the text, and three others said that they _would_ do that. Nine
children did nothing; 158 "did not understand the requirements"; 100
gave irrelevant answers; 119 merely "thought," or "tried to understand
the lesson," or "studied the lesson"; and 324 simply wrote the facts
of the lesson. In other words, 710 out of the 842 sixth- and seventh-
grade pupils who took the test gave indefinite and unsatisfactory
answers. This number showed that they had no clear knowledge of the
principal things to be done in mastering an ordinary text-book lesson
in geography. Yet the schools to which they belonged were, beyond
doubt, much above the average in the quality of their instruction.

In a later and different test, in which the children were asked to
find the subject of a certain lesson that was given to them, 301 out
of 828 stated the subject fairly well. The remaining 527 gave only
partial, or indefinite, or irrelevant answers. Only 317 out of the 828
were able to discover the most important fact in the lesson. Yet
determining the subject and the leading facts are among the main
things that any one must do in mastering a topic. How they could have
been intelligent in their study in the past, therefore, is difficult
to comprehend.

_Teachers' and parents complaints about methods of study._

It is, perhaps, unnecessary to collect proofs that young people do not
learn how to study, because teachers admit the fact very generally.
Indeed, it is one of the common subjects of complaint among teachers
in the elementary school, in the high school, and in the college. All
along the line teachers condole with one another over this evil,
college professors placing the blame on the instructors in the high
school, and the latter passing it down to teachers in the elementary