286 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
At this point I want to call attention to two practices com¬ 
mon among superintendents which tend to conceal much of the 
real existing retardation. Neither one of them, so far as I 
can recall, have ever been mentioned in the literature of the 
subject. The first is the practice of arbitrarily promoting a 
child at the end of the second year in the grade, whether his 
work merits it or not. The repeating or retardation concealed 
by this practice is the very worst sort, namely, second-time 
repeating. Promoting thus on sympathy forces the child 
through the grades whether he merits it or not. x\kin to this 
is another practice which has the same effect. It is the custom 
of promoting children “on trial,” even if they do not quite meet 
the requirements of the class where for one reason or another 
they are permitted to remain. And need it he added that when 
once a child has been allowed to go on with the class he is rarely 
reduced to the grade below, no matter how poor his work ? The 
causes which • operated to place him above the grade he merited 
operate to keep him there. 
The data in hand show 1612 children promoted on trial this 
year; and there are no figures to show how many were arbi¬ 
trarily promoted at the end of the second year in the grade. 
But there can be no doubt that these two practices reduce ma¬ 
terially the number of repeating and retarded children. 
With this consideration of the problem itself, of the organi¬ 
zation of the schools, and the circumstances tending to obscure 
the real amount of retardation, we next turn our attention to 
the data upon the question. To obtain this a questionnaire 
was sent to all the state high schools in Minnesota. The re¬ 
turns secured were good in quantity and quality and from 
schools sufficiently scattered to give fair representation to'the 
conditions prevailing in all sections of the state, geographically, 
socially, and educationally. The largest four cities were pur¬ 
posely omitted to preserve unimpaired the essentially rural con¬ 
ditions governing the other returns. 
The figures presented are those from fifty-five high school 
systems, with 1.7,279 children in the grades below the high 
school. We shall deal only with grade children because in 
