Academic failure

“ It is in fact ludicrous and absurd that the universities should be expected to come in with their blessing in cases of non-academic success, and that degrees should be mere acclamations of popular verdicts. ”

“ We find imperfections everywhere in nature, and it may be that there are recipients of diplomas who do not illustrate the highest ideals. If such be the case, failure is not due to an excess of education, but to deficient, defective or misdirected training. ”

“ There are tendencies in university life to-day that give ample cause for misgiving,—the more so because they spring rather from vital weakness reflecting the intellectual vices of our age than from defective methods and organisation. ”

“ As the measuring of the achievements of the public schools has become a distinctive feature of the more recent activities in the educational field, the failure in expected accomplishment by the school, and its proficiency in turning out a negative product, have been forced upon our attention rather emphatically. ”

“ To take stock of myself mentally is not so easy. I have received the deplorable education of the day. Everything that possibly could be done was done to make me hate the pursuit of knowledge. I am, indeed, an excellent example of the signal failure of American education,—the failure to provide for the utilization of a developed type. My father and my grandfather and his father before him were brought up to public service as the result of a system of society and education which demanded service of them. ”

“ The very threat of such a procedure is certain to raise havoc with academic freedom. Youthful indiscretions, mistaken causes, misguided enthusiasms-all long forgotten-become the ghosts of a harrowing present. ”

“ THE OPEN DOOR TO INTELLIGENCE
It has been the chief aim in these pages, not to elaborate a scheme of education on new principles, but to point out the utter folly of persisting with a system that has worked a vast amount of evil, and cannot be proved to have achieved any real good.
Our great men have not been the product of a school curriculum, or of an academic training. ”

“ Well there can be no question that this examination which every year assumes larger proportions, and every year presents increasing difficulties for those of us who have to carry it out is, in the judgment of many who are well able to form a sound opinion on the point, a gigantic failure. ”

“ It is this conviction which, pressing upon the schools and colleges, has caused such a flood of courses and textbooks, such an expenditure of time, energy, and money in the teaching of composition, so many ardent hopes of accomplishment, so much bitter disappointment at relative failure. ”

“ Is it not that the student's chief business is the passive one of receiving and not the active one of finding. We act as if his brain were an empty hull into which each professor in his turn was to tumble a science. By this system of overteaching, we deprive our students of the pleasures of search and leave them none of the spontaneity in the pursuit of their studies which springs from being left to themselves. ”

“ And remember that some of the world's sages of the practical have closed their life's wisdom with the deliberate opinion that a college education is a waste of time, and an over-refinement of body and of mind. ”

“ Many of our graduates leave college every year as weak and inefficient in many respects as when they began their education. What is education for if it is not to train the youth to be the master of his faculties, master of every situation, able to summon all of his reserves of knowledge and power at will?
A college graduate, timid, stammering, blushing, and confused, when suddenly called upon to use his knowledge whether in public or elsewhere, ought to be an unknown thing. Of what use is education which can not be summoned at will? ”

“ Perhaps nothing in our present system of education is so demoralizing and unjust as the custom of public examinations. In them interest and vanity play into each other’s hands; genuine acquirement and principle “go to the wall.” The teachers and the boys alike know that they are never true criterions of progress, that they are seldom even fair representations of the actual course of study. Weeks, months are spent in preparations for the deceitful display; even then true merit, which is generally modest by nature, does itself injustice, and vain self-assurance comes off with flying colors. ”

“ A school altogether fails, just as a human life altogether fails, if at heart and in spirit, it is not dedicated, so far as opportunity permits, to the service of men. The lesson of this incident is the lesson that I would we might all learn from the school. ”

“ The evaded study and dissipation of a public school is succeeded by the equally evaded study and dissipation of a college; and too many of our youthful aristocracy begin life with self-sufficiency for knowledge, prejudices for opinions, and with pleasure a habit rather than an enjoyment. ”

“ He was a public school and University man, and so one of the victims of our public school educational system, which, while undertaking to make classical scholars of the few, who have some taste and capacity for such studies, leaves the minds of all the rest, the great majority, who have no taste or capacity for such studies, utterly blank; and, which is still worse, engenders in most cases an insuperable life-long distaste for every other kind of study. ”

“ If we are to proceed wisely in reference to the failing pupils in the high school, it is admittedly of importance that such procedure should be based on a definite knowledge of the facts. The value of such a study will in turn be conditioned by the scrupulous care and scientific accuracy in the securing and handling of the facts. It is believed that the causes of and the remedies for failure are necessarily closely linked with factors found in the school and with the school experiences of failing pupils, so that the problem cannot be solved by merely labeling such pupils as the unfit. ”

“ The instruction, the advice are offered by the persons who cannot achieve performance. It is thus that all things work together in favour of failure, which, indeed, may well appear so easy that special instruction, however competent, is a luxury rather than a necessary. But when we look round on the vast multitude of writers who, to all seeming, deliberately aim at failure, who take every precaution in favour of failure that untutored inexperience can suggest, it becomes plain that education in ill-success, is really a popular want. ”

“ And these, too, are the men who bring learning and scholarship into ill-repute; not true scholars indeed, not men of erudition, not the men who, by close thought and laborious, painful study, seek the ground of things, but your dilettante students, your amateur scholars! ”

“ But the obstacles which they may, for the most part unwittingly, throw in the way of the efficient work of the faculties of the university are chiefly due to their ignorance of the principles and right methods of education, or to their indifference toward the supreme ends of education, or to their reluctance to criticize—much more oppose—the will of the president or the majority of their own body. ”

“ If I find a room in a tumult, I blame myself, not the scholars. It is I who have failed, not they. Were I what I should be, every one of my pupils would reflect my worth. I key the situation, I set the pace, and if my soul is in disorder, the school will be in confusion. ”

“ The university fails because it refuses to connect education with contemporary life. You go there and you learn a lot of rot about syllogisms and pentameters, and nothing is done to explain to you the meaning of the life in the streets outside. ”

“ A failure on the part of a child in any school can have no other meaning than this: the child was, at the time of his failure, in the wrong group for his intellectual advantage. There is no effort in such a remark to place the blame for the child’s failure. Perhaps the child who fails is indolent. Perhaps the work is too difficult for him. Whatever the reason, failure means that the pupil and the system of grading are out of joint with each other. Hence, when we find pupils failing, we know that the grading system is not working perfectly. ”

“ Any one can pick holes in the University system of teaching and examination--'can strike a finger on the place, and say, "Thou ailest here and here,"'--or construct schemes of reform: more especially young men who have recently quitted their Alma Mater, and are therefore qualified to assert (as they do, and at times not without a certain plausibility) that she has failed to teach them anything. ”

“ Again, in the customs and institutions of schools, academies, colleges, and similar bodies destined for the abode of learned men and the cultivation of learning, everything is found adverse to the progress of science. For the lectures and exercises there are so ordered, that to think or speculate on anything out of the common way can hardly occur to any man. ”

“ No one recognises now that the education of the professors is an exceedingly difficult problem, if their humanity is not to be sacrificed or shrivelled up:—this difficulty can be actually seen in countless examples of natures warped and twisted by their reckless and premature devotion to science. ”

“ There is something cold and hard about the schools and colleges of the state, while the fact of a student having secured by a competitive examination an inalienable right to his place in them, is an infallible source of weakness. ”

“ When a student fails try to determine whether his failure is due to lack of study or to bad methods of study. For example, if a student has learned his lesson by heart, and forgets, he is very different from the student who has not tried either to understand or to learn by heart. ”

“ Our young men and women have been blamed for their lack of reverence and their readiness to form conclusions without adequate knowledge or study in the teeth of venerable opinion and convention. Indisputably they have erred in this respect, but indisputably also the fault is now recognized, and is being cured in the curriculum of education. Yet, evil as the fault is, the traits which seem to have nourished it—unwillingness to accept tradition and a searching, honest clearness of vision—are virtues of the first water, and typical of the best national character. ”

“ It was in good measure by the influence which these gentlemen had over the rest, that the university itself, or at least any part of its discipline and order, was saved from ruin.... Nor indeed could it be otherwise, for such spiritual frenzies, which did then bear rule, can never stand long before a clear and deep skill in nature. It is almost impossible, that they who converse much with the subtilty of things, should be deluded by such thick deceits. ”

“ The magnitude of the failure will be appreciated by those who know what other countries accomplish at a fraction of the cost. Beyond the admission that something is seriously wrong there is little agreement. We are told that the curriculum is too exclusively classical, that the classes are too large, the teaching too dull, the boys too much away from home, the examination-system too oppressive, athletics overdone. ”

“ When we look at the difficulties which hindered the acquisition of knowledge fifty years to a century ago; the scarcity and the costliness of books, the value of the dimmest candle-light, the unremitting toil which left so little time for study, the physical weariness which had to be overcome to enable mental exertion in study, we may well marvel at the giants of scholarship those days of hardship produced. ”

“ An Educational Futility.—​I think this great moral teacher here throws down the gauntlet in challenge of an educational futility which is practised, and an educational fallacy which is accepted, even in the twentieth century. That futility is the exaction of original composition from schoolboys and schoolgirls. The proper function of the mind of the young scholar is to collect material for the generalisations of after-life. If a child is asked to generalise, that is, to write an essay upon some abstract theme, a double wrong is done him. ”

“ Now, we solemnly believe, and are prepared to argue, that a collegiate education would have materially detracted from his usefulness. A scholastic or classic course of study seems to unfit men in a great degree for active life. The practical too often becomes merged in the ideal, and the mind grows effeminate. ”

“ Grammar, themes, memorized lessons, and translations with the dictionary, are too discouraging, and do not dispose to voluntary effort.
One of the worst evils of the university system is, that not a step can be taken without a master. In place of exercising the pupils in the imitation of good models, which would in part dispense with his aid, they are pushed in a false direction, where they seek their way painfully, and cannot advance without help ”

“ And now, if I may take for granted that the true and adequate end of intellectual training and of a university is not learning or acquirement, but rather, is thought or reason exercised upon knowledge, or what may be called philosophy, I shall be in a position to explain the various mistakes which at the present day beset the subject of university education.
I say then, if we would improve the intellect, first of all, we must ascend; we cannot gain real knowledge on a level ”

“ The creative paralysis of pupils who have drudged most deeply in classical training—English or otherwise—is a fact that no observer of college life can overlook. The guilt for this state of affairs must be laid at the door of the classics or at the door of the teachers. Either the classics are not worth teaching or they are not being taught properly. ”