But it is the choice rather than the setting out of words that really matters, and the name that we give to the choosing of words is Composition.

The excessive regard that has always been paid in our elementary schools to neat handwriting and correct spelling is characteristic of the whole Western attitude towards education.

No "results" are more easily or more accurately appraised than these, and it follows that no "results" are more highly esteemed by the unenlightened teacher.

For wherever the outward standard of reality has established itself at the expense of the inward, the ease with which worth (or what passes for such) can be measured is ever tending to become in itself the chief, if not the sole, measure of worth.

And in proportion as we tend to value the results of education for their measureableness, so we tend to undervalue and at last to ignore those results which are too intrinsically valuable to be measured.
* * * * * Hence the neglect of _Composition_ in so many elementary schools.