English as She is Taught: Being Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools

In Short

This curious volume serves as a historical repository for genuine classroom blunders, ranging from garbled history and biology to creative linguistic misinterpretations. Collected by a teacher from student examination papers, the book exposes the pedagogical failure of "cramming," where rote memorization replaces true comprehension. It has endured as a classic of unintentional humor because the errors—often born of phonetic confusion or mismatched facts—are as charming as they are revealing. By showcasing the "brickbat culture" of the era, the book remains an insightful, laugh-out-loud critique of rigid, top-down educational systems.

The Story

The arc of the book is defined by the relentless, often overwhelming breadth of the late-19th-century curriculum. It opens with definitions that betray the students’ struggle to map unfamiliar vocabulary to their own limited experience: "Aborigines" become a "system of mountains," and a "parasite" is misremembered as "a kind of umbrella." As the book progresses, the scope of these errors widens to encompass the entire academic world. The students venture into geography, where they confidently declare that "America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey" and that the principal occupation in Austria is "gathering Austrich feathers."

The narrative tension builds as the students move from simple definitions into the more taxing realm of literature and history. Here, the "forcing apparatus" of the school system is on full display. The children grapple with the lives of poets and historical figures, resulting in a fractured, kaleidoscopic version of reality where George Washington is born in 1492, and Cleopatra is "caused by the death of an asp which she dissolved in a wine cup." The middle chapters delve into the "Intellectual" and "Analysis" sections, where students attempt to summarize poems or explain the lives of authors like Chaucer and Milton, leading to delightful inventions such as "Chaucer was the father of English pottery."

As the book nears its conclusion, the focus shifts toward the hard sciences—physiology, physics, and metaphysics. The students’ confusion reaches its zenith in these sections. They describe the digestive system with startling, gruesome logic, claiming that "the gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking" or that "the stomach is a small pear-shaped bone." Finally, the book closes with a return to the "Original" compositions, where the students finally speak in their own voices. In an essay "On Girls," a young boy offers a candid, hilariously blunt summary of his female classmates, noting they are "stuckup and dignefied" but admitting they "always now their lessons bettern boys." The book ends not with a grand resolution, but with a lingering, poignant reminder that despite the absurdity of the curriculum, the children remain observant, curious, and profoundly human, even when their teachers’ systems fail them.

How It Unfolds

The lexicographical struggle The book begins by highlighting how students interpret dictionary definitions through sound rather than meaning. These initial beats demonstrate a pattern of phonetic guessing, where "Eucharist" becomes "one who plays euchre" and "Tenacious" becomes "ten acres of land."

The geography of confusion The focus shifts to the physical world, where students attempt to map the globe based on hearsay and classroom lectures. These entries present a geography where "Gibraltar is an island built on a rock" and the "principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes."

The literary mosaic The middle section documents the attempt to force complex literary history into the minds of children. Here, pupils link authors to the wrong centuries and inventions, famously dubbing Chaucer the "father of English pottery" and claiming Edgar A. Poe was a "curdling writer."

The scientific breakdown The narrative descends into the chaotic mechanics of the human body and physics. Students struggle to explain fluid pressure and anatomy, resulting in the memorable claim that the heart is a "comical shaped bag" that manufactures blood while the liver keeps it going.

The final reflection The book concludes with students reflecting on the act of reading itself and offering their own observational essays. This final beat provides a glimpse into the actual lives of the students, showing their ability to reason about their own social world even when their formal lessons remain hopelessly scrambled.

The People

The "people" in this book are not characters in a traditional sense, but the distinct archetypes found in a Victorian schoolhouse. First is the Student, a figure of infinite resilience who navigates a curriculum of "brickbat culture" with humor and unintentional wit. These children are the primary agents of the book, wanting to please their teachers but hindered by a lack of context. They end up as unintentional philosophers of the absurd, their "errors" revealing more about their imaginative capacity than their ignorance.

Opposing them is the Teacher (or the administrative Board/Committee), who serves as the cold, mechanical force behind the "forcing apparatus." This figure wants total compliance and memorization of "rules" that the students do not understand. They are the target of the book's gentle critique, as they represent the rigid, inhuman system that prioritizes the "dryest twigs" of knowledge over genuine growth. Finally, there is the Commentator, whose voice provides the analytical frame. This figure serves as the bridge between the reader and the confusion, wanting to ensure that the blame for these blunders is placed squarely on the "unintelligent" systems that demand parrots rather than thinkers. By the end, the students remain the heroes—blameless, funny, and surprisingly observant—while the system is left looking antique and ineffective.

In Its Own Voice

The following entries capture the unique, often nonsensical logic applied by students to subjects they have not yet grasped:

“The five seaports of the U. S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.”

This entry from the geography section illustrates the students' struggle to identify American landmarks.

“The heart is a comical shaped bag.”

This student provides a vivid, if anatomically incorrect, definition of the heart during a physiology lesson.

“Girls are very stuckup and dignefied in their maner and behaveyour.”

This observation, taken from a student's essay, highlights the sharp, personal perspective hidden beneath the rote academic work.

What It's Really About

At its core, this book is a subtle, biting critique of the Victorian educational ideal of "forcing." It argues that when a system prioritizes the memorization of high-level facts over the development of foundational understanding, it produces only "parrot-like" repetition. The underlying theme is the dissonance between the adult world of complex, abstract rules and the child's world of immediate, sensory experience. By documenting how children attempt to reconcile these two realms, the book makes a plea for a more natural, child-centered approach to learning. It suggests that if students are forced to swallow "bone and viscera" without digestion, the result will always be the kind of creative, beautiful, and hilarious misinformation found in these pages.

Why Read It Today

Readers who enjoy the history of childhood, language, or pedagogical reform will find this collection captivating. Reading it feels like peering into a dusty, long-forgotten classroom drawer where someone carefully kept the evidence of a failed experiment. The book’s humor is timeless; the frustration of a child trying to make sense of a teacher’s confusing lecture is a feeling that remains universal.

However, a modern reader must be prepared for the book's period-specific context. The text reflects the cultural attitudes of the 1880s, including some dated language and societal assumptions regarding gender and race that are consistent with the era but require a modern eye to process. Additionally, while the blunders are consistently funny, the relentless pacing of the lists can feel repetitive if read in one sitting. What stays with you is not just the laughter, but the empathy for these children. You will find yourself rooting for them as they struggle to reconcile their own logic with the nonsensical demands of their schools. It is a warm, human, and genuinely curious document that reminds us that children have always been the most inventive translators of an adult world they didn't create.