“Teaching nurtures strengths and remedies failings” comes from the Xue Ji chapter of the Book of Rites. The preceding passage says learners may go wrong by taking on too much, learning too little, treating study as too easy, or stopping when difficulty appears. Because these failings arise differently, a teacher must first understand the learner’s disposition.
The sentence does not mean praising strengths while hiding weaknesses. It defines teaching as discernment: seeing what capacity has already formed and identifying what obstructs it. Its restrained contemporary value is that one uniform method should not be mistaken for fairness. Help must answer an actual difficulty; otherwise strengths may not grow and failings cannot be remedied.
https://ctext.org/liji/xue-ji/zh
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