These are my contemporary comments, pinned to the letter:
‘When some forty years ago England superseded France as the controlling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_: