just high enough to engage his full strength, physical, mental, and moral.
They should ever be a challenge to his best efforts. But they should never
be so high that they will invite discouragement, disaster, and failure.
The teacher should guard against elevating hurdles as an exhibition of her
own reach. The gymnasium is not a stage for exhibitions. On the contrary,
it is a place for graduated, cumulative training.

Our inclination is to make life easy and agreeable to our pupils rather
than real. To this end we help them over the difficulties, answer
questions which they do not ask, and supply them with crutches when we
should be training them to walk without artificial aids. The passing mark
rather than real training seems to be made the goal of our endeavors even
if we enfeeble the child by so doing. We seem to measure our success by
the number of promotions and not by the quality of the training we give.
We seem to be content to produce weaklings if only we can push them
through the gateway of promotion. It matters not that they are unable to
find their way alone through the mazes of life; let them acquire that
ability later, after they have passed beyond our control. Again quoting
from Professor Swift, "Following a leader, even though that leader be the
teacher, tends to take from children whatever latent ability for
initiative they may have."

There is a story of an indulgent mother who was quite eager that her boy
should have a pleasant birthday and so asked him what he would most like
to do. The answer came in a flash: "Thank you, Mother, I should most like
just to be let alone." This answer leads us at once to the inner sanctuary
of childhood. Children yearn to be let alone and must grow restive under
the incessant attentions of their elders. In school there is ever such a
continuous fusillade of questions and answers, assigning of lessons,
recitations, corrections, explanations, and promulgations, rules and
restrictions that the children have no time for growing inside. They are
not left to their own devices but are pulled and pushed about, and
managed, and coddled or coerced all day long, so that there is neither
time nor scope for the exercise and development of initiative. The
teacher, at times, seems to think of the school as a mammoth syringe with
which she is called upon to pump information into her bored but passive
pupils.

Silence is the element in which initiative thrives, but our school
progra