This ten per cent has substituted the modern harvester for the sickle and
cradle with which our ancestors harvested their grain; it has brought us
the tractor for the turning of the soil in place of the primitive plow; it
has enabled us to use the auto-truck in marketing our products instead of
the ox-teams of the olden times; it has brought us the telegraph and
telephone with which to send the message of our desires across far spaces;
and it has supplied us with conveniences and luxuries that our
grandparents could not imagine even in their wildest fancies.
A close scrutiny will convince even the most incredulous that many
teachers and schools arc doing their utmost, in actual practice if not in
theory, to eliminate the ten per cent margin and render their pupils
imitators to the full one hundred per cent limit. We force the children to
travel our standard pedagogical tracks and strive to fashion and fix them
in our standard pedagogical molds. And woe betide the pupil who jumps the
track or shows an inclination to travel a route not of the teacher's
choosing! He is haled into court forthwith and enjoined to render a strict
accounting for his misdoing; for anything that is either less or more than
a strict conformity to type is accounted a defection. We demand absolute
obedience to the oracular edicts of the school as a passport to favor.
Conformity spells salvation for the child and, in the interests of peace,
he yields, albeit grudgingly, to the inevitable.
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