The first essay that I selected was titled Advice to Youth, and it was written by Mark Twain. The title speaks for the whole essay; it is all advice to the youth of Twain's day. Although it doesn't say in the article, I would suspect that the essay was probably written so it could be spoken in a speech or published in a newspaper. Most of the pieces of advice are things that parents teach their children nowadays. These teachings contain things like 'always obey your parents' and 'be respectful to your superiors'.
I feel that these things are fairly simple to teach your children. Almost all of the things that are mentioned are things that are hardwired into our brains from as long as we can remember. It made me wonder why Twain would write an essay like this in a time where I would think that discipline would be stressed more. I believe that this essay could have been in response to an increasing amount of young factory workers. During the time that Twain wrote this, factories were becoming ever so plentiful, and many of the workers were young juveniles. As these kids are obviously not in school, their hooliganism would be more rampant. Twain then obviously felt a need to write an essay to remind kids what it really meant to be an upstanding child in society.
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