The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-07-17
TUTORING SCHOOL
 DENOUNCED BY PREP" TEACHERS

proprfetorS of the Grail School of Southport, have written the following denunciation of tutoring methods: One of the cleverest institutions of modern times is the tutoring school. For while our present civilization has evolved many subtle ways for cor rupting the body and mind and soul, there is scarcely another that so in- evitably and so completely ruins all three. It Is, however, with the men | tai deterioration produced by these in St1tutfOnS that we are now concerned.
 The tutoring school is character 1stic product of this age and one of
 the most final expressions of the commercial spirit now rampant. The
 man who can, by means N his money, order French chateau with a park
 with the same ease the he can a steak
 with onions, is not likely to see why it is that he can't put his son into college for education in the same way that he puts his automobile into garage for repairs-by paying for it And the son, brought up to this idea
 of getting things by paying for them, quite naturally says,Q quote an actual remark) 'I go to a tutoring school to
 be taught. I expect information to
 be injected into me. I don't expect to have to study.''
 The tutoring school is a product of the college examinations In order to have some tangible evidence of the whole structure of cultural knowledge that the candidate is expected to have, the college is forced Cor has so far felt itself forced) to prepare examinations to test the candidates knowledge of certain specific facts. The tutoring school, by judicious study of this crude expression of great and mex pressible reality, can simmer the noble mass of details which the college thinks necessary as a preparatory ba- sis for the work it wishes to do, down to a very small, uninteresting, unin- spired list of facts, formuIae and ta- bles, can force this in a few weeks in- to a lazy brain, and cram a boy through the fourteen examinations By teaching "only what is necessary to pass the exams" it can completely subvert the end of the examinations. and railroad into college large num- Der of boys to form drag progress of classes and a deteriorating influence on the intellectual standards of col lege.
 Tn contrast to these methods of un- scholarly superficiality are the highly and culturegiving methods that the true preparatory schools are working to maintain. The American people possess perhaps dozen schools of the highest type administered by men whose influence produces for the col leges young men cultured, well bal anced, educated in the truest sense. It is against the most sacred ideals of these schools that the tutoring school labors. It is as parasites on these that they live. It is from the fragments of the scholastic ideals maintained by these that they get their pecuniary profit.
 There are two classes of boys that fall into the tutoring school First there are those lured by the promise of tabloid instruction taken without effort, and charmed with the idea of getting into college without work. Their intellectual ruin is of small import ance. But of the greatest importance is the intellectual ruin of the other class who come to such schools either unawares or forced by necessity be- cause there is no other place for them. Their only fault is that they don't fit into the curriculum of the regular schools. This has been arranged for the normal and ordinary balanced boys mind, and is run off at a speed fitted to the average boy. But there are many boys who fail to fit this. The reasons are various; their home train ing, backwardness in one particular group of studies, a generally slow rate, a too highly developed individuality, etc. But some of these things is seri- ous enough to relegate them deserved ly to a school where they will learn superfciality and tricks instead of in dustry and real scholarship. These boys defects may be serious but they can be overcome. This can be done, perhaps, only by treatment much more special and delicate than the schools could be expected to give in fairness to their general plans.
 But it must be done somewhere. The parents think they are going to cot Int iro yonxy find out, generally too late, not only that they haven't gotten it, but that they have got instead something pos itively, cankerously, ruinously subver- sive to all mentality and morality. They find out that their boys have been mentally spoiled
 What this class of boys needs can be gotten nowhere as yet There should be a school for them. This school would of necessity be small, limited, say to ten Or twelve boys. The methods would be largely individ- ual So far it might well be called a tutoring school It might anyway, if the word were not putrid with the connotation of evil that has been forced upon it, if it had retained its original and noble sense from the verb tutor ito watch" or ito guard.'
 But when the ideals Qf they may so be named) of the tutoring school are COIlSIuoTCQ, Ill0 Sp0CldI SCIlOOI IS instantly differentiated. As opposed | to slovenly mental work, the extrem- est superficfality, the most unscholas- | tic and anti-cultural cramming, the | special school aims to teach boys how to think, how to learn a lesson, how to | be industrious, how to be economical of time, energy and money, how to | make count in a useful, practical way the surging, unruly energy that some | how, in their cases, whether by de- | fault or early training or by some | cause more inherent in their natures, | refuses to go into the proper channels | and help them do the tasks that other | boys find not difficult
 The special school works to put the | boy where he ought to be in order to complete and go along with others | It teaches him, not facts, but meth ods It does not attempt to teach | him trigonometry in a week or lead | him to think that this is a right, if | possible, thing to do. But it endeav- ors to show his bewildered mind the easons underlying formulae and fig ureS using more insistent and deli cate methods than can be used in the class of a large. school. It does not make hir1 learn by heart the plots of a dozen masterpieces of English liter ature and the meanings of a few hun dred hard words therein contained, and let him believe that he has thus prepared his English requirements. It rather labors to beguile his interest to