Our inclination is to make life easy and agreeable to our pupils rather than real.  To this end we help them over the difficulties, answer questions which they do not ask, and supply them with crutches when we should be training them to walk without artificial aids.  The passing mark rather than real training seems to be made the goal of our endeavors even if we enfeeble the child by so doing.  We seem to measure our success by the number of promotions and not by the quality of the training we give.  We seem to be content to produce weaklings if only we can push them through the gateway of promotion.  It matters not that they are unable to find their way alone through the mazes of life; let them acquire that ability later, after they have passed beyond our control.  Again quoting from Professor Swift, “Following a leader, even though that leader be the teacher, tends to take from children whatever latent ability for initiative they may have.”

There is a story of an indulgent mother who was quite eager that her boy should have a pleasant birthday and so asked him what he would most like to do.  The answer came in a flash:  “Thank you, Mother, I should most like just to be let alone.”  This answer leads us at once to the inner sanctuary of childhood.  Children yearn to be let alone and must grow restive under the incessant attentions of their elders.  In school there is ever such a continuous fusillade of questions and answers, assigning of lessons, recitations, corrections, explanations, and promulgations, rules and restrictions that the children have no time for growing inside.  They are not left to their own devices but are pulled and pushed about, and managed, and coddled or coerced all day long, so that there is neither time nor scope for the exercise and development of initiative.  The teacher, at times, seems to think of the school as a mammoth syringe with which she is called upon to pump information into her bored but passive pupils.

Silence is the element in which initiative thrives, but our school programs rarely provide any periods of silence.  They assume that to be effective a school must be a place of bustle, and hurry, and excitement, not to mention entertainment.  Sometimes the child is intent upon explorations among the infinities when the teacher summons him back to earth to cross a t or dot an i.  The teacher who would implant a thought-germ in the minds of her pupils and then allow fifteen minutes of silence for the process of germination, should be ranked as an excellent teacher.  When the child is thinking out things for himself the process is favorable to initiative; but when the teacher directs his every movement, thought, and impulse, she is repressing the very quality that makes for initiative and ultimate leadership.  When the boy would do some things on his own, the teacher is striving to force him to travel in her groove.