ty, or, indeed, any
quality, it must be kept clearly in mind every day and every hour of the
day that the children with whom we have to do are not all alike. On the
contrary, they differ, and often differ widely, in respect of mental
ability, environment, inheritances, and native disposition. If they were
all alike, it would be most unfortunate, but we could treat them all alike
in our teaching and so fix and perpetuate their likeness to one another.
Some teachers have heard and read a hundred times that our teaching should
attach itself to the native tendencies of the child; yet, in spite of
this, the teacher proceeds as if all children were alike and all possessed
the same native tendencies. Herein lies a part of the tragedy of our
traditional, stereotyped, race-track teaching. We assume that children are
all alike, that they are standardized children, and so we prescribe for
them a standardized diet and serve it by standardized methods. If we were
producing bricks instead of embryo men and women our procedure would be
laudable, for, in the making of bricks, uniformity is a prime necessity.
Each brick must be exactly like every other brick, and, in consequence, we
use for each one ingredients of the same quality and in like amount, and
then subject them all to precisely the same treatment.

This procedure is well enough in the case of inanimate bricks, but it is
far from well enough in the case of animate, sentient human beings. It
would be a calamity to have duplicate human beings, and yet the
traditional school seems to be doing its utmost to produce duplicates. The
native tendencies of one boy impel him toward the realms of nature, but,
all heedless of this big fact, we bind him hard and fast to some academic
post with traditional bonds of rules and regulations and then strive to
coerce him into partaking of our traditional pabulum. His inevitable
rebellion against this regime we style incorrigibility, or stupidity, and
then by main strength and authority strive to reduce him to

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

Anonymous may refer to: Anonymus, the Latin spelling, may refer to: