Knowing this, the teacher takes care that the exercise-books of his pupils shall be filled with neat and accurate composition exercises, and that some of the neatest and most accurate of these shall be exhibited on the walls of his school. The visitor whose eye ranges over these exercises and goes no further may be excused if he forms a highly favourable opinion of the school which can produce such seemingly excellent work. But let him spend a morning in the school, and see how these "results" have been produced. He will probably change his mind as to their value. The teaching of composition in the ordinary elementary school is too often fraudulent 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