DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING
Write a story that will be closely connected with school life. Use the ordinary characters that are to be found in your school, but use typical characters that will sum up well-recognized characteristics. Base your story upon any sharp contrast in characters. Begin your story by telling of everyday events, but make those events lead quickly to events that are out of the ordinary. In like manner begin with familiar surroundings and then lead your readers into surroundings that will be less familiar and that will be an appropriate setting for unusual action. Make the climax of your story powerful by using suspense. Indicate that your hero is likely to be overcome. Make his final success depend upon his resolution or good spirit,—upon his character. Use much conversation. Omit everything that will not contribute to the effect of the climax.
THE CRITICAL ESSAY
CODDLING IN EDUCATION
By HENRY SEIDEL CANBY
(1878). Editor of The Literary Review; Assistant Editor of The Yale Review, and Assistant Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School. He is author and co-author of many books on English, among which are: The Short Story; Facts, Thought and Imagination; and Good English.
The critical essay comments on a fault,—but it does no more: it makes no searching analysis and it points to no specific remedy.
Coddling in Education is a critical essay. It points at what its author believes is a serious fault in American education. Like all critical essays it aims at reform, but it merely suggests the means of reform.
Many of the editorial articles in newspapers are examples of the critical essay.
American minds have been coddled in school and college for at least a generation. There are two kinds of mental coddling. The first belongs to the public schools, and is one of the defects of our educational system that we abuse privately and largely keep out of print. It is democratic coddling. I mean, of course, the failure to hold up standards, the willingness to let youth wobble upward, knowing little and that inaccurately, passing nothing well, graduating with an education that hits and misses like an old type-writer with a torn ribbon. America is full of “sloppy thinking,” of inaccuracy, of half-baked misinformation, of sentimentalism, especially sentimentalism, as a result of coddling by schools that cater to an easy-going democracy. Only fifty-six per cent. of a group of girls, graduates of the public schools, whose records I once examined, could do simple addition, only twenty-nine per cent. simple multiplication correctly; a deplorable percentage had a very inaccurate knowledge of elementary American geography.