Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III Results in Batavia We have in Batavia learned the very great importance of individual instruction, and have committed ourselves to it fully. It is scarcely too much to say that our school system has undergone a revolution. Our experiment has not taught us to believe that individual instruction will ever be the prime pillar of education or even be the normal form of teaching. We are more convinced than ever before that children will continue to be assembled in classes, to be drilled and trained and educated in the presence of their fellows. In classes only can they get the needed spur of emulation, the attrition of mind upon mind, the helpful sidelights from many minds, and the breadth of teaching which is compelled by the presence of numbers. Prom an address delivered at Lakewood, N. Y. To start a great school-system forward on purely class-instruction however is like starting a great army forward without its medical service. There will soon be culminative distress, misery, suffering, despair, loss, depletion. It is no mere figure of speech that charges up distress and suffering to schools. The work of the class is guaged to average capacity. Fully half the children are below that average, and are dragging despairingly in the rear. Their dragging is a peril to themselves and an infliction to the rest. Their dragging is also a positive peril to the teacher. Distress tends to awaken sympathy; but when the distress is hanging about your neck and tending to drag you under, your sympathy turns to a fierce struggle for yourself. Half the class is composed of children dragging down their teacher. And how about the other half? They are children tethered either to an immovable obstruction or to one moving so slowly as to be insufferably irksome. These children a...