Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/265

 We are slowly feeling our way towards a solution of this problem, at least in the case of formal education. Until very recently our educational system offered only two very partial solutions of the difficulties inherent in a great discrepancy between children of different endowment and different rates of development. One solution was to allow a sufficiently long time to each educational step so that all but the mentally defective could succeed, a method similar to the Samoan one and without its compensatory dance floor. The bright child, held back, at intolerably boring tasks, unless he was fortunate enough to find some other outlet for his unused energy, was likely to expend it upon truancy and general delinquency. Our only alternative to this was "skipping" a child from one grade to another, relying upon the child's superior intelligence to bridge the gaps. This was a method congenial to American enthusiasm for metcoric careers from canal boat and log cabin to the White House. Its disadvantages in giving the child a sketchy, discontinuous background, in removing it from its age group, have been enumerated too often to need repetition here. But it is worthy of note that with a very different valuation of individual ability than that entertained by Samoan society we used for years one solution, similar and less satisfactory than theirs, in our formal educational attempts.

The methods which experimental educators are substituting for these unsatisfactory solutions, schemes like the Dalton Plan, or the rapidly moving classes in