The Historical Spectator.

What Is Taught at a Public School?

The English public schools, Edward Lytton Bulwer has demonstrated to his own satisfaction, offer no social advan­tage to the aristocratic pupil now that the Reform Act has closed the rotten boroughs, and ordinary people have access to good education. But what of the academic advantage? Here, he says, the picture is even bleaker.

I have thus sought to remove the current impression that public schools are desirable, as affording oppor­tunities for advan­tageous connexion and permanent distinc­tion. And the ambitious father (what father is not ambitious for his son?) may therefore look dispas­sionately at the true ends of education and ask himself if, at a public school, those ends are accom­plished? This part of the question has been so fre­quently and fully examined, and the faults of our aca­demical system are so generally allowed, that a very few words will suffice to dispose of it. The only branches of learning really attempted to be taught at our public schools are the dead lan­guages.* Assuredly there are other items in the bills—French and arithmetic, geography and the use of the globes. But these, it is well known, are merely nominal instructions: the utmost acquired in geography is the art of colouring a few maps; and geography itself is only a noble and a practical science when associated with the history, the commerce, and the produc­tions of the country or the cities, whose mere position it indicates. What matters it that a boy can tell us that Povoa is on one side the river Douro, and Pivasende on the other; that the dusky inhabitant of Benguela looks over the South Atlantic, or that the waters of Terek exhaust them­selves in the Caspian sea? Useful, indeed, is this knowledge, com­bined with other branches of statistics;—useless by itself,—another speci­men of the waste of memory and the frivolity of imitation. But even this how few learn, and how few of the learners remember?

Arithmetic and its pretended acqui­sitions, is, of all scholastic delusions, the most remarkable. What sixth-form ornament of Harrow or Eton has any knowledge of figures? Of all parts of education, this the most useful is, at aristocratic schools, the most neglected. As to French, at the end of eight years the pupil leaves Eton, and does not know so much as his sister has acquired from her governess in three months. Latin and Greek, then, alone remain as the branches of human wisdom to which serious attention has been paid.

*Formerly a nobleman, or rich gentleman, in sending his son to school sent with him a private tutor, whose individual tuition was intended to supply the deficiencies of the public course of study. This custom has almost expired, and aristocratic education, therefore, instead of improving, is still more superficial than it was.

Edward Lytton Bulwer, England and the English, 1833.