The proportion of time given to language study in our secondary schools is nothing short of a public crime in its effect upon students of this type--and indeed of any type.

This, however, is a matter to which we return below.

The average student comes to college with his sense of exploration, his inductive capacity, stifled at its birth.

He stands appalled when confronted with the unassimilated details of any science which does not give him a "key" in the shape of general formulas made up beforehand.

Were it not that his enlarging experience of life is all the while running counter to the trend of his so-called education, he would probably graduate ready for the social position in which authority takes the place of evidence, and imitation is the method of life.
Second, the teacher should be on the lookout for a tendency which is very characteristic of a student of this type, the tendency, i.e., to fall into elaborate guessing at results.