pils make each higher number of
repetitions, a higher percentage of each successive group meets with
final failure in the subject repeated, and the facts are indicative of
what should be expected however large the numbers making such
multiplied repetitions. It seems almost incredible that pupils should
anywhere be required or permitted to make the fourth, fifth, or sixth
repetition of subjects so manifestly certain of leading to further
disappointment. It must be understood, too, that five and six
repetitions means six and seven times over the same school work. The
existence of such a situation testifies to a sort of deep-seated faith
in the dependence of the pupil's educational salvation on the
successful repetition of some particular school subject. It shows no
recognition that the duty of the school is to give each pupil the type
of training best suited to his individual endowments and limitations,
and at the same time in keeping with the needs of society. Such
indiscriminate repetition becomes a matter of thoughtless duplicating
and operates, first, to increase the economic, educational, and human
waste, where the school is especially the agency charged with
conserving the greatest of our national resources. Second, it operates
to fix more permanently the habit and attitude of failing for such
pupils, and bequeaths to society the fruit of such maladjustments,
which cannot fail to function frequently and seriously in the
production of industrial dissatisfactions and misfits later in life.
Such probabilities are merely in keeping with the psychological fact
that habits once established are not likely to be easily lost.
Indiscriminate repetition is an expensive way of failing to do the
thing which it assumes to do.

Surely one finds in the preceding pages rather slight grounds to
warrant the almost unqualified faith in repetition such as the school
practice exhibits (Table X), or in the importance of the particular
subjects so repeated. There may be evidence in this faith and practice
of what Snedden[43] calls the "undue importance attached to the
historic instruments of secondary education ... now taught mainly
because of the ease with which they can be presented ... and which may
have had little distinguishable bearing on the future achievement of
those young people so gifted by nature as to render it probable that
they should later become leaders." But such instruments will not lack
direct bearing on the production