By DR. ALFRED ADLER, Viennese Psychologist.
THE most common error in education is the failure of the teacher to understand the coherence of the child's living. The "problem child," the class "bad boy," is scolded and punished, but that is about as foolish as for a physician to call on a man who has broken his leg and say, "Aha! I see you've broken your leg—for shame!"
If the teacher will put herself in the bad child's place she would see that, according to his lights, he is acting intelligently. He has either been pampered or hated and has grown into an atmosphere of alienness, feeling nothing in common with others around him and wanting to be aloof.
To discover the child who steals, and punish him, does not correct the evil; it increases his sense of the sport of the thing and only sets him to figuring out what his mistakes were which led to his discovery so that in future he can avoid them.
The progress of education has been greatly retarded through the stress placed on the inheritance of abilities. To say that one child is gifted and another stupid is to retard both. The gifted child is stumped by thinking too much is expected of him, and the stupid one comes to think it is futile for him to try to achieve anything.
Mankind is as a species tremendously timid. We need encouragement, not discouragement. We need to be taught, what is really the truth, that we can be anything we want if we will train ourselves properly for it.
Fuente: Coronado Eagle and Journal (Coronado, California), 22 de mayo de 1928, artículo sindicado firmado. Transcripción hecha sobre la imagen de la página en la California Digital Newspaper Collection (CDNC, CJ19280522.2.22), cotejada con el OCR de la plataforma. Otras copias sindicadas: La Jolla Light and La Jolla Journal, 24 de mayo de 1928 (CDNC, LJJ19280524.2.28); posiblemente Contra Costa Times, 14 de junio de 1928 (CCT19280614.1.6, sin verificar).