September 17th, 1872. Fine.

In the afternoon, accompanied by General Alexander, we visited one of the city's primary schools in a district close to our hotel. The school had been built to provide education for both boys and girls. It had over 150 pupils in all, mostly from seven or eight to thirteen or fourteen years of age. The school taught English, reading, writing, religion, drawing, British history, geography and music. Science would undoubtedly have been taught as well, although we saw no science apparatus.

The girls were taught spinning, weaving and needlework. They used their knowledge of arithmetic to make patterns and what they had learnt of optics to arrange the yarns on their looms. Through weaving this and braiding that, they learnt the principles of stretching and shrinkage. Such tasks as arranging yarns on their warp beams in the right order to make letters and patterns in the fabric called on their knowledge of both mathematics and optics. In the West, the teaching of handicrafts always includes simple basic instruction which begins, like this, with the minutest theoretical principles. The more the pupils study, the deeper the knowledge they acquire of such principles.