“Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to teach a child Cato’s Soliloquy, who does not know how many pence there are in sixpence?”
In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society, Professor Ravenstein quoted the following list of frantic questions, and said that they had been asked in an examination:
Mention all the name of places in the world derived from Julius Cæsar or Augustus Cæsar.
Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria, Guadalete, Jalon, Mulde?
All you know of the following: Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos, Crivoscia, Basecs, Mancikert, Taxhen, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.
The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.
The number of universities in Prussia.
Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow [sic]?
Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which issued from the Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.
That list would oversize nearly anybody’s geographical knowledge. Isn’t it reasonably possible that in our schools many of the questions in all studies are several miles ahead of where the pupil is?—that he is set to struggle with things that are ludicrously beyond his present reach, hopelessly beyond his present strength? This remark in passing, and by way of text; now I come to what I was going to say.