Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/255

Rh study. The ordinary assignment of home work and class-room recitation method tends to reduce all the class to a base level. Classroom study enables the teacher better to teach both weak and strong pupil, to his highest efficiency. The ordinary class recitation method—a sort of vermiform appendix on our educational system—often consists either in allowing the best students to do the work or in having them sit idly by, developing habits of low tension while the teacher attempts to pull up the weaker ones to a fair understanding of the point at hand. It requires a higher order of ability to teach genius than mediocrity, and our present class-room methods often ignore genius, through an illy balanced sense of duty to the mediocre, or may neglect the majority in the interests of the few brighter pupils. Well-balanced study should enable the teacher to stimulate all to a high degree of effort.

Class-room study means a longer school day and more teaching force or longer hours for the present teaching force. The school day should be longer. Germany has approximately thirty school hours per week to our approximate twenty hours per week in secondary schools.

Almost all high-school work should be done at school in school hours under guidance of teachers. Less assigned home work will mean less carrying of responsibility for school duties during the hours at home when often such responsibilities can not be met and under conditions which often foster ineffective habits of study. There will always remain plenty of good home work; good reading, some assignment, upon work in line with school work; but our pupils should no more carry home with them the larger burden of their school work than a good business man should take home with him his major business duties.

The longer school day is not to be feared, but welcomed, if by means of it adequate time for proper study is secured. We have cheapened our schools by shortening them. Even longer hours for teachers, the time being given to more prolonged and more effective teaching in a reduced number of classes, is not undesirable, if by means of these longer hours more effective teaching and less wreckage through failure in high school may be secured.