How to Know the Fallacies by Samuel M. Crothers

My friend Scholasticus was in a bad way. He had been educated before the elective system came in, and he had a pathetic veneration for the old curriculum. It was to him the sacred ark, now, alas, carried away into the land of the Philistines. He cherished it as a sort of creed containing the things surely to be learned by a gentleman, and whoso hath not learned these things, let him be anathema. In meeting the present-day undergraduates, it was hard to say which amazed him most, the things they knew or the things they did not know. Perhaps the new knowledge seemed to him the more uncouth.

"The intellectual world," he would say, "is topsy-turvy. What is to be expected of a generation that learns to write before it learns to read, and learns to read before it learns to spell, -- or rather which never does learn to spell. Everything begins wrong end foremost. In my day small children were supposed to be ‘pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,' until such time as they were old enough to be put to stiff work on the First Reader. Nowadays, the babes begin with the esoteric doctrine of their playthings. Even the classics of infancy are rationalized. I was about to buy a copy of ‘Mother Hubbard and her Dog' for a dear young friend, when I discovered that it was a revised version. The most stirring incident was given thus, --