickly they can get beyond this plane and on to the next level.

To argue against improved methods in teaching on the ground that they make things too easy for the pupil is, to my mind, a grievous error.  It is as fallacious as to argue that the introduction of machinery is a curse because it has diminished in some measure the necessity for human drudgery.  But if machinery left mankind to rest upon its oars, if it discouraged further progress and further effortful achievement, it would be a curse:  and if the easier and quicker methods of instruction simply bring my children to my own level and then fail to stimulate them to get beyond my level, then they are a curse and not a blessing.