When you open a school, you do not engage, either openly or tacitly, to make every pupil who may be sent to you a learned or a virtuous man.

You do engage to give them all faithful instruction, and to bestow upon each such a degree of attention as is consistent with the claims of the rest.

But it is both unwise and unjust to neglect the many trees in your nursery which, by ordinary attention, may be made to grow straight and tall, and to bear good fruit, that you may waste your labor upon a crooked stick, from which all your toil can secure very little beauty or fruitfulness.
Let no one now understand me to say that such cases are to be neglected.
I admit the propriety, and, in fact, have urged the duty, of paying to them a little more than their due share of attention.

What I now condemn is the practice, of which all teachers are in danger, of devoting such a disproportionate and unreasonable degree of attention to them as to encroach upon their duties to others.

The school, the whole school, is your field, the elevation _of the mass_ in knowledge and virtue, and no individual instance, either of dullness or precocity, should draw you away from its steady pursuit.
(6.) The teacher should guard against unnecessarily imbibing those faulty mental habits to which his station and employment expose him.
Accustomed to command, and to hold intercourse with minds which are immature and feeble compared with our own, we gradually acquire habits that the rough collisions and the friction of active life prevent from gathering around other men.