dient will become inoculated with it and bear it forth into the
uses of society.

=Caution.=--But just here we find the most delicate and difficult task
of the school. Here we encounter some of the fundamental principles of
psychology as explained and emphasized by James, McDougall, and Strayer.
Here we must begin our quest for the native tendencies that condition
successful teaching. We must discover what pupils are susceptible to
chemistry before we can proceed with the work of inoculation. This has
been the scene and source of many tragedies. We have been wont to ask
whether chemistry will be good for the boy instead of making an effort
to discover whether the boy will be good for chemistry--whether his
native tendencies render him susceptible to chemistry.

=Some mistakes.=--Our procedure has often come but little short of an
inquisition. We have followed our own predilections and prejudices
instead of being docile at the feet of Nature and asking her what to do.
We have applied opprobrious epithets and resorted to ostracism. We have
been freely dispensing suspensions and expulsions in a vain effort to
prove that the school is both omniscient and omnipotent. We have tried
to transform a poet into a mechanic, a blacksmith into an artist, and an
astronomer into a ditcher. And our complacency in the presence of the
misfits of the school is the saddest tragedy of all. We have taken
counsel with tradition rather than with the nature of the pupil, the
while rejoicing in our own infallibility.

=Native dispositions.=--Society needs only a limited number of chemists
and only such as have the native tendencies that will make chemistry
most effective in the activities of society. But we have been proceeding
upon the agreeable assumption that every pupil has such native
tendencies. Such an assumption absolves the school, of course, from the
necessity of discovering what pupils are susceptible to chemistry and of
devising ways and means of making this important discovery. Because we
do not know how to make this discovery we find solace in the assumption
that it cannot or need not be made. We then proceed to apply the
Procrustean bed principle with the very acme of _sang froid_. Here is
work for the efficiency expert. When children are sitting at the table
of life, the home and the school in combination ought to be able to
discover what food they crave and not insist upon their eating olives
when they really crave oatmeal.