audulent and futile.
Indeed, there is no lesson in which the teacher's traditional
distrust of the child goes further than in this. In the lower classes
the child is taught how to construct simple sentences (as if he
had never made one in the previous course of his life), and he is
not trusted to do more than this. He listens to a so-called object
lesson, and when it is over he is told to write a few simple
sentences about the Cow or the Horse, or whatever the subject of the
lesson may have been; and lest his memory (the only faculty which he
is allowed to exercise) should fail him, the chief landmarks of the
lesson are placed before him on the blackboard. This string of simple
sentences reproduced from memory passes muster as composition. And
yet that child began to practise oral composition at the age of
eighteen months, and at the age of three was able to use complex
sentences with freedom and skill. In the upper classes the
composition is too often as mechanical, as unreal, and as insincere
as in the lower. Sometimes a given subject is worked out by the
teacher with the class, the children, one by one, suggesting
sentences, which are shaped and corrected by the teacher and then
written up on the blackboard, until there are enough of them to fill
one page of an ordinary exercise book. Then the whole essay (if one
must dignify it with that name) is copied out, very neatly and
carefully, by every child in the class; and the result is shown to
the inspector as original composition. At other times or in other
schools the class teacher does not go quite so far as this. He
contents himself with talking the subject over with the class, and
then writing a series of headings[12] on the blackboard. Or, again,
trusting to the child's red-hot memory, he will allow him to write
out what he remembers of an object-lesson, or a history lesson, or
whatever it may be. Composition exercises which are the genuine
expression of genuine perception, which have behind them what the
child has experienced, what he has felt or thought, what he has read,
what he has studied, are the exception rather than the rule; for
in such exercises there would probably be faults of spelling,
faults of grammar, colloquialisms, careless writing (due to the
child's eagerness), and so forth; and the work would therefore be
unsatisfactory from the showman's point of view. The child's natural
capacity for expressing himself in language is systematically starved