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.