While The Billy BoilsSearchOh, what a discussion there’s been,On the subject of State Education;Some people consider it good,And others a great innovation.The National system, it seems,Has met with immense opposition;And for knowledge, the children out hereSeem in a most woeful condition.
With two stools we come to the ground,And as there is so much heart-burning,The matter remains as before,And children still go without learning.The National system’s worked well,And prospered with many a nation;So away with all prejudice now,Give the boys a good sound education.
To most of the children out hereArithmetic seems quite a mystery;It’s true they can reckon you up,But what do they know about history?Julius Caesar, for all that they know,May have been an Egyptian or Saxon;And the wife-killing Henry the Eighth,A brother of General Jackson.
You might tell them King Charles was a Dane;George the Fourth, too, a badly used martyr;And that Mary, a Protestant Queen,Was the one who first signed Magna Charta.Or that learned young Alfred the Great,Was most unmistakably cranky;And Queen Anne a Spaniard by birth,And King John a ’cute down-east Yankee.
And grammar is foreign to them,Of course, as regards the strict letter;Though I must say that some M.L.C.’s,Than the children are not a wit better.Of geography what do they know?Of that science I swear in reality,Their acquaintance is strictly confinedTo the gullies all round the locality.
How should they know Vienna’s in France,And Paris a city in Prussia?They may, p’raps, have heard of the Rhine;They don’t know it’s a river in Russia.Or that Constantinople’s in Spain,And Leghorn in South Carolina;Or that the snow-clad PyreneesAre in the interior of China.
Solomon —and he knew what was right —(In language that’s truly commanding),Exhorts with all that we get,To be sure and obtain understanding:Some one has said knowledge is power —If so, let us prize education,And give all the assistance we canTo this rising and ’cute generation.