54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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 con- 

 vinced 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 author- 

 ities 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 reiter- 

 ated 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 Caesar 

 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 

 Caesar's campaigns in Gaul. The usual practise of daily assignments 

 of home work to be done under varying and often most unfavorable con- 

 ditions, 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 2 and breeds slipshod, if not dis- 

 honest, 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 



i See the article "Teaching High School Pupils How to Study," by Ernst R. 

 Breslict in the School Review XX: 505-15. 



