Some Things Never Change

I came across the following passage while reading H.G. Wells' story "The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth". Even though the story was first published in 1904, this description of the simultaneous lack of teaching skills but extreme confidence in one's instructional methods made me smile:

I heard Bensington also once—in the old days—at an educational conference in Bloomsbury. Like most eminent chemists and botanists, Mr. Bensington was very authoritative upon teaching—though I am certain he would have been scared out of his wits by an average Board School class in half-an-hour—and so far as I can remember now, he was propounding an improvement of Professor Armstrong's Heuristic method, whereby at the cost of three or four hundred pounds' worth of apparatus, a total neglect of all other studies and the undivided attention of a teacher of exceptional gifts, an average child might with a peculiar sort of thumby thoroughness learn in the course of ten or twelve years almost as much chemistry as one could get in one of those objectionable shilling text-books that were then so common...

I imagine we still have many such folks among us.