Edgar Wallace by Himself by Edgar Wallace — Read

The value of popular education has so often been discussed by men who are authorities on the subject that I hesitate to put on record my own point of view. But at any rate I can see the subject from another angle. If every boy who came from a Council school were being prepared for a definite career, it would be a simple matter for the hard-working teachers to train him towards perfection; but the truth is that eighty per cent. of the boys who go through Council schools go forth into the world to swell the ranks of unskilled labour. Their seven or eight years of dreary grind has taught them to read, to write an indifferent hand, and to figure. Within a year of leaving school even a public school boy would find it difficult to qualify for a lower certificate. How much harder is it for the poor boy who leaves a Council school, a place more often than not of unpleasant memories, to utilise the knowledge he has acquired during those seven or eight years! The weary hours he spends securing a working knowledge of the capes and bays of England--knowledge that passes in a flash almost as soon as he has taken a joyous farewell of his school!

I was a fairly intelligent boy, and I am trying to remember now just what I did learn. At geography, roughly the shape of England; nothing about the United States, nothing about the railway systems of Europe. I learnt that China had two great rivers, the Yangtse-kiang and Hoangho, but which is which I can't remember. I knew the shape of Africa and that it was an easy map to draw. I knew nothing about France except that Paris was on the Seine. I knew the shape of Italy was like a top-booted leg, and that India was in the shape of a pear; but except that there had been a mutiny in that country, it was terra incognita to me.