They were no further advanced, on entering, than they would have to be to enter any ordinary fitting school for one of our first-class colleges, or the high schools in the graded systems of public schools in our cities.

Three years of study would put them abreast of students entering college elsewhere, and four years would carry them about as far as the end of the Freshman year in Yale, Harvard, or Princeton.

The corps of professors and teachers at West Point has always deservedly ranked high as instructors, but there is no "royal road" to knowledge, and it cannot be claimed that three or four years at the Military Academy would count for more, as general education, than the same period spent in any other good school.

A very few men of high standing in the classes supplemented their education by obtaining appointments as temporary instructors in the academy after graduating, but most of them left their books behind them and began at once the subaltern's life at the distant frontier post.
If we analyze the course of study they pursued, we find that it covered two years' work in mathematics, one in physics and chemistry, and one in construction of fortifications.

This was the scientific part, and was the heaviest part of the curriculum.