Essays

     The public relations office of the Freeport school system calls to announce the winners of the Peter Gallagher Memorial Day Essay Contest. They are:
     1st: Beatrice Skinner, 17, Eisenhower H.S., daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Skinner.
     2nd: Michael Nelley, 18, Southside H.S., son of Margaret Nelley.
     3rd: Gretchen Young, 16, Horace Mann H.S., daughter of William Young.
     The announcement is made by Rodney Addison, chairman of the city board of education. The 1st prize is a $100 government bond; 2nd, $50 bond; 3rd, $25 bond. Each high school in the city sends what it considers to be the best essays submitted for the contest. The judges were Samuel Ward, head of the English department at Mallory College; Billy Jo Barber, juvenile fiction writer; F.W. Stern, coordinator of high school English in the city school system.
     You call Addison in hopes of getting some kind of angle on the story. You wonder how many entries there were and what the quality of the writing was.
     Addison tells you:

     There were only a dozen entries, the smallest number since the contest started in 1971 to honor young Gallagher, a local high school graduate of great talent who died in the Vietnam War. You know, his classmates started the prize then and they have kept it funded ever since. When we started, we would get maybe 30 or 40 fine essays.

     Professor Ward tells you:

     Except for the winners, the essays were dull, poorly written and had a paucity of ideas. Received ideas, you might call them. You wonder what the younger generation has on its mind, if anything. You don't expect any startling revelations, but you hope to see young minds trying to handle subjects important to them in a fresh way.

     Barber says:

     I graduated from the local school system only 20 years ago, but if these essays are an example of the best, I think something funny has been going on down there in the classes. The three winners were clearly outstanding, and then nothing. I think we're developing a meritocracy based on literacy. If you can read, write and think these days, the world is yours. But maybe the world belongs to the visual generation. Still, who is going to read manuals to repair our cars and TV sets, or will there just be deliverymen who show up with a replacement for the set when the wire is disconnected or a new car when the muffler conks out?

     You begin to think that these quotes are going to make what you thought would be a routine story into a good feature, perhaps even a page 1 story. You talk it over with the city editor, and he encourages you to keep going, to try to interview some of the winners, too.
     "We'll make this into a Sunday feature. Let the parents know what their charming children are learning in this school system," he says.
     You call the school office back and ask for the titles of the winning essays. They are:
     1st: "Humanity's Hope—World Government."
     2nd: "Life on an Island!"
     3rd: "Meaningless Competition."
     Then you call Skinner and ask what she wrote about. She replies:

     Ever since the discovery of atomic energy, we've had the power to destroy ourselves. A world government movement started then, but it disappeared in the Cold War because of the rise of nationalism, for example, among the Third World countries. The United Nations tried, but it has no teeth. I did a lot of research on world government as a hope for human survival.
     I hope to go into government myself. I consider that as much a public service as being a doctor.

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