"School days are the happiest days of our lives." Express your views either for or against this statement.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 380 words) — arguing AGAINST the statement

The people who say that school days are the happiest days of our lives are, without exception, people who left school a long time ago.

That is not a cheap point. It is the whole argument. The statement is not a description of what school is like; it is a description of what school looks like from a distance of thirty years, once the examinations have been survived and forgotten, and once memory has done its ordinary work of keeping the cricket matches and discarding the Tuesday afternoons.

Consider what is actually true of a student’s life. He has almost no control over how he spends his time; his day is decided for him from six in the morning until he sleeps. He is examined constantly, and his worth is announced publicly in a rank order. He cannot leave a class he dislikes, avoid a person who torments him, or choose what he studies. Adults, who complain a great deal about their own freedom, seldom notice that they have more of it than any fifteen-year-old they know.

There is also the matter of what these years contain that nobody mentions afterwards. Anxiety about marks is not a small thing at sixteen; it is most of what a student thinks about. Bullying exists in every school and is remembered by its victims for life. And the pressure of a board examination falls on children at precisely the age when they are least equipped to carry it.

The honest case for the other side is real. We do have friendships at school more absolute than any we will have again, and we are free of the responsibilities — money, employment, the care of others — that occupy the rest of life. Those are genuine goods, and I do not dismiss them.

But they do not make these the happiest days. They make them memorable, which is a different thing that we habitually confuse with happiness.

I would rather be told the truth: that these years are difficult and valuable, that they end, and that the best of life is almost certainly still ahead. That is a more encouraging thing to tell a tired student in February than the assurance that this is as good as it gets.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The instruction is "either for OR against", so take one side and hold it.

THE KEY MOVE with this particular proverb is to notice WHO SAYS IT. The statement is always made by adults about a period they have left, and pointing that out gives you an argument rather than an opinion — it explains why a widely believed thing might nevertheless be false.

A SECOND USEFUL MOVE appears in the closing paragraphs: distinguishing MEMORABLE from HAPPY. When a statement seems both true and false, the usual reason is that two ideas are being confused, and separating them is the strongest thing an argumentative essay can do.

The counter-argument paragraph is compulsory in practice, and it must concede something REAL — here, the absoluteness of school friendships and the absence of adult responsibilities.

Keep the register formal: no slang, no contractions in the argument itself. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.