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This article presents information on the criticism faced by the public schools education curriculum in the 1860s in Great Britain. In general critics found the curriculum of the public schools inadequate in two ways. In the first place it was too narrow. In the second place it was irrelevant to the new industrial society which had established itself. It was inevitable therefore that much of the debate should concern itself with the importance of expanding the curriculum through the development of the Sciences and the so called Modern subjects such as History and Geography. And it was likewise inevitable that considerable attention should be paid to the role of the mother tongue as a necessary field of study within a reformed curriculum. The article further informs that the debate on the mother tongue took place through Commission, through pamphlet, through speech, through editorial, with great vigor over a whole decade. The author comments on the clarity and insistence with which the failure to teach the mother tongue was picked out as a major deficiency of the school curriculum and the obscurity and half-heartedness of any practical proposals to remedy the deficiency.