The teacher, if he is a kind-hearted and considerate man, perhaps briefly commends the effort with some such dubious and equivocal praise as it is "Very well for a beginner," or "As good a composition as could be expected at the first attempt," and then proceeds to go over the exercise in a cool and deliberate manner, with a view of discovering and bringing out clearly and conspicuously to the view, not only of the little author himself, but often of all his classmates and friends, every imperfection, failure, mistake, omission, or other fault which a rigid scrutiny can detect in the performance.

However kindly he may do this, and however gentle the tones of his voice, still the work is criticism and fault-finding from beginning to end.

The boy sits on thorns and nettles while submitting to the operation, and when he takes his marked and corrected manuscript to his seat, he feels mortified and ashamed, and is often hopelessly discouraged.
_How Faults are to be Corrected_.
Some one may, perhaps, say that pointing out the errors and faults of pupils is absolutely essential to their progress, inasmuch as, unless they are made to see what their faults are, they can not be expected to correct them.

I admit that this is true to a certain extent, but by no means to so great an extent as is often supposed.

There are a great many ways of teaching pupils to do better what they are going to do, besides showing them the faults in what they have already done.
Thus, without pointing out the errors and faults which he observes, the teacher may only refer to and commend what is right, while he at the same time observes and remembers the prevailing faults, with a view of adapting his future instructions to the removal of them.