the adoption of the plan two full units of excess credit. What attitude the college will take toward such cases I do not know, but I am convinced that this student with only thirteen units on the usual basis for reckoning admission credits is by all means the best prepared student in the entire class. With the rapidly growing tendency for college authorities to place the responsibility for the decision as to the fitness of pupils to enter college upon the high school, I see no reason why students should not be accepted from properly accredited schools a limited part of whose credits have been given because of exceptionally good work.
Another means for increasing the efficiency of school work is in the improvement of class-room methods. One of the most frequently reiterated complaints made by high-school and college teachers is that our pupils do not know how to study. They certainly do not in most cases, and those who do have not consciously been taught the art by their teachers. Each teacher who makes the complaint lays the fault upon the teachers in the grades below and recognizes no responsibility on his own part for teaching this neglected lesson. The teacher of Cæsar thinks it so important to get his pupils through the four books which long tradition has assigned to his year's work, that he has no time to lose in teaching his pupils how to study. Let those who can not keep the pace fall by the wayside! And the dead scattered along the road each year are as numerous as those who fell in the most sanguinary of Cæsar's campaigns in Gaul. The usual practise of daily assignments of home work to be done under varying and often most unfavorable conditions, followed by a period spent in an ineffectual attempt to secure anything approaching an adequate and coherent recitation of the day's assignment, affords little incentive to the bright pupil and little training to the dull one. The method is most ineffectual so far as the mastery of the immediate material is concerned[1] and breeds slipshod, if not dishonest, habits of work and of thinking. Some valuable experiments have been made recently, showing that without any home study at all, by devoting the class period to careful teaching followed by work under the direction and supervision of the teacher, more actual ground can be covered and better results secured at the end of a given time, than under the usual recitation method. This method has been employed in Latin in several New Hampshire schools, in which the classes have covered in three years the amount of work usually done in four, and the fourth year has been given to the reading of college authors in an amount and with a facility which is surprising. And all this has been done with much less than the usual elimination of pupils by failure. When teachers of the upper years of the elementary school and the first year of the high school come to realize that it is more important that pupils learn right habits of work than that they get through a certain
- ↑ See the article "Teaching High School Pupils How to Study," by Ernst R. Breslict in the School Review XX: 505-15.
