‘When some forty years ago England superseded France as the controlling European Power in Egypt, English was at first taught in the schools as an alternative to French, but gradually became dominant as the European administrative language, though French remained the chief language of commerce and culture. As a result, the young Egyptian, who now definitely claims himself a European and denies his African inheritance, has come to have two distinct minds (switched off and on casually)—the irresponsible hedonistic café and cinema mind, which leans towards French, and the grave moralizing bureaucratic mind, which leans towards English. Early English educationalists in Egypt shrewdly decided to give their students a moralistic character-forming view of English literature; and this tradition continues as a counterpoise to the boulevard view of life absorbed from translations of French yellow-back novels. But the student of 1926 is not so well-instructed in English as his predecessor of ten years ago, because the English educational staff has gradually been liquidated, and the teaching of English is now principally in the hands of Egyptians, former students, who are not born teachers or disciplinarians. The Western spirit of freedom as naively interpreted by the Egyptian student greatly hinders Egyptian education. The primary and secondary schools, not to mention the University, are always either on strike, threatening a strike, or prevented from striking by being given a holiday. So work gets more and more behindhand. Even the Higher Training College is not free from such disturbances, which possibly account for the regretted neglect of Milton, Spenser, and the prose works of Dr. Johnson. This Diploma Class consists of students who, after some twelve years’ study of English, the last four or five years under English instructors, are now qualifying to teach the language and literature to their compatriots. ‘The Egyptian student is embarrassingly friendly, very quick at learning by heart, disorderly, lazy, rhetorical, slow to reason, and absolutely without any curiosity for general knowledge. The most satisfactory way to treat him is with a good-humoured sarcasm, which he respects; but if he once gets politically excited nothing is any use but an affected violent loss of temper. When introduced to the simpler regions of English literature he finds himself most in sympathy with the eighteenth century; and the English instructor, if he wishes to get any results at all, must be ready to regard Shakespeare, Galsworthy and Conan Doyle as either immature or decadent figures in relation to the classical period. The _Science_ referred to in the attached letter is supposed to educate the student in twentieth-century rationalism, to which he gives an eighteenth-century cast. The following essay is the work of one Mahmoud Mohammed Mahmoud of the Diploma Class, and refers principally to two chapters of Sir Ray Lankester’s _Science from an Easy Chair_: