60 Selections from Huxley 



more reading and writing of English. But, for all that, 

 every one knows that it is a rare thing to find a boy of 

 the middle or upper classes who can read aloud decently, 

 or who can put his thoughts on paper in clear and gram- 

 5 matical (to say nothing of good or elegant) language. 

 The " ciphering " of the lower schools expands into ele- 

 mentary mathematics in the higher; into arithmetic, with 

 a little algebra, a little Euclid. But I doubt if one boy 

 in five hundred has ever heard the explanation of a rule 



10 of arithmetic, or knows his Euclid otherwise than by 

 rote. 



Of theology, the middle class schoolboy gets rather 

 less than poorer children, less absolutely and less rela- 

 tively, because there are so many other claims upon his 



15 attention. I venture to say that, in the great majority 

 of cases, his ideas on this subject when he leaves school 

 are of the most shadowy and vague description, and asso- 

 ciated with painful impressions of the weary hours spent 

 in learning collects and catechism by heart. 



20 Modern geography, modern history, modern literature, 

 the English language as a language; the whole circle 

 of the sciences, physical, moral, and social, are even more 

 completely ignored in the higher than in the lower schools. 

 Up till within a few years back, a boy might have passed 



25 through any one of the great public schools with the 

 greatest distinction and credit, and might never so much 

 as have heard of one of the subjects I have just men- 

 tioned. He might never have heard that the earth goes 

 round the sun; that England underwent a great revolu- 



30 tion in 1688, and France another in 1789; that there 

 once lived certain notable men called Chaucer, Shake- 

 speare, Milton, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller. The first 

 might be a German and the last an Englishman for any- 

 thing he could tell you to the contrary. And as for 



