Mr Primrose was delighted and astonished at what Mr Kipperson told him; he could hardly believe his senses; he began to imagine that he must himself be the most ignorant and uninformed person in his majesty’s dominions. “But tell me, sir,” continued he, “if those persons, whose time and attention is of necessity so much occupied, are become so well informed; do others, who have greater leisure, keep pace with them; or, I should say, do they keep as much in the advance as their leisure and opportunity allow them? For, according to your account, the very poorest of the community are better instructed now than were the gentry when I lived in England.” “Education, sir,” answered Mr Kipperson, with the tone of an oracle, “is altogether upon the advance. The science of instruction has reached a point of perfection, which was never anticipated; nay, I may say, we are astonished at ourselves. The time is now arrived when the only ignorant and uninformed persons are those who have had the misfortune to be educated at our public schools and universities: for in them there is no improvement. I have myself been witness of the most shocking and egregious ignorance in those men who call themselves masters of arts. They know nothing in the world about agriculture, architecture, botany, ship building, navigation, ornithology, political economy, icthyology, zoology, or any of the ten thousand sciences with which all the rest of the world is intimate. I have actually heard an Oxford student, as he called himself, when looking over a manufactory at Birmingham, ask such questions as shewed that he was totally ignorant even of the very first rudiments of button-making.” “Astonishing ignorance,” exclaimed Mr Primrose, who was rather sleepy; “I dare say they make it a rule to teach nothing but ignorance at the two universities.” “I believe you are right, sir,” said Mr Kipperson, rubbing his hands with cold and extacy; “those universities have been a dead weight on the country for centuries, but their inanity and weakness will be exposed, and the whole system exploded. There is not a common boys’ school in the kingdom which does not teach ten times more useful knowledge than both the universities put together, and all the public schools into the bargain. Why, sir, if you send a boy to school now, he does not spend, as he did formerly, ten or twelve years in learning the Latin grammar, but now he learns Latin and Greek, and French, German, Spanish, Italian, dancing, drawing, music, mapping, the use of the globes, chemistry, history, botany, mechanics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, hydrodynamics, astronomy, geology, gymnastics, architecture, engineering, ballooning, and many more useful and indispensable arts and sciences, so that he is fitted for any station in life, from a prime minister down to a shoe-black.”