Genre:

Regular Feature, Proceedings, Drollery

Subjects:

Education, Human Development, Physical Geography, Mathematics, Astronomy, Government

    Describing the government's decision to make education in public schools more 'extended' and 'thorough', Mr Punch notes that although enjoys classical learning, 'it is rather a bore when your boy comes home from a great school, perfect in his quantities and easy in Greek chorus', to find that he is deficient in other areas: for example, that he 'shirks all conversation that hints at geography', that he 'gets up three different results' when 'his Mamma asks him to cast up her milliner's bill', and that 'he knows the tides are the cause of the eclipses of the moon'. Concludes by criticising the fact that the boy 'can just learn an isolated fact by an effort of memory, perhaps a memoria technica, but that he has no power of generalising, or of connecting his knowledge'.