Some teachers have heard and read a hundred times that our teaching should
attach itself to the native tendencies of the child; yet, in spite of
this, the teacher proceeds as if all children were alike and all possessed
the same native tendencies. Herein lies a part of the tragedy of our
traditional, stereotyped, race-track teaching. We assume that children are
all alike, that they are standardized children, and so we prescribe for
them a standardized diet and serve it by standardized methods. If we were
producing bricks instead of embryo men and women our procedure would be
laudable, for, in the making of bricks, uniformity is a prime necessity.
Each brick must be exactly like every other brick, and, in consequence, we
use for each one ingredients of the same quality and in like amount, and
then subject them all to precisely the same treatment.
This procedure is well enough in the case of inanimate bricks, but it is
far from well enough in the case of animate, sentient human beings. It
would be a calamity to have duplicate human beings, and yet the
traditional school seems to be doing its utmost to produce duplicates. The
native tendencies of one boy impel him toward the realms of nature, but,
all heedless of this big fact, we bind him hard and fast to some academic
post with traditional bonds of rules and regulations and then strive to
coerce him into partaking of our traditional pabulum.
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