This comes close to the assignment of marks of failure
for penalizing purposes, which is unjustified and vicious.
It is certain that some of the pupils are failures only in the narrow
academic sense. Information in reference to a few such cases was
volunteered by principals, without any effort being made to trace such
pupils in general. One of the pupils in this study who had graduated
after failing 23 times, was able to enter a reputable college, and had
reached the junior year at the time of this study. Two others with a
record of more than 20 failures each had made a decided success in
business--one as an automobile salesman and manager, the other in a
telegraph office. It is not unrecognized that the school has many
notable failures to indicate how even the fittest sometimes do not
survive the school routine. Among such cases were Darwin, Beecher,
Seward, Pasteur, Linnaeus, Webster, Edison, and George Eliot, who were
classed by their schools as stupid or incompetent.[51] In reference to
the pupil's responsibility for the failures, Thorndike remarks[52] that
"something in the mental or social and economic status of the pupil who
enters high school, or in the particular kind of education given in the
United States, is at fault. The fact that the elimination is so great
in the first year of the high school gives evidence that a large share
of the fault lies with the kind of education given in the United
States.
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