Jul. 31st, 2013

"During the middle part of the last century individual teaching fell into disgrace and... the emphasis was placed on class teaching and class organization. Indeed, a careful perusal of [journals] would almost lead one to believe that individual children scarcely existed in the schools..., so little is said of their needs.

"Matters in America, however, began to change for the better in the seventies... The importance of the individual child has since then been brought to the front slowly but surely, until now the principle is rather firmly established that the school should be organized to meet the varying needs of the individuals who comprise it."

School organization and the individual child: a book for school executives and teachers, being an exposition of plans that have been evolved to adapt school organization to the needs of individual children, normal, supernormal and subnormal. By William H. Holmes (1912)
"No greater foe to the genuine equality of opportunity which our educational, as our political system, implies, can be found than the belief that equality can be attained by ignoring or denying diversity of gifts or by submerging all elevations in the vast ocean of the commonplace.
...
"The supreme test of a teacher's efficiency is not how well he has awakened sluggish minds, or how far he has led the capable, or what excellencies he has discovered, but how few he has "failed." Reward for, or even recognition of, high achievement in any line save athletics is singularly lacking.
...
"Soon we shall hear that college itself has been appropriated by the aspiring crowd and the inspiring dictum shall go forth that human society owes every child a college education.
...
"It is undoubtedly true, as we are continually being reminded, that the public schools as they stand, do not produce the citizenship needed for the work ahead of the country.' But in all fairness, how can they be expected to when the whole tendency of teaching and of administration is toward the minimizing of distinctions by virtue of which alone special efficiency of any sort is possible?"

~ Frank P. Whitney,
Equality and the Schools in Education, Vol. 33, No. 2 (October, 1912)

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