3.8.4 The Greatest Good of The Greatest Number

It is reasonably certain, then, that a teacher may safely appeal to both boys and girls on the ground of the fundamental instincts, feeling confident that common stimuli will produce largely the same results.

Important as it is that we know what our pupils are from their parentage, it is even more important in the matter of religious instruction that we shall appreciate the force of the varieties of environment that have been operative.

Though boys and girls may be essentially alike at the outset of their lives they may be thrown into such associations as to make their ideals and conduct entirely different.

Fancy the contrast between the case of a girl brought up for fifteen years in a household of refinement and in a companionship of gentility, and the case of a boy who during the same years has been the pal of bullies on street corners. Surely stimuli that are to promote proper reaction in these two cases will have to be suited to the person in question.

Then, too, the teacher must realize that one child may come from a home of faith, confidence, and contentment; whereas, another may come from a home of agitation, doubt, and suspicion.

One may have been taught to pray—another may have been led to disbelieve. One may have been stimulated to read over sacred books—another may have been left to peruse cheap, sensational detective stories.

To succeed in reaching the hearts of a group of such boys and girls, a teacher surely ought to be aware of individual differences and ought to be fortified with a wealth of material so that the appeal may be as varied as possible. To quote from Thorndike’s Principles of Education:

“A teacher has to choose what is for the greatest good of the greatest number. He cannot expect to drive forty children abreast along the highroad of education.” “Yet the differences in children should not blind us to their likenesses.” “We need general principles and their sagacious application to individual problems.”

“The worst error of teachers with respect to individual differences is to neglect them, to form one set of fixed habits for dealing with all children, to teach ‘the child instead of countless different living individuals.’ To realize the varieties of human nature, the nature and amount of mental differences, is to be protected against many fallacies of teaching.”

Our treatment of individual differences was well summed up in the following paper by B.H. Jacobsen, a member of the B.Y.U. Teacher-Training class:

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