[i]

WOMAN
AND
The Higher Education

EDITED BY
ANNA C. BRACKETT

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MDCCCXCIII

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Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

[iv]

The series of collections, of which this volume is a part, is made up of representative work of the women of the State of New York in periodical literature.

This literature has been classified under its conspicuous divisions—Poetry, Fiction, History, Art, Biography, Translation, Literary Criticism, and the like.

A woman of eminent success in each department has then been asked to make a collection of representative work in that department; to include in it an example of her own work, and to place her name upon the volume as its Editor.

These selections have been made, as far as possible, chronologically, beginning with the earliest work of the century, in order that the volumes may carry out the plan of the [vi]“Exhibit of Women’s Work in Literature in the State of New York,” of which they are an original part.

The aim of this Exhibit was to make a record of literary work, limited, through necessity, both by sex and locality, but, as far as possible, accurate and complete, and to preserve this record in the State Library in the Capitol at Albany.

It includes twenty-five hundred books, beginning with the works of Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, the first-born female author of the province of New York, published in London in 1759, closing with the pages of a translation of Herder, still wet from the press, and comprising the works of almost every author in the intervening one hundred and forty years.

It includes also three hundred papers read before the literary clubs of the State, a summary of the work of all writers for the press, and the folios which preserve the work of many able women who have not published books.

The women of the State of New York have had the honor of decorating and furnishing the Library of the Women’s Building. Believing [vii]the best equipment of a library to be literature, they have therefore prepared this Exhibit; and have made its character comprehensive and historic, in order that it may not be temporary, but that it may be preserved in the State Library, and may have permanent value for future lovers and students of Americana.

Blanche Wilder Bellamy,
Chairman of the Committee on
Literature of the Board of Women
Managers of the State of New York.

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These essays, arranged in the order of the dates at which they were written, dating from 1819 to 1892, have no relation to each other but a logical one, and their logic is the logic of events. Professor Maria Mitchell’s article was published in Education, Mrs. Runkle’s in The Century Magazine, Mrs. Palmer’s in The Forum, Professor Salmon’s in The Academy, and the paper on The Private School in Harper’s Magazine. That so many periodicals offered material so valuable shows how wide-spread is the interest in the training of our girls, and how general and how intelligent is now the demand for the best. The change which has come about in these seventy years needs no emphasis for those who read in these pages the pleading words of Mrs. Willard to the members of the New York Legislature in behalf simply of a girls’ seminary, and then look through the collection to find that two of the articles have been written by women professors in girls’ colleges, and one of them by a woman who was for many years president of [x]a girls’ college. She tells us that at present the women’s colleges of this country reckon more than 50,000 students.

The facts speak for themselves. It is significant that we could find no words to present here written during the period of the Civil War. Then women found their opportunity practically to demonstrate to the world that opportunity was all they needed.

But in all that has been written since there is nothing more subtile than the argument presented by Mrs. Willard in 1819 in behalf of an education “giving strength and expansion to the minds of women,” whom she asserts to be “an essential part of the body politic,” with her warning to the law-makers of America to avoid the example of other republics, where “women have repaid the nations with ruin for their folly” in neglecting them.

A difference of tone in the essays is also exceedingly suggestive: In 1819 Mrs. Willard appeals to the “enlightened politicians” of her time; in 1881 Maria Mitchell writes, “All that women ask for is the enlightenment of our present rulers.”

Anna C. Brackett.

New York, 1893.

The object of this address is to convince the public that a reform with respect to female education is necessary; that it cannot be effected by individual exertion, but that it requires the aid of the Legislature; and, further, by showing the justice, the policy, and the magnanimity of such an undertaking, to persuade that body to endow a seminary for females as the commencement of such reformation.

The idea of a college for males will naturally be associated with that of a seminary, instituted and endowed by the public; and the absurdity of sending ladies to college may, at first thought, strike every one to whom this subject shall be proposed. I therefore hasten to observe that the seminary here recommended will be as different [2]from those appropriated to the other sex as the female character and duties are from the male. The business of the husbandman is not to waste his endeavors in seeking to make his orchard attain the strength and majesty of his forest, but to rear each to the perfection of its nature.

That the improvement of female education will be considered by our enlightened citizens as a subject of importance, the liberality with which they part with their property to educate their daughters is a sufficient evidence; and why should they not, when assembled in the Legislature, act in concert to effect a noble object which, though dear to them individually, cannot be accomplished by their unconnected exertions?

If the improvement of the American female character, and that alone, could be effected by public liberality, employed in giving better means of instruction, such improvement of one-half of society, and that half which barbarous and despotic nations have ever degraded, would of itself be an object worthy of the most liberal government on earth; but if the female character be raised, it must inevitably raise that of the other sex; and thus does the plan proposed [3]offer, as the object of legislative bounty, to elevate the whole character of the community.

As evidence that this statement does not exaggerate the female influence in society, our sex need but to be considered in the single relation of mothers. In this character we have the charge of the whole mass of individuals who are to compose the succeeding generation during that period of youth when the pliant mind takes any direction to which it is steadily guided by a forming hand. How important a power is given by this charge! Yet little do too many of my sex know how either to appreciate or improve it. Unprovided with the means of acquiring that knowledge which flows liberally to the other sex, having our time of education devoted to frivolous acquirements, how should we understand the nature of the mind so as to be aware of the importance of those early impressions which we make upon the minds of our children? Or how should we be able to form enlarged and correct views, either of the character to which we ought to mould them or of the means most proper to form them aright?

Considered in this point of view, were the [4]interests of male education alone to be consulted, that of females becomes of sufficient importance to engage the public attention. Would we rear the human plant to its perfection, we must first fertilize the soil which produces it. If it acquire its first bent and texture upon a barren plain, it will avail comparatively little should it be afterwards transplanted to a garden.

In the arrangement of my remarks I shall pursue the following order:

I. Treat of the defects of the present mode of female education, and their causes.

II. Consider the principles by which education should be regulated.

III. Sketch a plan of a female seminary.

IV. Show the benefits which society would receive from such seminaries.

DEFECTS IN THE PRESENT MODE OF FEMALE EDUCATION, AND THEIR CAUSES.

Civilized nations have long since been convinced that education as it respects males will not, like trade, regulate itself; and hence they have made it a prime object to provide that sex with everything requisite to facilitate their progress in learning; [5]but female education has been left to the mercy of private adventurers; and the consequence has been to our sex the same as it would have been to the other had legislatures left their accommodations and means of instruction to chance also.

Education cannot prosper in any community unless, from the ordinary motives which actuate the human mind, the best and most cultivated talents of that community can be brought into exercise in that way. Male education flourishes because, from the guardian care of legislatures, the presidencies and professorships of our colleges are some of the highest objects to which the eye of ambition is directed. Not so with female institutions. Preceptresses of these are dependent on their pupils for support, and are consequently liable to become the victims of their caprice. In such a situation it is not more desirable to be a preceptress than it would be to be a parent invested with the care of children and responsible for their behavior, and yet depending on them for subsistence, and destitute of power to enforce their obedience.

Feminine delicacy requires that girls should be educated chiefly by their own sex. This is apparent from considerations that [6]regard their health and conveniences, the propriety of their dress and manners, and their domestic accomplishments.

Boarding-schools, therefore, whatever may be their defects, furnish the best mode of education provided for females.

Concerning these schools it may be observed:

1. They are temporary institutions, formed by individuals whose object is present emolument. But they cannot be expected to be greatly lucrative; therefore, the individuals who establish them cannot afford to provide suitable accommodations as to room. At night the pupils are frequently crowded in their lodging-rooms, and during the day they are generally placed together in one apartment, where there is a heterogeneous mixture of different kinds of business, accompanied with so much noise and confusion as greatly to impede their progress in study.

2. As individuals cannot afford to provide suitable accommodations as to room, so neither can they afford libraries and other apparatus necessary to teach properly the various branches in which they pretend to instruct.

3. Neither can the individuals who establish [7]these schools afford to provide suitable instruction. It not unfrequently happens that one instructress teaches, at the same time and in the same room, ten or twelve distinct branches. If assistants are provided, such are usually taken as can be procured for a small compensation. True, in our large cities preceptresses provide their pupils with masters, though at an expense which few can afford; yet none of these masters are responsible for the general proficiency or demeanor of the pupils. Their only responsibility is in the particular branch which they teach, and to a preceptress who probably does not understand it herself, and who is therefore incapable of judging whether or not it is well taught.

4. It is impossible that in these schools such systems should be adopted and enforced as are requisite for properly classing the pupils. Institutions for young gentlemen are founded by public authority, and are permanent; they are endowed with funds, and their instructors and overseers are invested with authority to make such laws as they shall deem most salutary. From their permanency their laws and rules are well known. With their funds they procure libraries, philosophical apparatus, and [8]other advantages superior to what can elsewhere be found; and to enjoy these, individuals are placed under their discipline who would not else be subjected to it. Hence the directors of these institutions can enforce among other regulations those which enable them to make a perfect classification of their students. They regulate their qualifications for entrance, the kind and order of their studies, and the period of their remaining at the seminary. Female schools present the reverse of this. Wanting permanency and dependent on individual patronage, had they the wisdom to make salutary regulations, they could neither enforce nor purchase compliance. The pupils are irregular in their times of entering and leaving school, and they are of various and dissimilar acquirements. Each scholar of mature age thinks she has a right to judge for herself respecting what she is to be taught; and the parents of those who are not, consider that they have the same right to judge for them. Under such disadvantages a school cannot be classed, except in a very imperfect manner.

5. It is for the interest of instructresses of boarding-schools to teach their pupils showy accomplishments rather than those [9]which are solid and useful. Their object in teaching is generally present profit. In order to realize this, they must contrive to give immediate celebrity to their schools. If they attend chiefly to the cultivation of the mind, their work may not be manifest at the first glance; but let the pupil return home laden with fashionable toys, and her young companions, filled with envy and astonishment, are never satisfied till they are permitted to share the precious instruction. It is true, with the turn of the fashion the toys which they are taught to make will become obsolete, and no benefit remain to them of perhaps the only money that will ever be expended on their education; but the object of the instructress may be accomplished, notwithstanding, if that is directed to her own rather than her pupil’s advantage.

6. As these schools are private establishments, their preceptresses are not accountable to any particular persons. Any woman has a right to open a school in any place, and no one, either from law or custom, can prevent her. Hence the public are liable to be imposed upon, both with respect to the character and acquirements of preceptresses; I am far, however, from asserting that [10]this is always the case. It has been before observed that in the present state of things the ordinary motives which actuate the human mind would not induce ladies of the best and most cultivated talents to engage in the business of instructing from choice. But some have done it from necessity, and occasionally an extraordinary female has occupied herself in instructing because she felt that impulse to be active and useful which is the characteristic of a vigorous and noble mind, and because she found few avenues to extensive usefulness open to her sex. But if such has been the fact, it has not been the consequence of any system from which a similar result can be expected to recur with regularity, and it remains true that the public are liable to imposition both with regard to the character and acquirements of preceptresses.

Instances have lately occurred in which women of bad reputation, at a distance from scenes of their former life, have been intrusted by our unsuspecting citizens with the instruction of their daughters.

But the moral reputation of individuals is more a matter of public notoriety than their literary attainments; hence society is more liable to be deceived with regard to [11]the acquirements of instructresses than with respect to their characters.

Those women, however, who deceive society as to the advantages which they give their pupils are not charged with any ill intention. They teach as they were taught, and believe that the public are benefited by their labors. Acquiring in their youth a high value for their own superficial accomplishments, they regard all others as supernumerary if not unbecoming. Although these considerations exculpate individuals, yet they do not diminish the injury which society receives; for they show that the worst which is to be expected from such instruction is not that the pupils will remain ignorant, but that by adopting the views of their teachers they will have their minds barred against future improvement by acquiring a disrelish, if not a contempt, for useful knowledge.

7. Although, from a want of public support, preceptresses of boarding-schools have not the means of enforcing such a system as would lead to a perfect classification of their pupils, and although they are confined in other respects within narrow limits, yet because these establishments are not dependent on any public body within those limits, they [12]have a power far more arbitrary and uncontrolled than is allowed the learned and judicious instructors of our male seminaries.

They can at their option omit their own duties, and excuse their pupils from theirs.

They can make absurd and ridiculous regulations.

They can make improper and even wicked exactions of their pupils.

Thus the writer has endeavored to point out the defects of the present mode of female education, chiefly in order to show that the great cause of these defects consists in a state of things in which legislatures, undervaluing the importance of women in society, neglect to provide for their education, and suffer it to become the sport of adventurers of fortune who may be both ignorant and vicious.

OF THE PRINCIPLES BY WHICH EDUCATION SHOULD BE REGULATED.

To contemplate the principles which should regulate systems of instruction, and consider how little those principles have been regarded in educating our sex, will show the defects of female education in a [13]still stronger point of light, and will also afford a standard by which any plan for its improvement may be measured.

Education should seek to bring its subjects to the perfection of their moral, intellectual, and physical nature, in order that they may be of the greatest possible use to themselves and others; or, to use a different expression, that they may be the means of the greatest possible happiness of which they are capable, both as to what they enjoy and what they communicate.

Those youth have the surest chance of enjoying and communicating happiness who are best qualified, both by internal disposition and external habits, to perform with readiness those duties which their future life will most probably give them occasion to practise.

Studies and employments should therefore be selected from one or both of the following considerations: either because they are peculiarly fitted to improve the faculties, or because they are such as the pupil will most probably have occasion to practise in future life.

These are the principles on which systems of male education are founded; but female education has not yet been systematized. [14]Chance and confusion reign here. Not even is youth considered in our sex, as in the other, a season which should be wholly devoted to improvement. Among families so rich as to be entirely above labor, the daughters are hurried through the routine of boarding-school instruction, and at an early period introduced into the gay world; and thenceforth their only object is amusement. Mark the different treatment which the sons of these families receive. While their sisters are gliding through the mazes of the midnight dance, they employ the lamp to treasure up for future use the riches of ancient wisdom, or to gather strength and expansion of mind in exploring the wonderful paths of philosophy. When the youth of the two sexes has been spent so differently, is it strange, or is nature in fault, if more mature age has brought such a difference of character that our sex have been considered by the other as the pampered, wayward babies of society, who must have some rattle put into our hands to keep us from doing mischief to ourselves or others?

Another difference in the treatment of sexes is made in our country which, though not equally pernicious to society, is more pathetically unjust to our sex. How often [15]have we seen a student who, returning from his literary pursuits, finds a sister, who was his equal in acquirements while their advantages were equal, of whom he is now ashamed. While his youth was devoted to study and he was furnished with the means, she, without any object of improvement, drudged at home to assist in the support of the father’s family, and perhaps to contribute to her brother’s subsistence abroad; and now, a being of a lower order, the rustic innocent wonders and weeps at his neglect.

Not only has there been a want of system concerning female education, but much of what has been done has proceeded upon mistaken principles.

One of these is that, without a regard to the different periods of life proportionate to their importance, the education of females has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty. Though it may be proper to adorn this period of life, yet it is incomparably more important to prepare for the serious duties of maturer years. Though well to decorate the blossom, it is far better to prepare for the harvest. In the vegetable creation Nature seems but to sport when she embellishes the flower, while all [16]her serious cares are directed to perfect the fruit.

Another error is that it has been made the first object in educating our sex to prepare them to please the other. But reason and religion teach that we too are primary existences; that it is for us to move in the orbit of our duty around the Holy Centre of perfection, the companions, not the satellites, of men; else, instead of shedding around us an influence that may help to keep them in their proper course, we must accompany them in their wildest deviations.

I would not be understood to insinuate that we are not in particular situations to yield obedience to the other sex. Submission and obedience belong to every being in the universe, except the great Master of the whole. Nor is it a degrading peculiarity to our sex to be under human authority. Whenever one class of human beings derive from another the benefit of support and protection, they must pay its equivalent—obedience. Thus, while we receive these benefits from our parents, we are all, without distinction of sex, under their authority; when we receive them from the government of our country, we must obey our rulers; and when our sex take the obligations of [17]marriage, and receive protection and support from the other, it is reasonable that we too should yield obedience. Yet is neither the child, nor the subject, nor the wife under human authority, but in subservience to the divine. Our highest responsibility is to God, and our highest interest is to please Him; therefore, to secure this interest should our education be directed.

Neither would I be understood to mean that our sex should not seek to make themselves agreeable to the other. The error complained of is that the taste of men, whatever it might happen to be, has been made a standard for the formation of the female character. In whatever we do, it is of the utmost importance that the rule by which we work be perfect. For if otherwise, what is it but to err upon principle? A system of education which leads one class of human beings to consider the approbation of another as their highest object, teaches that the rule of their conduct should be the will of beings, imperfect and erring like themselves, rather than the will of God, which is the only standard of perfection.

Having now considered female education both in theory and practice, and seen that in its present state it is, in fact, a thing [18]“without form, and void,” the mind is naturally led to inquire after a remedy for the evils it has been contemplating. Can individuals furnish this remedy? It has heretofore been left to them, and we have seen the consequence. If education is a business which might naturally prosper if left to individual exertion, why have legislatures intermeddled with it at all? If it is not, why do they make their daughters illegitimates, and bestow all their care upon their sons?

It is the duty of a government to do all in its power to promote the present and future prosperity of the nation over which it is placed. This prosperity will depend on the character of its citizens. The characters of these will be formed by their mothers; and it is through the mothers that the government can control the characters of its future citizens, to form them such as will insure their country’s prosperity. If this is the case, then it is the duty of our present legislatures to begin now to form the characters of the next generation by controlling that of the females who are to be the mothers, while it is yet with them a season of improvement.

But should the conclusion be almost admitted that our sex too are the legitimate [19]children of the Legislature, and that it is their duty to afford us a share of their paternal bounty, the phantom of a college-learned lady would be ready to rise up and destroy every good resolution which the admission of this truth would naturally produce in our favor.

To show that it is not a masculine education that is here recommended, and to afford a definite view of the manner in which, a female institution might possess the respectability, permanency, and uniformity of operation of those appropriated to males, and yet differ from them so as to be adapted to that difference of character and duties to which the softer sex should be formed, is the object of the following imperfect

SKETCH OF A FEMALE SEMINARY.

From considering the deficiencies in boarding-schools, much may be learned with regard to what would be needed for the prosperity and usefulness of a public seminary for females.

I. There would be needed a building, with commodious rooms for lodging and recitation; apartments for the reception of apparatus, [20]and for the accommodation of the domestic department.

II. A library, containing books on the various subjects in which the pupils were to receive instruction; musical instruments; some good paintings, to form the taste and serve as models for the execution of those who were to be instructed in that art; maps, globes, and a small collection of philosophical apparatus.

III. A judicious board of trust, competent and desirous to promote its interests, would, in a female as in a male literary institution, be the corner-stone of its prosperity. On this board it would depend to provide:

IV. Suitable instruction. This article may be subdivided under four heads:

1. Religious and Moral.

2. Literary.

3. Domestic.

4. Ornamental.

1. Religious and Moral.—A regular attention to religious duties would of course be required of the pupils by the laws of the institution. The trustees would be careful to appoint no instructors who would not teach religion and morality, both by their example and by leading the minds of the pupils to perceive that these constitute the [21]true end of all education. It would be desirable that the young ladies should spend part of their Sabbaths in hearing discourses relative to the peculiar duties of their sex. The evidences of Christianity and moral philosophy would constitute a part of their studies.

2. Literary Instruction.—To make an exact enumeration of the branches of literature which might be taught would be impossible unless the time of the pupils’ continuance at the seminary and the requisites for entrance were previously fixed. Such an enumeration would be tedious, nor do I conceive that it would be at all promotive of my object. The difficulty complained of is, not that we are at a loss what sciences we ought to learn, but that we have not proper advantages to learn any. Many writers have given us excellent advice in regard to what we should be taught, but no legislature has provided us the means of instruction. Not, however, to pass lightly over this fundamental part of education, I will mention one or two of the less obvious branches of science which, I conceive, should engage the youthful attention of my sex.

It is highly important that females should be conversant with those studies which will [22]lead them to understand the operations of the human mind. The chief use to which the philosophy of the mind can be applied is to regulate education by its rules. The ductile mind of the child is intrusted to the mother; and she ought to have every possible assistance in acquiring a knowledge of this noble material on which it is her business to operate that she may best understand how to mould it to its most excellent form.

Natural philosophy has not often been taught to our sex. Yet why should we be kept in ignorance of the great machinery of Nature, and left to the vulgar notion that nothing is curious but what deviates from her common course? If mothers were acquainted with this science, they would communicate very many of its principles to their children in early youth. From the bursting of an egg buried in the fire I have heard an intelligent mother lead her prattling inquirer to understand the cause of the earthquake. But how often does the mother, from ignorance on this subject, give her child the most erroneous and contracted views of the causes of natural phenomena—views which, though he may afterwards learn to be false, are yet from the laws of association, [23]ever ready to return unless the active powers of the mind are continually upon the alert to keep them out. A knowledge of natural philosophy is calculated to heighten the moral taste, by bringing to view the majesty and beauty of order and design, and to enliven piety, by enabling the mind more clearly to perceive, throughout the manifold works of God, that wisdom in which He hath made them all.

In some of the sciences proper for our sex the books written for the other would need alteration, because in some they presuppose more knowledge than female pupils would possess; in others they have parts not particularly interesting to our sex, and omit subjects immediately relating to their pursuits. There would likewise be needed for a female seminary some works which I believe are nowhere extant, such as a systematic treatise on housewifery.

3. Domestic instruction should be considered important in a female seminary. It is the duty of our sex to regulate the internal concerns of every family, and unless they be properly qualified to discharge this duty, whatever may be their literary or ornamental attainments, they cannot be expected to make either good wives, good [24]mothers, or good mistresses of families; and if they are none of these, they must be bad members of society; for it is by promoting or destroying the comfort and prosperity of their own families that females serve or injure the community. To superintend the domestic department there should be a respectable lady, experienced in the best methods of housewifery, and acquainted with propriety of dress and manners. Under her tuition the pupils ought to be placed for a certain length of time every morning. A spirit of neatness and order should here be treated as a virtue, and the contrary, if excessive and incorrigible, be punished with expulsion. There might be a gradation of employment in the domestic department, according to the length of time the pupils had remained at the institution. The older scholars might then assist the superintendent in instructing the younger, and the whole be so arranged that each pupil might have advantages to become a good domestic manager by the time she has completed her studies.

This plan would afford a healthy exercise. It would prevent that estrangement from domestic duties which would be likely to take place in a length of time devoted to study [25]with those to whom they were previously familiar, and would accustom those to them who from ignorance might otherwise put at hazard their own happiness and the prosperity of their families.

These objects might doubtless be effected by a scheme of domestic instruction, and probably others of no inconsiderable importance. It is believed that housewifery might be greatly improved by being taught not only in practice but in theory. Why may it not be reduced to a system, as well as other arts? There are right ways of performing its various operations, and there are reasons why those ways are right. And why may not rules be formed, their reasons collected, and the whole be digested into a system, to guide the learner’s practice?

It is obvious that theory alone can never make a good artist; and it is equally obvious that practice, unaided by theory, can never correct errors, but must establish them. If I should perform anything in a wrong manner all my life, and teach my children to perform it in the same manner still, through my life and theirs, it would be wrong. Without alteration there can be no improvement; but how are we to alter so as to improve, if we are ignorant of the principles of [26]our art, with which we should compare our practice and by which we should regulate it?

In the present state of things it is not to be expected that any material improvements in housewifery should be made. There being no uniformity of method prevailing among different housewives, of course the communications from one to another are not much more likely to improve the art than a communication between two mechanics of different trades would be to improve each in his respective occupation. But should a system of principles be philosophically arranged and taught, both in theory and by practice, to a large number of females whose minds were expanded and strengthened by a course of literary instruction, those among them of an investigating turn would, when they commenced house-keeping consider their domestic operations as a series of experiments which either proved or refuted the system previously taught. They would then converse together like those who practise a common art, and improve each other by their observations and experiments; and they would also be capable of improving the system by detecting its errors, and by making additions of new principles and better modes of practice.

[27]

4. The ornamental branches which I should recommend for a female seminary are drawing and painting, elegant penmanship, music, and the grace of motion. Needle-work is not here mentioned. The best style of useful needle-work should either be taught in the domestic department or made a qualification for entrance; and I consider that useful which may contribute to the decoration of a lady’s person, or the convenience or neatness of her family. But the use of the needle for other purposes than these, as it affords little to assist in the formation of the character, I should regard as a waste of time.

The grace of motion must be learned chiefly from instruction in dancing. Other advantages besides that of a graceful carriage might be derived from such instruction if the lessons were judiciously timed. Exercise is needful to the health, and recreation to the cheerfulness and contentment of youth. Female youth could not be allowed to range unrestrained, to seek amusement for themselves. If it was entirely prohibited, they would be driven to seek it by stealth, which would lead them to many improprieties of conduct, and would have a pernicious effect upon their general character, by inducing a habit of treading forbidden [28]paths. The alternative that remains is to provide them with proper recreation, which, after the confinement of the day, they might enjoy under the eye of their instructors. Dancing is exactly suited to this purpose, as also to that of exercise, for perhaps in no way can so much healthy exercise be taken in so short a time. It has, besides, this advantage over other amusements: that it affords nothing to excite the bad passions; but, on the contrary, its effects are to soften the mind, to banish its animosities, and to open it to social impressions.

It may be said that dancing would dissipate the attention and estrange it from study. Balls would doubtless have this effect; but let dancing be practised every day by youth of the same sex, without change of place, dress, or company, and under the eye of those whom they are accustomed to obey, and it would excite no more emotion than any other exercise or amusement, but in degree, as it is of itself more pleasant. But it must ever be a grateful exercise to youth, as it is one to which Nature herself prompts them at the sound of animating music.

It has been doubted whether painting and music should be taught to young ladies, because [29]much time is requisite to bring them to any considerable degree of perfection, and they are not immediately useful. Though these objections have weight, yet they are founded on too limited a view of the objects of education. They leave out the important consideration of forming the character. I should not consider it an essential point that the music of a lady’s piano should rival that of her master’s, or that her drawing-room should be decorated with her own paintings rather than those of others; but it is the intrinsic advantage which she might derive from the refinement of herself that would induce me to recommend to her an attention to these elegant pursuits. The harmony of sound has a tendency to produce a correspondent harmony of soul; and that art which obliges us to study Nature in order to imitate her often enkindles the latent spark of taste—of sensibility for her beauties, till it glows to adoration for their Author, and a refined love of all His works.

V. There would be needed for a female as well as for a male seminary a system of laws and regulations, so arranged that both the instructors and pupils would know their duty; and thus the whole business move with regularity and uniformity.

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The laws of the institution would be chiefly directed to regulate the pupils’ qualifications for entrance; the kind and order of their studies; their behavior while at the institution; the term allotted for the completion of their studies; the punishments to be inflicted on offenders; and the rewards or honors to be bestowed on the virtuous and diligent.

The direct rewards or honors used to stimulate the ambition of students in colleges are, first, the certificate or diploma, which each receives who passes successfully through the term allotted to his collegiate studies; and, secondly, the appointments to perform certain parts in public exhibitions, which are bestowed by the faculty, as rewards for superior scholarship. The first of these modes is admissible into a female seminary; the second is not, as public speaking forms no part of female education. The want of this mode might, however, be supplied by examinations judiciously conducted. The leisure and inclination of both instructors and scholars would combine to produce a thorough preparation for these; for neither would have any other public test of the success of their labors. Persons of both sexes would attend. The less entertaining [31]parts might be enlivened by interludes, where the pupils in painting and music would display their several improvements. Such examinations would stimulate the instructors to give their scholars more attention, by which the leading facts and principles of their studies would be more clearly understood and better remembered. The ambition excited among the pupils would operate without placing the instructors under the necessity of making distinctions among them, which are so apt to be considered as invidious, and which are in our male seminaries such fruitful sources of disaffection.

Perhaps the term allotted for the routine of study at the seminary might be three years. The pupils probably would not be fitted to enter till about the age of fourteen. Whether they attended to all or any of the ornamental branches, should be left optional with the parents or guardians. Those who were to be instructed in them should be entered for a longer term, but if this was a subject of previous calculation no confusion would arise from it. The routine of the exercises, being established by the laws of the institution, would be uniform, and publicly known; and those who were previously acquainted with the branches first taught [32]might enter the higher classes; nor would those who entered the lowest be obliged to remain during the three years. Thus the term of remaining at the institution might be either one, two, three, four, or more years, and that without interfering with the regularity and uniformity of its proceedings.

The writer has now given a sketch of her plan. She has by no means expressed all the ideas which occurred to her concerning it. She wished to be as concise as possible, and yet afford conviction that it is practicable to organize a system of female education which shall possess the permanency, uniformity of operation, and respectability of our male institutions, and yet differ from them so as to be adapted to that difference of character and duties to which early instruction should form the softer sex.

It now remains to inquire more particularly what would be the benefits resulting from such a system.

BENEFITS OF FEMALE SEMINARIES.

In inquiring concerning the benefits of the plan proposed, I shall proceed upon the [33]supposition that female seminaries will be patronized throughout our country.

Nor is it altogether a visionary supposition. If one seminary should be well organized its advantages would be found so great that others would soon be instituted, and that sufficient patronage can be found to put one in operation may be presumed from its reasonableness, and from the public opinion with regard to the present mode of female education. It is from an intimate acquaintance with those parts of our country where education is said to flourish most that the writer has drawn her picture of the present state of female instruction, and she knows that she is not alone in perceiving or deploring its faults. Her sentiments are shared by many an enlightened parent of a daughter who has received a boarding-school education. Counting on the promise of her childhood, the father had anticipated her maturity as combining what is excellent in mind with what is elegant in manners. He spared no expense that education might realize to him the image of his imagination. His daughter returned from her boarding-school improved in fashionable airs and expert in manufacturing fashionable toys; but in her conversation he sought in vain for that refined [34]and fertile mind which he had fondly expected. Aware that his disappointment has its source in a defective education, he looks with anxiety on his other daughters, whose minds, like lovely buds, are beginning to open. Where shall he find a genial soil in which he may place them to expand? Shall he provide them male instructors? Then the graces of their persons and manners, and whatever forms the distinguishing charm of the feminine character, they cannot be expected to acquire. Shall he give them a private tutoress? She will have been educated at the boarding-school, and his daughters will have the faults of its instruction second-handed. Such is now the dilemma of many parents, and it is one from which they cannot be extricated by their individual exertions. May not, then, the only plan which promises to relieve them expect their vigorous support?

Let us now proceed to inquire what benefits would result from the establishment of female seminaries.

They would constitute a grade of public education superior to any yet known in the history of our sex, and through them the lower grades of female instruction might be controlled. The influence of public seminaries [35]over these would operate in two ways: first, by requiring certain qualifications for entrance; and, secondly, by furnishing instructresses initiated in their modes of teaching and imbued with their maxims.

Female seminaries might be expected to have important and happy effects on common schools in general, and in the manner of operating on these would probably place the business of teaching children in hands now nearly useless to society, and take it from those whose services the State wants in many other ways.

That Nature designed for our sex the care of children, she has made manifest by mental as well as physical indications. She has given us in a greater degree than men the gentle arts of insinuation, to soften their minds and fit them to receive impressions; a greater quickness of invention to vary modes of teaching to different dispositions; and more patience to make repeated efforts. There are many females of ability to whom the business of instructing children is highly acceptable, and who would devote all their faculties to their occupation. They would have no higher pecuniary object to engage their attention, and their reputation as instructors they would consider as important; [36]whereas, whenever able and enterprising men engage in this business, they consider it merely as a temporary employment, to further some other object, to the attainment of which their best thoughts and calculations are all directed. If, then, women were properly fitted by instruction, they would be likely to teach children better than the other sex; they could afford to do it cheaper; and those men who would otherwise be engaged in this employment might be at liberty to add to the wealth of the nation by any of those thousand occupations from which women are necessarily debarred.

But the females who taught children would have been themselves instructed either immediately or indirectly by the seminaries. Hence, through these the government might exercise an intimate and most beneficial control over common schools. Any one who has turned his attention to the subject must be aware that there is great room for improvement in these, both as to the modes of teaching and the things taught; and what method could be devised so likely to effect this improvement as to prepare by instruction a class of individuals whose interest, leisure, and natural talents would combine to make them pursue it with ardor? Such [37]a class of individuals would be raised up by female seminaries. And, therefore, they would be likely to have highly important and happy effects on common schools.

It is believed that such institutions would tend to prolong or perpetuate our excellent government.

An opinion too generally prevails that our present form of government, though good, cannot be permanent. Other republics have failed, and the historian and philosopher have told us that nations are like individuals; that at their birth they receive the seeds of their decline and dissolution. Here, deceived by a false analogy, we receive an apt illustration of particular facts for a general truth. The existence of nations cannot in strictness be compared with the duration of animate life; for by the operation of physical causes this, after a certain length of time, must cease; but the existence of nations is prolonged by the succession of one generation to another, and there is no physical cause to prevent this succession’s going on in a peaceable manner under a good government till the end of time. We must then look to other causes than necessity for the decline and fall of former republics. If we could discover these causes, [38]and seasonably prevent their operation, then might our latest posterity enjoy the same happy government with which we are blessed; or if but in part, then might the triumph of tyranny be delayed, and a few more generations be free.

Permit me, then, to ask the enlightened politician of my country whether amid his researches for these causes he cannot discover one in the neglect which free governments, in common with others, have shown to whatever regarded the formation of the female character.

In those great republics which have fallen of themselves the loss of republican manners and virtues has been the invariable precursor of their loss of the republican form of government. But is it not in the power of our sex to give society its tone, both as to manners and morals? And if such is the extent of female influence, is it wonderful that republics have failed when they calmly suffered that influence to become enlisted in favor of luxuries and follies wholly incompatible with the existence of freedom?

It may be said that the depravation of morals and manners can be traced to the introduction of wealth—as its cause. But [39]wealth will be introduced; even the iron laws of Lycurgus could not prevent it. Let us, then, inquire if means may not be devised to prevent its bringing with it the destruction of public virtue. May not these means be found in education? in implanting in early youth habits that may counteract the temptations to which, through the influence of wealth, mature age will be exposed? and in giving strength and expansion to the mind, that it may comprehend and prize those principles which teach the rigid performance of duty? Education, it may be said, has been tried as a preservative of national purity. But was it applied to every exposed part of the body politic? For if any part has been left within the pestilential atmosphere of wealth without this preservative, then that part, becoming corrupted, would communicate the contagion to the whole; and if so, then has the experiment whether education may not preserve public virtue never yet been fairly tried. Such a part has been left in all former experiments. Females have been exposed to the contagion of wealth without the preservative of a good education, and they constitute that part of the body politic least endowed by nature to resist, most to communicate [40]it. Nay, not merely have they been left without the defence of a good education, but their corruption has been accelerated by a bad one. The character of women of wealth has been, and in the old governments of Europe now is, all that this statement would lead us to expect. Not content with doing nothing to promote their country’s welfare, like pampered children, they revel in its prosperity, and scatter it to the winds with, a wanton profusion; and, still worse, they empoison its source by diffusing a contempt for useful labor. To court Pleasure their business, within her temple, in defiance of the laws of God and man, they have erected the idol Fashion; and upon her altar they sacrifice with shameless rites whatever is sacred to virtue or religion. Not the strongest ties of nature, not even maternal love can restrain them! Like the worshipper of Moloch, the mother, while yet yearning over the new-born babe, tears it from the bosom which God has swelled with nutrition for its support, and casts it remorselessly from her, the victim of her unhallowed devotion.

But while with an anguished heart I thus depict the crimes of my sex, let not the other stand by and smile. Reason declares that [41]you are guiltier than we. You are our natural guardians—our brothers, our fathers, and our rulers. You know that our ductile minds readily take the impressions of education. Why, then, have you neglected our education? Why have you looked with lethargic indifference on circumstances ruinous to the formation of our characters, which you might have controlled?

But it may be said the observations here made cannot be applied to any class of females in our country. True, they cannot yet; and if they could, it would be useless to make them; for when the females of any country have become thus debased, then is that country so corrupted that nothing but the awful judgments of Heaven can arrest its career of vice. But it cannot be denied that our manners are verging towards those described; and the change, though gradual, has not been slow. Already do our daughters listen with surprise when we tell them of the republican simplicity of our mothers. But our manners are not as yet so altered but that throughout our country they are still marked with republican virtues.

The inquiry to which these remarks have conducted us is this: What is offered by the plan of female education here proposed [42]which may teach or preserve among females of wealthy families that purity of manners which is allowed to be so essential to national prosperity, and so necessary to the existence of a republican government?

1. Females, by having their understandings cultivated, their reasoning powers developed and strengthened, may be expected to act more from the dictates of reason and less from those of fashion and caprice.

2. With minds thus strengthened, they would be taught systems of morality, enforced by the sanctions of religion; and they might be expected to acquire juster and more enlarged views of their duty, and stronger and higher motives to its performance.

3. This plan of education offers all that can be done to preserve female youth from a contempt of useful labor. The pupils would become accustomed to it, in conjunction with the high objects of literature and the elegant pursuits of the fine arts; and it is to be hoped that both from habit and association they might in future life regard it as respectable.

To this it may be added that if housewifery could be raised to a regular art, and taught upon philosophical principles, it [43]would become a higher and more interesting occupation; and ladies of fortune, like wealthy agriculturists, might find that to regulate their business was an agreeable employment.

4. The pupils might be expected to acquire a taste for moral and intellectual pleasures which would buoy them above a passion for show and parade, and which would make them seek to gratify the natural love of superiority by endeavoring to excel others in intrinsic merit rather than in the extrinsic frivolities of dress, furniture, and equipage.

5. By being enlightened in moral philosophy, and in that which teaches the operations of the mind, females would be enabled to perceive the nature and extent of that influence which they possess over their children, and the obligation which this lays them under to watch the formation of their characters with unceasing vigilance, to become their instructors, to devise plans for their improvement, to weed out the vices of their minds, and to implant and foster the virtues. And surely there is that in the maternal bosom which, when its pleadings shall be aided by education, will overcome the seductions of wealth and fashion, and [44]will lead the mother to seek her happiness in communing with her children, and promoting their welfare, rather than in a heartless intercourse with the votaries of pleasure, especially when with an expanded mind she extends her views to futurity, and sees her care to her offspring rewarded by peace of conscience, the blessings of her family, the prosperity of her country, and, finally, with everlasting pleasure to herself and them.

Thus laudable objects and employments would be furnished for the great body of females who are not kept by poverty from excesses. But among these, as among the other sex, will be found master-spirits, who must have pre-eminence, at whatever price they acquire it. Domestic life cannot hold these, because they prefer to be infamous rather than obscure. To leave such without any virtuous road to eminence is unsafe to the community; for not unfrequently are the secret springs of revolution set in motion by their intrigues. Such aspiring minds we will regulate by education; we will remove obstructions to the course of literature, which has heretofore been their only honorable way to distinction; and we will offer them a new object, worthy of their ambition: [45]to govern and improve the seminaries for their sex.

In calling on my patriotic countrymen to effect so noble an object, the consideration of national glory should not be overlooked. Ages have rolled away; barbarians have trodden the weaker sex beneath their feet; tyrants have robbed us of the present light of heaven, and fain would take its future. Nations calling themselves polite have made us the fancied idols of a ridiculous worship, and we have repaid them with ruin for their folly. But where is that wise and heroic country which has considered that our rights are sacred, though we cannot defend them? that, though a weaker, we are an essential part of the body politic, whose corruption or improvement must affect the whole? and which, having thus considered, has sought to give us by education that rank in the scale of being to which our importance entitles us? History shows not that country. It shows many whose legislatures have sought to improve their various vegetable productions and their breeds of useful brutes, but none whose public councils have made it an object of their deliberations to improve the character of their women. Yet, though history lifts not her [46]finger to such a one, anticipation does. She points to a nation which, having thrown off the shackles of authority and precedent, shrinks not from schemes of improvement because other nations have never attempted them; but which, in its pride of independence, would rather lead than follow in the march of human improvement—a nation wise and magnanimous to plan, enterprising to undertake, and rich in resources to execute. Does not every American exult that this country is his own? And who knows how great and good a race of men may yet arise from the forming hand of mothers, enlightened by the bounty of that beloved country, to defend her liberties, to plan her future improvement, and to raise her to unparalleled glory?

Middlebury, 1819.

At the present period of society, when the light of knowledge, no longer the feeble glimmering of an uncertain dawn, is rapidly becoming “brighter and brighter unto perfect day,” it may seem idle and superfluous to call your attention to so hackneyed a subject as that of education. But permit me to observe that a subject of such vital importance to us, both as individuals and citizens, can scarcely be too often presented to our view. There is perhaps no country in the world where the benefits of education are so fully appreciated and so widely diffused as in our own. Schools, both public and private, have multiplied in every part of the Union; and even our common seminaries are now conducted upon such enlarged and liberal principles, as were formerly unknown beyond the walls of a university. But [48]even in this enlightened age there is one point which yet remains somewhat in dispute—I mean the education of females. It is not long since the belief in woman’s inferior capacity was at least tacitly admitted, and there are many even now who adhere to that belief; but let us inquire what domain of human knowledge man can claim as his exclusive right. Is it the boundless field of classic lore? Where can be found a more indefatigable laborer in that fruitful soil than was Madame Dacier, the elegant translator of Plutarch? Is it the rugged steep of science? How few of all those who have toiled up that ascent ever attained such an elevated station as Maria Agnesi, the young and beautiful professor of mathematics at Bologna? Is it the thorny road of political economy, or the flowery paths of general literature? Who has ever traversed the former with such masculine vigor, or threaded the pleasant mazes of the latter with such feminine tact, as Madame de Staël, the wonder of her own sex, the envy of ours? Is it the fairy-land of poesy? Who, since the days of Shakespeare, could lay claim to the title of the “Poet of the Passions,” until it was proudly won by Miss Baillie? Where, since the early days of Campbell, have been [49]found more sweetness and polish than in the productions of our universal favorite, Mrs. Hemans?

From the almost numberless examples of female intellect a few only have been adduced, with which we are all familiar, and surely they are enough to convince any unprejudiced mind that Heaven has conferred upon woman no less than upon man the gifts of talent and genius. By the proper restraints of her sex, woman is prevented from buffeting the waves of popular prejudice and diving into the depths of science after the yet undiscovered gems of truth; but who will dare assert that she is therefore insensible to their value or incapable of grasping them?

It has been asserted by some, whose minds were capable of a much wider range of observation than the remark would seem to indicate, that education, though it always renders man an ornament to his station in society, invariably unfits a woman for the duties which seem to have been allotted her by nature. This cannot possibly be true. Our ordinary experience certainly affords no proof that an enlightened mind is the most prone to error; it rather teaches us that they whose eyes have been opened to “see the [50]right” seldom will voluntarily “the wrong pursue.” I speak not now of what is usually termed the eccentricity of genius, though that might be referred to as another evidence of the necessity of a proper education; for were talents always subjected to the discipline of the schools, we should not find a Mary Wollstonecroft pleading the cause of immorality and atheism under pretence of advocating the rights of women; nor would our country have been so recently insulted by the presence of a woman who still more boldly tramples upon the restraints of modesty and decorum, and publicly proclaims herself the “apostle of infidelity.” These are things which, if they were the result of mental cultivation, would induce a parent to suppress every glimmering of intellect in his darling and innocent child; but we need no argument to convince us that only those who have been “nursed in darkness” are prone to evil rather than to good.

Another objection which has been urged, with some apparent truth, against the present enlarged system of female education is that it is calculated to render women pedants and bookworms rather than useful members of the domestic circle; but to confute this we need only recur to our own [51]personal experience, since doubtless there are few among us who cannot number among their friends women as much distinguished for domestic virtues as for superior and extensive acquirements. Indeed, is it not absurd to suppose that our daily repast will be less grateful because intellect and elegance preside at the social board? or that household fires will burn less brightly because kindled by a torch from the shrine of Minerva?

The true cause of all these various objections appears to be a misconception of the term education. A good education includes the culture of the heart as well as of the mind. It implies not merely the improvement of the mental faculties, but also the government of the passions and the proper direction of the affections. We should not think a garden beautiful where the weeds have been allowed to grow up among the flowers, however green and flourishing it might appear; neither should we deem a woman well educated whose heart was the abode of folly and vanity, however her mind might be stored with knowledge. One of our best writers on education (herself a striking proof of its benefits) has compared a well-regulated mind to a watch, where every part is so nicely balanced that no one can preponderate. [52]This is a very apt illustration. Of the various faculties with which Heaven has endowed us, each may be perfect in itself; but from some error in our adjustment of them (if I may use the term), all may become useless. It is only by the most unwearied self-discipline that this correct balance of mental powers can be effected; and the ability to discipline one’s self can only be derived from education.

To employ the rapidly-developing faculties of early childhood merely as sources of amusement to ourselves is certainly not the proper method of bestowing upon our children the treasures of wisdom; yet this is the course usually pursued. If we would reap the rich harvest of a truly good education, the work of cultivation must commence at a much earlier period than even our most zealous laborers in the field of knowledge would deem necessary. As soon as a child is capable of receiving different degrees of pleasure from different objects, the task of instruction should commence; not, however, by means of dry precept and tedious disquisition, for these would be incomprehensible, but by resorting to all those thousand devices which a judicious instructor is so ingenious in contriving, in order to inform as [53]well as amuse. Every opportunity of imparting knowledge should be eagerly seized, for knowledge acquired at such an age becomes a part of our very nature; and, whatever may be the course of our after-life, the impressions received in early childhood are never totally effaced.

But to whom is the sacred and laborious duty of early instruction delegated? Is it to the father, who, returning from his daily toil, seeks in the bosom of his family that peace which never abides in the turmoil of the world? Surely not. The conflict with a hard and selfish world is enough for him; the duty of combating with rebellious human nature is reserved for the mother’s portion. No father can, no father ought to know how much heaviness of heart, how much weariness of spirit, the mother has endured in order to render his children the objects of his pride as well as of his affection. To foster the germ of mental energy, to train up the early shoots of intellect, and, more than all, to watch over the pure fresh feelings of the youthful heart, and direct its innocent affections to “things above,” so that it may never be induced to “place its happiness lower than itself,” these are the ennobling duties of a mother.

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But can these duties be performed by the woman whose mental energies were in early youth wasted upon the fascinating pages of romance, and, in later life, frittered away amid the frivolities of fashion? “Never,” observed a man of acknowledged sense and penetration, “never have I known a man distinguished for wisdom and virtue who was the son of a foolish mother.” This is emphatically true; and when we consider how often the temper and dispositions which we falsely ascribe to nature may be traced to impressions received in infancy, our own experience will bear testimony to its truth. The husbandman who should scatter his seed among the dry clods of an untilled field, and then go his way rejoicing in the anticipation of a rich harvest, would be far more likely to reap tares than wheat; yet there would not be more folly in his expectations than in those of the well-meaning but injudicious mother who, after having allowed the precious years of infancy to slip by, fondly hopes to gather from the youthful mind the rare fruits of virtue and religion, the principles of which no previous culture had fitted it to receive. Education must begin in infancy. Even in the nurse’s arms a child learns to distinguish between pleasurable [55]and disagreeable objects; and in the same manner—that is to say, by making appeals to the senses—may it be taught the difference between right and wrong. If it be true, as some wise men have asserted, that the first ten years give a coloring to man’s whole life, then let women look well to their maternal duties, for awful is their responsibility.

Could the secret biography of heroes and sages throughout the earth be correctly ascertained, so as to trace the progress of early education, what a brilliant lustre would be shed on the maternal character! Even in the pages of general history, notwithstanding its vague and unsatisfactory sketches of the detail of life, how universally do we find the influence of women made manifest. It is recorded of the greatest orator of antiquity that the wise and politic plans which it had cost him years to frame could be overturned in a single day by a woman; and Tacitus himself, the most impartial of historians, has not hesitated to trace the degeneracy of morals under the emperors to the period when the Roman matrons began to relinquish to slaves and hirelings the education of their children. If such are the desolating effects of woman’s ill-directed influence, let us reflect for a moment upon the incalculable [56]benefits which might be derived from the same powerful force when exerted in its proper direction. Those only who have been long accustomed to look into the springs of human action can be aware how much the general state of civilized society depends upon the sentiments and habits of women; for while many are willing to admit the powerful effect of female elegance on the manners of men, few will as readily acknowledge the influence of female principles upon their character. But to those who can only be taught by examples we can give one noble evidence of the advantages of woman’s influence. Let us recall to mind the history of the man who directed the destinies of our own proud and happy country—let us look at the moral grandeur of his character—let us behold him gifted with the heart to desire, the intellect to plan, and the hand to achieve the freedom of an infant nation—let us observe him placed at the head of that nation, idolized by its citizens, respected by its enemies, admired by the world; yet, uncontaminated by that ambition which is so generally the offspring of power, we see him quietly resigning that proudest of all titles, the ruler of a free people, and returning, with his early, simple habits, to the tillage of his humble [57]farm. Yes; let us contemplate in every point of view the majesty of this character, which stands, like the pyramids of Egypt, the unrivalled object of a world’s admiration, and then let us recollect with noble pride that the character of our illustrious Washington was formed by his mother.

In a country like ours, where wealth is continually fluctuating, where the fortune which a father bequeaths to his son to-day may be totally consumed by some sudden revolution in commerce to-morrow, the only unalienable property which can be bestowed upon our children is an unblemished name and a good education. Under such a government as ours the latter is indispensable. Ours has been called a nation of kings; and when we reflect on the incalculable mischief which is daily effected in less happy countries by unenlightened rulers and an ignorant populace, we may form some idea of the evils which would result from an uninformed and uneducated sovereign people. The little boy who climbs his father’s knee and lisps his infantile prattle into his delighted ear may be called at some future period to direct the destinies of a large portion of our fellow-countrymen. The path to distinction is open to all, however lowly their station; for the [58]aristocracy of talent is the only aristocracy which Americans acknowledge; and this we cannot reject, since it bears Heaven’s own signet on its patent of nobility. Is it not absolutely essential, then, that the heart and mind of every child in the community should be objects of earnest solicitude to every patriotic bosom? “The old systems of education are good for nothing,” said the First Consul of France to Madame Campan, when he visited the school under her direction. “What is yet requisite in order that young persons may be well educated in France?” continued he. “Mothers,” was the emphatic reply. “True, madame,” answered Napoleon; “let Frenchmen, therefore, acknowledge their obligation to you as having been the first to educate mothers for their children.” Napoleon well knew that the only materials out of which a mighty nation could be formed were rational, enlightened, educated men; and the importance of female influence in early life could not possibly escape the penetration of such an adept in human nature.

Let me not be misunderstood when I thus earnestly insist upon the necessity of female education. I do not mean that our daughters should be rendered capable of becoming teachers of classical literature or professors [59]of the sciences; but I would have them intimately acquainted with all useful branches of human knowledge. I would have them sufficiently versed in the learning of the ancients to be able to lay the foundation of a classical education in their sons; I would have them so skilled in those elegant arts which form the embellishment of life, that they may be able to improve to the utmost the developing tastes of their daughters; and, above all, I would have them deeply and thoroughly imbued with the knowledge of the Scriptures—the wisdom which cometh from above—the pure and holy and liberal principles of that religion whose founder was the Redeemer of a world.

The duty of a mother is indeed an arduous one; but its very difficulty renders it incapable of being transferred to other hands. To struggle with the untamed passions of human nature—those passions whose early development affords the most convincing proof that the heart of the natural man is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked;” to arouse the spirit of useful inquiry in the infant mind; to direct that inquiry to subjects which may purify the heart and elevate the intellect; to impart the first notions of a Deity, and afterwards to improve [60]those vague ideas into a love and reverence for the bountiful Creator and Ruler of the universe—these are tasks of which no father, however affectionate, is capable. They require woman’s opportunities, woman’s tact, woman’s delicacy; and, may I not add, the peculiar devotedness of woman’s affection?

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But these are not all. Were a mother’s cares confined to the mere physical welfare of her sons, too often in later life, when she saw the objects of her solicitude swallowed up in the ever yawning vortex of vice, would she be compelled to exclaim, with all the bitterness of disappointment,

It is not so—her duties are of a higher order. Beautiful as is the picture of woman’s tenderness which I have just presented to you, it was far exceeded in moral beauty by the exquisite description of an enlightened and pious mother, which not long ago was uttered within these very walls,⁠[1] by lips that seemed touched with “a live coal from the altar.” If it be true that the noblest being in the scale of creation is he who has the greatest number of duties to perform, then well may woman rejoice in the dignity of her station; but let her joy be mingled with “fear and trembling,” and let her so perform her allotted task that in the day when all must be summoned before the bar of God [62]she may be able to say, in the emphatic words of Scripture, “Behold, here am I, Lord, with the children which thou hast given me.”

If such are the arduous duties of a mother, what should be the measure of gratitude which she has a right to claim from her children? It is a debt like that we owe to Heaven—the day of our death finds it yet uncancelled.

To you, my young friends, I would address myself in the language of deep and earnest interest. You are now at that delightful period of life which is like spring among the seasons, redolent of beauty and freshness, and giving fair promise of the rich fruits of maturer years. Take heed the young blossoms be not blighted. Call to mind the countless advantages which have been bestowed on you; reflect upon the anxious solicitude of the fathers who wait to see you the objects of their pride as well as the sources of their happiness; remember the cares, the exertions, the almost heart-breaking anxiety of the mothers who have guided your infant feet to the threshold of the temple of knowledge, and then press forward “in the race set before you.” You are entering upon a noble career. The pure and elevated and holy duties which are peculiarly a woman’s [63]will soon claim your undivided attention. Let me pray you, therefore, so to discipline your hearts, so to cultivate your minds, so to purify your spirits now, during the unbroken leisure of youth, that the hour of trial may find you “with your lamps trimmed and burning.” You have begun well; go on, then, in the same course and remember that “of those to whom much is given, much will be required;” and that genius and knowledge, while they lay claim to the highest honors which man can bestow, also bear with them the highest responsibilities both to God and man. Science is now opening to you her richest store of honor and usefulness, and the prayers of parents and friends are following you when you are utterly unconscious of them. Pause, then—in the cool freshness of the morning of life, before you wax faint in the noonday heats—pause and form for yourselves the noble resolutions which should direct your future life. Look back through the shadowy vista of past years, and behold what are the foundations of the most lasting honors of men. Look forward with the eye of faith to the glories of the promised land; and while you weigh well the different results of moral conduct, take heed that ye “keep your hearts [64]with all diligence, for out of them are the issues of life.” Form your taste on the classics, your judgment on the sciences, and your principles on the book of all truth. Let the dawn of your being be hallowed by that pure devotion which is ever an “offering of a sweet smelling savor” to the bounteous giver of all good. Let the first-fruits of your intellect be laid before the altar of Him who breathed into your nostrils the breath of life, and with that breath a portion of His exalted spirit; and while your life furnishes the most striking illustration of the benefits of education, let it be your care so to persevere unto the end that it may be said of each in her own peculiar sphere, “Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.”

1831.

Some years since I met, in travelling, an intelligent gentleman who was interested in the cause of education. It is good to get away from your native latitude, even if the polestar is lower. I listened with great interest to the expression of his views, which were based upon surroundings unlike my own. He enlarged upon the advantage to the country which would result from a great national university, and he described it in glowing colors. “I would have it cost,” he said, “not tens of millions, but hundreds of millions.” “For both boys and girls,” I said, quietly. He paused a minute, and then said, as if to himself, “Well—I had not [66]thought of the girls.” And he had daughters only! Let us think of the girls.

WHOM SHALL WE HELP TO A COLLEGIATE EDUCATION?

Our colleges are at present adapted to what in England would be called the “upper middle class.” Can we extend their opportunities to a larger number? We cannot put every girl through a college course. In the more enlightened States elementary education is compulsory, and (theoretically) every child is taught to read and to write. To watch the public schools; to foster interest in the subject of education; to vote for the best persons, men or women, as guardians of these schools—these are our duties to all classes, but more especially to the very poor, to whom no other schools can open. We cannot in this age make the public school a college, although it would be well if every State, like Massachusetts, gave to the few who intend to enter college the necessary instruction in preparatory studies. To my question, “Whom shall we help to collegiate education?” I should answer:

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First. Do not attempt to put the daughters of the very poor through a college course. It is barely possible that a rare genius may be found even among the unworthy poor, but the chance is so small that we shall waste time in looking for it. We cannot hurry the processes of nature. We may by rearrangements and modifications change the conditions into which we are born, but we cannot escape them. The tree of slowest growth is the family tree; if you examine that on one of whose branches some great name hangs, you will find that it had no mushroom growth, that its rings can be counted by hundreds.

Second. I should say, also, Do not aid the sickly girl to enter college. Harm has already been done in this way. As in earlier days the feeble boy was trained for the pulpit, so there is to-day some tendency to send a sickly girl to college—partly because our girls’ colleges are governed by so good sanitary laws. I should dissuade the delicate girl from the attempt to take a regular college course. Let her study in the open air! Let her take a regular course of study in out-of-door practical sciences—botany, geology, mineralogy. Let her exchange the crochet-needle for the needle of the surveyor’s [68]compass. The study of nature must be study with nature; if it requires one hour with books, this may be followed by two hours spent in hunting an insect in green fields, or in gathering shells from sea-washed rocks.

I should suppose that a summer science school for girls would be a good institution. Let a number of students club together, and establishing themselves in a healthy and unfashionable place, study its natural history. Such education would be fragmentary, but a little of science is as valuable for development as a little of the classics, or a little of mathematics; and the theory of to-day is, “Taste, even if you cannot drink deeply.”

Knowing well-born, well-bred, and healthy young girls who are prepared to enter college, and whose means are not quite adequate, let us help them. But the hand should not go to the pocket without some direction from the head. I say let us help them, for I deplore the rash impulse to take up one bright girl and carry her through a college course by other means than those of her parents or relatives. We take her from the very struggle which she needs for her growth. She learns to expect to be held up, and she [69]ceases to stand upright. I believe a girl loses her nicety in morals who looks around to see who is coming to her rescue! She owes, without a thought of payment.

Do not aid by founding prizes. You then add an artificial struggle to that which is healthy and invigorating. If possible, aid by giving manual labor, but let it be such as shall be educating. When we talk of manual labor for girls, we seem always to mean household duties. A college student can often make herself useful by copying for professors, or by tutoring slow pupils, as well as by less pleasing domestic work. I think young girls at colleges where land is allotted to them for cultivation might raise and sell flowers and seeds. Form for any young girl a habit of earning money, and you give her a lifelong advantage. I consider it one of my duties to the young women who come into my department to encourage a respect for remunerative occupation. Why should girls be brought up with an idea that paid labor is ignoble?

If you cannot give to a good girl a chance to work her way through college, give money into her hands. Do not help her by buying her books, by paying her bills, or by bestowing unsuitable costume. Let her learn the [70]value of money. Most girls would prefer a loan, and the very carefulness to repay a loan would be a check to unnecessary expense. But as some very sensible girls are timid about a loan, I should say, “Give,” but give just the amount sufficient to bridge over the difficult place; do not make the journey ruinously easy. Our Vassar girls receive aid from a fund left by the founder of the college. Many of them return it as soon as they are able, for the use of the coming classes. It is small, and but few can receive it in one year. I would increase the number who can receive, rather than the amount to each student.

This direct aid given to certain students by individuals is good, but it is limited to exceptional cases. We reverse the order of nature. We are careful of the single life, we are careless of the type.

HOW SHALL WE MAKE THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN STILL HIGHER?

I never look at a group of teachers such as are employed in the colleges for girls but I am reminded of the expression of St. Ambrose: “The noble army of martyrs.” [71]The work of a teacher should be such as does not kill, for the value of human life is quite as great in the case of the teacher as in that of the student.

The pleasant smile with which a young teacher greets her class as she enters upon her duties should become more serene, more inspiring at middle life. But how can it be? I find that the number of students to one teacher is usually fifty! The amount of work that teachers do is enormous. There seems to be no “getting through.” They work five or six hours a day, and then take to their rooms the written examinations and problems for their evening recreation. Besides, a good teacher does infinitely higher work outside of tutorial hours. I have sometimes looked at the variety of work done for some young girl—the careful watching over her health, the good counsel given in morals, the patient endurance with loose mental habits—and I have said to myself, “How little that parent knows the enormous return which he gets for his moneyed investment!”

We are constantly told that too many women become teachers. Yes; but the number would not be too great if fewer students were put into the hands of one [72]teacher. A teacher should not cease to be a student; she cannot, with safety; she should have time for new acquisitions. I would not say, give time by lengthening vacations; but I would say, give time by lessening the number of students. A young girl needs the companionship in her classes of a few, but the teacher should know each pupil individually. According to my own idea, the proper number for good class work is ten; but when I asked a professor of Cornell how many he thought best for class and professor, he said, “Four.” Given a small class and a teacher of any magnetism, and there need be no required attendance.

A large class requires much routine work to enable it to move without friction, and to some persons the precision of military drill is the poetry of motion. I mourn over any loss of individuality.

We should increase the number of teachers by lessening the number of students to each, and diminish the number by retiring the old and worn-out. In New York State a judge is retired at seventy, but a professor in a college may have a life tenure. The retired teacher should be pensioned. It is a great wrong to students to retain the incompetent teacher who would gladly rest; [73]it is base and cruel to turn off the old teacher penniless. I have known a woman whom every one respected and whose pupils loved her, to retire, after forty years of labor in one school, without even the small purse and small speech usually proffered to the cast-off clergyman. And this in Massachusetts.

Our colleges are too expensive for the class which most needs them. We ought to reach the large middle class. We do not. From the great City of New York there are usually ten students in Vassar College; and as many from New York are at Vassar as at any other college. If we take out of New York life those for whom Europe is the college, those for whom the workshop is the university, those for whom society is the universe, we still have an enormous residuum of young women who should be studying. For these our colleges are too expensive. The cost of a girl’s education is much greater than that of a boy. Why should it be so? Why should not girls club together, board themselves in a wholesome and inexpensive way, obtain some light employment which will add to their means, and dress for almost nothing? I touch the subject of expense in dress with a sinking heart, for I know that [74]no party is with me; I stand almost alone. We need organized missionary work on the subject. Young women say, “It is our duty to look pretty;” and one would suppose, from the attention paid to it, that it was the highest duty. In the very homes whose walls are unadorned with pictures and whose book-shelves contain no standard works, the wardrobe is defended on æsthetic grounds. I have visited in the houses of English noblemen whose daughters would be shocked at the expensiveness of the college and school costumes of the daughters of our ordinary mechanics. This is a question of taste only. But what shall we say of that family in which the personal decoration continues to be costly after financial reverse has come to its head?

I hope the time will come when colleges will be able to give up the pomps and parades of public days. Why should the conferring of degrees at commencement be heralded by noisy music? Is the college commencement a necessary evil? Girls need no stimulus to work. The commencement ceremonies are in the thoughts of an ambitious girl from the time she enters college until she graduates. The “part” at commencement haunts her; the college degree, [75]she feels, is sure; but for the sake of the loved ones at home she hopes and works and prays for what she considers the “honor.” Is it a healthy influence?

There can be no other motive for great gatherings at colleges than that of indirect advertising. The guests who come to the college see nothing of its methods of working; they see the college building and its inmates in full dress; they know nothing of the unremitting, hard, conscientious study which is done behind the scenes.

When we have done all that we can to lessen the expense inside the walls of the college—when those of us who have longed for college education, and to whom it has been denied for want of means, contribute our small aids—but little has been done towards bringing the colleges within the reach of the large middle class which needs them.

What our colleges need is endowment. But I would not have it take the shape of buildings. Buildings should come as they are called for, and be adapted to the call. Our colleges should not be monuments to the dead, but workshops for the living. There is no beauty in unfitness. There stands on Calton Hill, in Edinburgh, a temple which would delight the heart of an old Greek by [76]its architectural beauty. It is the astronomical observatory, and every classic ornament hides the height of the stars from the observer.

Thirty years ago I heard Professor Henry say that what he had needed was a simple office, and the Government had put him into the Smithsonian Institute. There is a story of a distinguished chemist, who, when a visitor asked to be shown his laboratory, turned to the servant and said, “John, bring in the laboratory,” and it was brought in on a waiter. I know two buildings for educational purposes which are exactly adapted to the demand of the hour. Both were built by women. The first is the Woman’s Laboratory in Boston, where every cent has been spent for science and the investigations of science. The second is the building of the School of Philosophy at Concord. It is a plain one-story building; its outward decoration the vine which creeps up its unpainted sides; its only music the song of birds. It shelters the summer philosophers; its lookout from the numerous windows is inspiring, its ventilation is excellent.

What our colleges need is such endowment as shall bring them within the reach of the large middle class. The amount of [77]money given to girls’ colleges is pitiably small. The endowment of all the girls’ colleges put together does not come up to that of Harvard alone. Why are not our colleges endowed? Because our people do not quite believe in that kind of education for boys; in the case of girls there is positive disbelief; the tone of the Press is against it.

A New York editor once said to me, “The highest duty of a woman is to be ornamental in the parlor.” He forgot that the majority of women have no parlors. I take up at random newspaper scraps, and I read:

“Last year twelve persons in the United States gave an aggregate of $3,000,000 to foreign missions.”

“Mr. S—— gives $25,000 for charitable, benevolent, and educational purposes in this country.”

These scraps do not unfairly represent the ratio of interest felt for foreign missions and home schools; very rarely is anything given directly for the education of girls. It would be well if something of the missionary’s spirit and the revivalist’s zeal came into our staid and decorous methods of dealing with educational subjects. To my view, the admission of women to school suffrage in Massachusetts [78]is a very great gain to the cause of education. Perhaps it is larger to me because I am far off, thus inverting the law of optics; for I hear it spoken of as small gain in Massachusetts. But it is eventually the gain of all that we ask for women; it is the beginning, and the best beginning. All that women ask for is the enlightenment of our present rulers; the foreign-born boy takes a lesson indirectly from the women who as school committee visit the school. Massachusetts was better prepared for school suffrage than New York can be for a long time. The women’s clubs had led the way. The community had become accustomed to hearing from women, had learned to value the opinions of women; the suffrage movement had reached the ears of women; the temperance movement had gone to their hearts; women had already become the leading orators; it was comparatively a little thing to drop a ballot into a box. When all the women of the land are roused to an interest in the public schools, the “hundreds of millions” for women’s colleges, or for men’s colleges, or for both together, will not be wanting.

In my morning journal stand five solid columns of advertisements of girls’ schools. “It is fit,” says Mr. Samuel Pepys, speaking of some new gown bought for his wife, “that the poor wretch should have something wherewith to content her.” But it would seem that some hundreds of New York wives refuse to content themselves with these manifold educational concessions of the Pepysian spirit. For beside the journal lies a petition, very fully signed, a large proportion of names being those of women, which reads:

“We, the undersigned, residents of New York City and neighborhood, beg leave to present our respectful petition: That in view of the present state of public opinion, both here and in other countries, touching the justice and expediency of admitting women to the same educational advantages as men, a state of opinion especially evidenced by the recent action of the English universities of Cambridge and London, and in view of the influential position of Columbia College as among the oldest and [80]most richly endowed educational institutions in the United States, and pre-eminently representing the intellectual interests of the city of New York, you will be pleased to consider how best to extend, with as little delay as possible, to such properly qualified women as may desire it, the many and great benefits of education in Columbia College, by admitting them to lectures and examinations.”

To many sober and conscientious persons, both men and women, this demand sounds absurd, needless, improper, and dangerous. But do these objectors remember that every appeal for a better female education seemed, in its day, equally preposterous? It is hardly three centuries since Mademoiselle Françoise de Saintonge was hooted through the streets of her native village for proposing so disreputable a plan as the establishment of schools for girls in France, and her anxious father called in four learned doctors to determine whether this mad idea was not due to her possession by devils. The doctors pronounced her in her right mind, but her pious fellow-citizens stopped the spread of immoral ideas by the conclusive argument of insults levelled at the teacher and stones addressed to the pupils. The progress of the next century and a half is recorded in Dean Swift’s observation that men constantly asked each other whether it was [81]prudent to choose a wife who had good natural parts, some sense of wit and humor, a little knowledge of history, the capacity to relish travels or moral and entertaining discourse, and to discern the more obvious beauties of poetry. The general verdict, he says, was against such attainments in women, because their tendency was to make wives pretentious and conceited, and not duly subject to their husbands.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, translating Epictetus at nineteen, and sending her work to her kind friend, the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, apologizes at length for attempting a task universally pronounced unfit for a woman, and certain to draw down censure upon her (excusing herself, however, by citing the opinions of Erasmus, in the Latin!). Nearly fifty years afterwards, in advising her daughter concerning the education of a bright little namesake, she entreats that free scope may be accorded the child’s capacity, for the sake of the pure delight of learning and of her future happiness. But she adds the warning that, to insure a satisfactory marriage, the young girl’s wit and acquirements must be as carefully concealed as a deformity from a world which suspected or despised a [82]learned woman. So strong, almost to our day, has been this half-conscious contempt of the feminine mentality, that even Charles Lamb, that gentle and charitable soul, could speak of “L.E.L.” with an unmanly sneer, and declare that a female poet, or female author of any kind, invited disrespect.

It is but ninety years since an Englishwoman, the famous Mary Wollstonecroft, published the first serious demand for the higher education of Englishwomen. Her public found the book immodest, irreligious, anarchic. Issued to-day, it would appear a harmless plea, a trifle heavy and conservative, perhaps, for the thorough cultivation of the female mind, urged on social, moral, and religious grounds, and protesting against the sentimentalism of Rousseau and the now forgotten Dr. Gregory. Mrs. Hannah More’s dull novel of “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife,” issued in 1808, contained, perhaps, the first argument in fiction that a ninny is not necessarily the ideal wife, or a knowledge of the Latin grammar incompatible with a turn for house-keeping.

It was no scoffer, but the sweet-spirited Fénelon, who taught that contact with learning would be almost as fatal to womanly delicacy as contact with vice. To [83]Voltaire’s love of epigram might be pardoned his saying that “Ideas are like beards; women and young men have none.” But Lessing was serious when he declared that “The woman who thinks is like the man who puts on rouge, ridiculous.” And even Niebuhr, the large-minded, believed that he should not have educated a girl well, for he should have made her know too much.

It was the first care of the Pilgrim Fathers to establish schools. Girls were allowed to attend these, two hours a day. But afterwards the system was remodelled in a spirit of wide liberality, and girls were suffered all day—in the summer. When women teachers came to be employed, they were required to “teach the English language correctly and the rudiments of arithmetic.” In 1826, after a discussion of three years, the city fathers of Boston resolved to establish a high-school for girls on the model of its admirable high-school for boys. But such an army of young women battered the gates of that educational heaven with storms of prayers that, after a trial of eighteen mouths, the dismayed corporation decided—to enlarge the building and multiply teachers? No, but to close the school altogether.

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We smile at Monsieur de Saintonge and the sages of Boston. The two hundred and fifty advertisements refute the ancient prejudices. The innumerable names of women who have conquered success in literature, science, art; as great organizers, administrators, educators, refute them. The very discussion of the hour puts them to silence, for it declares that the question is no longer whether women are worth educating, but what education is worth most to them. The point of view is changed because the social conditions are changed.

If the cultivated judgment of ages held the female understanding to be inferior, doubtless it was inferior. Without incentives, means, or opportunities for growth, the mind of woman did not grow. And these helps were denied her, not by any mean desire of man to defraud her, not by any divine limitation of her needs, but because her time had not come. Just as war and slavery have been inevitable conditions and natural agents of human progress, so has the subjection of woman. In a rude society man was her necessary protector, she his helpless dependent. Some sort of marriage utilized the capacity, such as it was, of every woman, because every man [85]needed a household of cheap servitors. If he fought to protect his property in wives and concubines, they cancelled the debt by labor. Ignorance was their normal and necessary estate. So long as the exercise of brute force remained the chief satisfaction of man, so long was woman insignificant. As advancing civilization has required them, the feminine qualities have answered, with growing adequacy, to the requirement. But of necessity the traditions of the time of man’s legitimate supremacy lived on, and still survive in the general if vague notion that something external, mechanical, eleemosynary, must be done continually for woman; whereas the modern spirit, which has been so long struggling into recognition, maintains that little of permanent value can be done for woman which is not done by woman. Growth is from within.

In his attitude of guardian, man—as, in the progress of time, he has felt the need of a companion and ally rather than of a servant and toy—has gradually released to woman the freedom of certain tracts of knowledge, finding his own account in this concession. And if he has not hitherto been ready to endow her with the whole fair domain, neither has she been free to occupy [86]it. Ever since the Old Testament matrons ground the corn between stones, and sewed the skins their husbands brought home, and baked, and brewed, and made wine, and taught their slaves, and tended their sick, and reared their children, and adorned themselves to find favor in the sight of their lords, have generations of women found their first untroubled rest in the grave. But now machinery does half their work at half the cost, while organization still further relieves them from drudgery. Moreover, the great increase of wealth following on the arts of peace, fosters a growing class of unemployed and luxurious women, free to use the means of the higher education which their higher needs demand.

How, then, shall we make the most of that great indeterminate factor of the new civilization—the feminine intelligence? It would seem self-evident that those studies which have taken their place in the higher education of man, because philosophy and experience found in them the surest and readiest means of symmetrical mental development, must be equally valuable to woman. If the languages, mathematics, modern science, logic, metaphysics, psychology, best train the faculties of observation, [87]comparison, reflection; if they give flexibility and strength to the mind, and mould it to be always progressive, always acquiring more knowledge by thoughtful experience—ought not their salutary discipline, as administered in college, to be extended to girls?

It is answered, first, that girls, being different, do not need the same training as boys; second, that they already have it; third, that they could not endure it. But whether likeness or difference predominates can never be known until like training develop the one or emphasize the other. “As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt and trundle hoops together,” wrote Sydney Smith, “they are precisely alike. If you catch up one-half of these creatures and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning to explain so very simple a phenomenon.” Teachers of mixed classes agree that what profits the one profits the other. Seneca advocated the study of the Greek philosophy [88]for women, who, he said, needed it as a restraint upon their more impulsive temperament; and Plutarch urged upon his countrywomen the study of the Greek language and literature for a like reason. No less forcible is Doctor Johnson’s plea for this culture—that whatever withdraws us from the power of the senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of human beings.

The education of women is notoriously defective in the cultivation of definite ideas and the training of the judgment. Familiarity with scientific methods of study would dissipate their general and perilous confidence in “luck,” and in that impossible condition known as “about right.” Of directly practical value, also, would they find the capacity to deduce a conclusion from its premises, to estimate the worth of evidence, and understand the nature of proof. In every household affairs come daily to judgment requiring more or less scientific knowledge and a scientific habit of thought. An exact mental training would mitigate the evils and enlarge the best possibilities of woman’s existence.

This training both private schools and [89]high-schools must fall short of. Girls’ high-schools afford four years of what is projected as an eight years’ term, and girls are expected to be satisfied with what is merely a preparatory course for their brothers. Private schools necessarily reflect the indefinite and various demands of their patrons. Undue stress must be laid upon accomplishments, undue cramming must be encouraged, the period of study being far too short; the methods of teaching must be empirical rather than scientific, and the end aimed at temporary and unreal, having no relation to life beyond the examination and the class-room. Our best private schools are indeed admirable, but there is no recognized standard of worth, and the bad are as ten to one. Besides, in apparatus, cabinets, libraries, and professorships, the richest among them is poor, compared with the richer colleges. There is but so much first-rate teaching capacity existent at any one time, and the larger salaries, honors, and pleasant conditions of the colleges inevitably absorb the most of it. Agassiz thought that a young student would gain more from coming into contact for a single month with a man of really profound knowledge on any subject than he could from many months spent under the tutelage [90]of one who himself knows but very little more than he attempts to teach. But the majority of teachers fall into this latter classification. Even the women’s colleges, proposing the same curriculum as the men’s, deserving the most sincere respect for their aims and their successes, must long be hampered by the difficulty of securing the ablest teaching talent and appliances. The best high-class boys’ schools are conceded to be those which send the best equipped candidates to the universities. Were pupils from the girls’ schools admitted to the same examinations, there is no doubt that their standards and their methods of teaching would immediately advance.

If, however, the health of our girls is threatened by hard study, further opportunities of self-immolation must, of course, be denied them. The average health of boarding-schools is indeed low. From the graded and normal schools girls are withdrawn more frequently than boys by reason of physical inability. But the monstrousness of the prevailing curriculum, the high pressure, bad dressing, bad diet, external distractions, and the almost total want of healthful exercise among girls, explain this difference. The experience of twelve years [91]at Ann Arbor, of eight at Cornell, of nine at Boston University, of much longer terms at the Ohio colleges, and of the entire existence of Vassar and Smith, testifies to a constant improvement in the health of their girls, and a wholesome and preservative power in severe study, provided the conditions are right.

If it be true that the higher the civilization, the more nearly is companionship of the sexes reached, it seems a paradox that they should be united everywhere except in study, the most refining and least self-conscious of employments. Yet there is a general feeling that some vague danger, to manners if not to morals, lurks in the demand for the admission of girls to the precincts of the college. When the trustees of Cornell were debating the wisdom of accepting the munificent Sage endowment, with its conditions, their committee gathered the opinions of nearly all the educators of note in the country as to the feasibility and propriety of opening the classes to women. The speculations of the officers of the older colleges (inheriting their traditions from semi-monastic institutions, founded and administered by men vowed to celibacy, and dreading the influence of women,) almost [92]uniformly discouraged and disapproved such a step. The testimony of the colleges already open to both sexes, of academies and high-schools, in the hands of men touching life at more points, with equal uniformity encouraged it. In theory it was averred that the girls would become mannish, or the boys effeminate; that the standard of scholarship would be lowered in concession to feminine limitations; and that sentimentalism would be developed, with a consequent deterioration of morals. In practice it was proved that while the boys acquired finer manners, the girls advanced in truthfulness, sincerity, and courage; that the standard of scholarship was raised, and that the predicted period of sentimentalism, though everywhere overdue, had persistently failed to appear. Cornell took the forward step, and President White adds the great weight of his own approval to the side of the innovators.

By some subtle process of reasoning, quite inscrutable to the ordinary mind, it is maintained, however, that though co-education may do for the bucolical regions of Michigan and Cornell universities, the metropolis, as represented by Columbia College, cannot with propriety extend her lectures [93]and examinations to girls. But what, then, shall be thought of Cambridge? For, after all, the experience of the great English university offers the best precedent, since the demand upon her was almost identical with that made to-day upon Columbia. It is, perhaps, twenty-five years since the English advocates of the higher education of women began to feel that their educational advantages could never equal those of men, until not only the subjects taught should be the same, but the teachers of equal and equally acknowledged ability. In ten years this feeling organized itself into the opening to them of the Cambridge local examinations, which are simply for standing. A little later the famous Girton College was founded, its object being “to hold in relation to girls’ schools and to home teaching a position analogous to that occupied by the universities toward the public schools for boys,” and “to obtain for the students of the college admission to the examinations for degrees of the University of Cambridge, and generally to place the college in connection with that University.” It was understood that the immediate instruction should be given daily by the professors, lecturers, and fellows of the University and its colleges.

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The new college went into operation with six students, in a hired building, in October, 1869. It now possesses a building of its own, and even in its first decade recorded the admission of eighty-six candidates, of whom nineteen were graduated with honors, according to the university standard, and eleven passed the examinations which qualify for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. These examinations, however, presented only an honor standard, and it was not until February, 1881, that the liberal action of the Senate placed women students of Cambridge, for all practical purposes, upon an equal footing with men. In 1875 Newnham Hall was erected for the accommodation of women students coming to Cambridge to avail themselves of the new opportunities. Newnham Hostel was presently added, and the two, constituting Newnham College, to-day overflow with students.

Following on the Cambridge success came the opening, at Oxford, of Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College, the free admission of women to the examinations of the University of London, and the granting of liberal opportunities on the part of Edinburgh, Dublin, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Durham, and St. Andrews. The University of London [95]is a young institution, unhampered by the prejudices and restrictions of its elders. “Hence it has been able to take a more decisive step than any other university in the direction of improvement in women’s education. For several years it tried the experiment of a special examination for women, with a curriculum framed in supposed deference to special feminine needs. But though many women availed themselves of this examination, it soon became evident that the successes they won were all on the old lines—in classics, science, mathematics, literature; in fact, the subjects which belong to an ordinary course of liberal education, and not in any of the special studies which were presumed to be appropriate for them as women. Moreover, it was manifest that a distinctly feminine examination was not what women wanted; for the public believed that it was inferior, or specially lenient, whereas female students desired to have their knowledge and intellectual cultivation tested by the ordinary and recognized standards, and asked for no special tenderness or favor. Accordingly, after much discussion, it was determined, in 1877, to obtain from the crown a new charter, admitting women on exactly the same footing as men to all the [96]degrees in all the faculties—arts, laws, medicine, science, music—and permitting them to receive the same honors and degrees. An increasing number of women has each year come up for matriculation and graduation, and some of the successes they have attained have been remarkable. The gold medal in anatomy—one of the chief and most coveted prizes in the medical profession—was won last year by a woman. Another came out first in mental and moral philosophy, and the proportion of women who pass well in the examinations is much greater than that of the men. This, however, is easily accounted for by the fact that at present the numbers are much smaller, and are necessarily made up of students of exceptional ability and enterprise; whereas the crowds of men, of course, include a large number of the rank and file of those who are treading the usual path towards professional life, and who have no special aptitude or enthusiasm for study.” This is the testimony of J. G. Fitch, Esquire, inspector of schools, member of the senate of London University, and one of the most distinguished educators of England.

Professor Jackson, of Trinity College, Cambridge, writes:

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“Having taken classes of ladies through the Ethics and part of the Metaphysics of Aristotle, and the ‘Republic,’ the ‘Phaedo,’ and the ‘Philetus’ of Plato, I can speak in the very highest terms of their industry and capacity. I put their attention to a severe test, as I sometimes lectured for an hour and a half, and even for an hour and three-quarters without interruption. As a proof of their capacity, I may mention that at the end of the Academic year, 1877-78, I examined some of my lady pupils in the Aristotle papers, which I was giving to the Trinity men who graduated in 1879, and the Plato papers which I was giving to the Trinity men who graduated in 1880, and that one of the ladies was third in Aristotle and first in Plato. In the following year another lady was second in my Aristotle paper. In both cases these ladies had among their competitors some of the very best men of the time.”

J. P. Postgate, Esquire, M.A., Fellow of Trinity, and Professor of University College, London, writes:

“The performances of women in examinations at Cambridge and elsewhere I look upon as wholly encouraging. The standard by which I should test them is an absolute one, and judged by that they show work which is intrinsically good and worth doing. I have been surprised at the numbers of first-class and other distinctions that they have gained. Both at Cambridge and at University College the women not unfrequently beat the men in the lists. Last year two-thirds of those examined in Comparative Philology were women; and a woman was easily first in the paper, beating another very good candidate, a man who has since taken a scholarship at Oxford, I believe. She did extremely well in the paper, and has been working at the subject since, and showing a very remarkable linguistic aptitude not merely in ancient, but in [98]modern languages. The third candidate was a young lady who has since brought out a Hebrew grammar, which I believe is very well done. She also distinguished herself in Greek and Latin.”

From the other colleges come equally favorable reports of feminine application, persistency, and accomplishment. Here, then, are some hundreds of women doing the same tasks as men, submitting to the same tests as men, showing at least as good work as men, without injury to their health. For no complaint of physical inability comes from any source; while at Girton the pleasant apartment thoughtfully provided as a hospital for the delicate women who were to break down under the strain of constant brain-work has never been used except as a room for examinations. Equally satisfactory is the testimony to the moral safety of the new system, not the slightest suggestion of impropriety having arisen.

From the beginning the most distinguished men in England, both lay and clerical, have been most friendly to this movement for the liberation of learning. At a recent distribution of prizes at the Oxford higher local examination, the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed his great gratification that opportunities for the highest instruction [99]were so rapidly opening to young women.

The fortunate candidates for honors or recognition long since began to reap substantial benefits from having received the Cambridge certificate, not only in being preferred as teachers or governesses, but by commanding better salaries. The standard of girls’ schools has been perceptibly advanced, and the character of pupils elevated, “sentimentalism and conceit being lessened, and habits of order, economy of time, and interest in study developed, as well as a new sympathy with those who are engaged in the graver business of life.”

So much for conservative England. What is asked of New York? To quote from the admirable address of Dr. Storrs—“that a great, distinguished, opulent institution of learning in the midst of this metropolitan city, which has received, undoubtedly, large endowments from the direct gift of women, or under their influence, should give them the opportunity to pursue the higher branches of study, under the care of the teachers already assembled.” Columbia cannot justify their exclusion on the ground that Vassar and Wellesley and Smith colleges invite them. Boys are intrusted to her care when [100]Harvard and Yale exist, because New York parents prefer that home influences should accompany college training; and girls do not need these influences less. Besides, the expense of girls’ resident-colleges is very great, compared with those of a richly endowed institution like Columbia. It is true that the charter of that venerable college did not contemplate the admission of girls. But it did contemplate the enlightenment and refinement of the community. And it would hardly be too much to say that, in the changed conditions of our time, if it were necessary to discriminate between the sexes in the matter of education, the cause of morality and progress would be better served by giving the higher opportunities to women.

The question of co-education is not even to be considered—at most, it is one of method only. If it be found convenient that boys and girls should listen to lectures in common, as at Cambridge, it is difficult to see any sound objection to that economy of teaching. If it be found convenient to instruct them separately, again, as at Cambridge, criticism is equally silenced. The President of Columbia, who heartily favors the admission of girls, says that the college can provide for them separate entrances, [101]cloak-rooms, and class-rooms. It is not apprehended that a crowd will assail the doors. It is not proposed to compel the many, who have no desire for better opportunities, but only to invite the few, who now stand vainly waiting.

The spirit of justice, of course, would rest woman’s claim to the highest educational privileges on the human right to unrestricted growth, for soul is above sex. But here, as everywhere, the way of justice is the way of expediency. Enlightenment is not in proportion to the amount of knowledge on deposit at any one time; it is in proportion to its diffusion. Because of the devotion of the average American to business, the mother and the school-mistress mould the early and sensitive years of the child’s life to what shape they must. To the fitness of the average mother and school-mistress for this high task, what wasted powers, what mean ideals, what mistaken views of life bear witness! Raise her schools, and the whole standard of woman’s existence is raised; for the higher the few can reach, the higher the many rise. It is her perverted love of beauty which makes woman extravagant. It is her uncultivated desire for the higher satisfactions of art which makes our homes museums of upholstery. [102]It is her unenlightened loyalty to the spirit of good which bids her cling to old abuses that were once uses, to harmful superstitions that were once faiths, and which to-day constitutes her the most conspicuous bar to progress. Tocqueville says that he ascribes the treachery of some of the first leaders in the reform movements in France to the unhappy influence of wives and sisters on husbands and brothers. The claims of the past and their own private interests were more to them than the welfare of the struggling millions. Their perspective was in fault. But when a thorough culture and a trained judgment are added to the “superlunary virtues” of women, these accusations must fall.

In the time of Cato the Censor women raised an insurrection to obtain the privilege of riding in chariots, of decking themselves with rings, and of wearing purple robes. To-day they demand the outlook of a broader humanity, the jewel of high culture, the royalty of knowledge.

1883.

American college education in the quarter-century since the Civil War has undergone more numerous and more fundamental changes than befell it in a hundred years before. These changes have not occurred unnoticed. A multitude of journals and associations are busy every year discussing the results of the experiments in teaching which go on with increasing daring and fruitfulness in nearly all our colleges and schools. There still exists a wide divergence of opinion among the directors of men’s colleges in regard to a variety of important questions: the conditions and proper age for entrance; the length of the course of study; the elective system, both of government and instruction; the requirements for the bachelor’s and master’s degrees; the stress to be laid on graduate work—these, and many sequents of these, touching the [104]physical, social, and religious life of the young men of the land, are undergoing sharp discussion.

The advanced education of young women is exposed to all the uncertainties which beset the education of men, but it has perplexities of its own in addition. After fifty years of argument and twenty-five of varied and costly experiment, it might be easy to suppose that we were still in chaos, almost as far from knowing the best way to train a woman as we were at the beginning. No educational convention meets without a session devoted to the difficulties in “the higher education of women,” so important has the subject become, and so hard is it to satisfy in any one system the variety of its needs. Yet chaos may be thought more chaotic than it really is. In the din of discussion it would not be strange if the fair degree of concord already reached should sometimes be missed. We are certainly still far from having found the one best method of college training for girls. Some of us hope we may never find it, believing that in diversity, no less than in unity, there is strength. But already three tolerably clear, consistent, and accredited types of education appear, which it will be the purpose [105]of this paper to explain. The nature of each, with its special strengths and weaknesses, will be set forth, in no spirit of partisanship, but in the belief that a cool understanding of what is doing at present among fifty thousand college girls may make us wiser and more patient in our future growth. What, then, are the three types, and how have they arisen?

When to a few daring minds the conviction came that education was a right of personality rather than of sex, and when there was added to this growing sentiment the pressing demand for educated women as teachers and as leaders in philanthropy, the simplest means of equipping women with the needful preparation was found in the existing schools and colleges. Scattered all over the country were colleges for men, young for the most part and small, and greatly lacking anything like a proper endowment. In nearly every State west of the Alleghanies, “Universities” had been founded by the voluntary tax of the whole population. Connected with all the more powerful religious denominations were schools and colleges which called upon their adherents for gifts and students. These democratic institutions had the vigor of [106]youth, and were ambitious and struggling. “Why,” asked the practical men of affairs who controlled them, “should not our daughters go on with our sons from the public schools to the university which we are sacrificing to equip and maintain? Why should we duplicate the enormously expensive appliances of education, when our existing colleges would be bettered by more students? By far the large majority of our boys and girls study together as children; they work together as men and women in all the important concerns of life; why should they be separated in the lecture-room for only the four years between eighteen and twenty-two, when that separation means the doubling of an equipment already too poor by half?”

It is not strange that with this and much more practical reasoning of a similar kind, co-education was established in some colleges at their beginning, in others after debate, and by a radical change in policy. When once the chivalrous desire was aroused to give girls as good an education as their brothers, Western men carried out the principle unflinchingly. From the kindergarten to the preparation for the doctorate of philosophy, educational opportunities are now [107]practically alike for men and women. The total number of colleges of arts and sciences empowered by law to give degrees, reporting to Washington in 1888, was three hundred and eighty-nine. Of these, two hundred and thirty-seven, or nearly two-thirds, were co-educational. Among them are all the State universities, and nearly all the colleges under the patronage of the Protestant sects.⁠[2]⁠

Hitherto I have spoken as if co-education were a Western movement; and in the West it certainly has had greater currency than elsewhere. But it originated, at least so far as concerns superior secondary training, in Massachusetts. Bradford Academy, chartered in 1804, is the oldest incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in 1836, three years after the foundation of co-educational Oberlin, and in the very year when Mount Holyoke was opened by Mary Lyon, in the large hope of doing for young women what Harvard had been founded to do for young men just two hundred years before. Ipswich [108]and Abbot Academies in Massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone. It has been the dominant sentiment in the East that boys and girls should be educated separately. The older, more generously endowed, more conservative seats of learning, inheriting the complications of the dormitory system, have remained closed to women. The requirements for the two sexes are thought to be different. Girls are to be trained for private, boys for public life. Let every opportunity be given, it is said, for developing accomplished, yes, even learned women; but let the process of acquiring knowledge take place under careful guardianship, among the refinements of home life, with graceful women, their instructors, as companions, and with suitable opportunities for social life. Much stress is laid upon assisting girl students to attain balanced characters, charming manners, and ambitions that are not unwomanly. A powerful moral, often a deeply religious earnestness, shaped the discussion, and finally laid the foundations of woman’s education in the East.

In the short period of the twenty years after the war the four women’s colleges which are the richest in endowments and [109]students of any in the world were founded and set in motion. These colleges—Vassar, opened in 1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1885—have received in gifts of every kind about $6,000,000, and are educating nearly two thousand students. For the whole country the Commissioner of Education reports two hundred and seven institutions for the superior instruction of women, with more than twenty-five thousand students. But these resources proved inadequate. There came an increasing demand, especially from teachers, for education of all sorts; more and more, too, for training in subjects of advanced research. For this, only the best equipped men’s universities were thought sufficient, and women began to resort to the great university centres of England and Germany. In an attempt to meet a demand of this sort the Harvard Annex began, twelve years ago, to provide a few women with instruction from members of the Harvard Faculty.

Where, in a great centre of education, for many years books have accumulated, and museums and laboratories have multiplied, where the prestige and associations of a venerable past have grown up, and cultivated surroundings assure a scholarly atmosphere; [110]in short, in the shadow of all that goes to make up the gracious influences of an old and honorable university, it was to be expected that earnest women would gather to seek a share in the enthusiasm for scholarship, and the opportunities for acquiring it, which their brothers had enjoyed for two hundred and fifty years.

These, then—co-education, the woman’s college, and the annex—are the three great types of college in which the long agitation in behalf of women’s education has thus far issued. Of course they are but types—that is, they do not always exist distinct and entire; but they are rather the central forms to which many varieties approximate. The characteristic features of each I must now describe, and, as I promised at the beginning, point out their inherent strengths and weaknesses; for each, while having much to recommend it, still bears in itself the defects of its qualities. To explain dangers as well as promises is the business of the critic, as contrasted with that of the advocate. To this business I now turn, and I may naturally have most in mind the University of Michigan, my own Alma Mater, Wellesley College, with whose government I have been connected for a dozen years, [111]and the Harvard Annex, whose neighbor I now am.

Co-education involves, as its name implies, the education of a company of young men, and women as a single body. To the two sexes alike are presented the same conditions of admission, of opportunities during the course, of requirements for the degrees, of guardianship, of discipline, of organization. The typical features are identical class-rooms, libraries, and laboratories, occupied at the same time, under the same instructors; and the same honors for like work. Ordinarily all the instructors are men, although in a few universities professorships are held by women. Usually no dormitories or boarding-houses are provided for either the young men or women, and no more surveillance is kept over the one than over the other. This feature, however, is not essential. At Cornell, Oberlin, and elsewhere, often out of local necessity, buildings have been provided where the young women may—in some instances, must—live together under the ordinary regulations of home life, with a lady in charge. But in most of the higher co-educational institutions the principle has from the first been assumed that students of both sexes [112]become sufficiently matured by eighteen years of home, school, and social life—especially under the ample opportunities for learning the uses of freedom which our social habits afford—safely to undertake a college course, and advantageously to order their daily lives. Of course all have a moral support in the advice and example of their teachers, and they are held to good intellectual work by the perpetual demand of the class-room, the laboratory, and the thesis.

The girl who goes to the University of Michigan to-day, just as when I entered there in 1872, finds her own boarding-place in one of the quiet homes of the pleasant little city whose interest centres in the two thousand five hundred students scattered within its borders. She makes the business arrangements for her winter’s fuel and its storage; she finds her washerwoman or her laundry; she arranges her own hours of exercise, of study, and of sleep; she chooses her own society, clubs, and church. The advice she gets comes from another girl student of sophomoric dignity who chances to be in the same house, or possibly from a still more advanced young woman whom she met on the journey, or sat near in church on her first Sunday. [113]Strong is the comradeship among these ambitious girls, who nurse one another in illness, admonish one another in health, and rival one another in study only less eagerly than they all rival the boys. In my time in college the little group of girls, suddenly introduced into the army of young men, felt that the fate of our sex hung upon proving that “lady Greek” involved the accents, and that women’s minds were particularly absorptive of the calculus and metaphysics. And still in those sections where, with growing experience, the anxieties about co-education have been allayed, a healthy and hearty relationship and honest rivalry between young men and women exist. It is a stimulating atmosphere, and develops in good stock a strength and independent balance which tell in after-life.

In estimating the worth of such a system as this, we may say at once that it does not meet every need of a woman’s nature. No system can—no system that has yet been devised. A woman is an object of attraction to men, and also in herself so delicately organized as to be fitted peculiarly for the graces and domesticities of life. The exercise of her special function of motherhood demands sheltered circumstances and refined [114]moral perceptions. But then, over and above all this, she is a human being—a person, that is, who has her own way in the world to make, and who will come to success or failure, in her home or outside it, according as her judgment is fortified, her observations and experiences are enlarged, her courage is rendered strong and calm, her moral estimates are trained to be accurate, broad, and swift. In a large tract of her character—is it the largest tract?—her own needs and those of the young man are identical. Both are rational persons, and the greater part of the young man’s education is addressed to his rational personality rather than to the peculiarities of his sex. Why, the defenders of co-education ask, may not the same principles apply to women? Why train a girl specifically to be a wife and mother, when no great need is felt for training a boy to be a husband and father? In education, as a public matter, the two sexes meet on common ground. The differences must be attended to privately.

At any rate, whatever may be thought of the relative importance of the two sides—the woman side and the human side—it will be generally agreed that the training of a young woman is apt to be peculiarly [115]weak in agencies for bringing home to her the importance of direct and rational action. The artificialities of society, the enfeebling indulgence extended to pretty silliness, the gallantry of men glad ever to accept the hard things and leave to her the easy—by these influences any comfortably placed and pleasing girl is pretty sure to be surrounded in her early teens. The co-educationists think it wholesome that in her later teens and early twenties she should be subjected to an impartial judgment, ready to estimate her without swerving, and tell her as freely when she is silly, ignorant, fussy, or indolent as her brother himself is told. Co-education, as a system, must minimize the different needs of men and women; it appeals to them and provides for them alike, and then allows the natural tastes and instincts of each scope for individuality. The strengths of this system, accordingly, are to be found in its tendency to promote independence of judgment, individuality of tastes, common-sense and foresight in self-guidance, disinclination to claim favor, interest in learning for its own sake; friendly, natural, unromantic, non-sentimental relations with men. The early fear that co-education would result in class-room romances has proved exaggerated. [116]These young women do marry; so do others; so do young men. Marriage is not in itself an evil, and many happy homes have been founded in the belief that long and quiet acquaintance in intellectual work, and intimate interests of the same deeper sort, form as solid a basis for a successful marriage as ball-room intercourse or a summer at Bar Harbor.

The weaknesses of this system are merely the converse of its strengths. It does not usually provide for what is distinctively feminine. Refining home influences and social oversight are largely lacking; and if they are wanting in the home from which the student comes, it must not be expected that she will show, on graduation, the graces of manner, the niceties of speech and dress, and the shy delicacy which has been encouraged in her more tenderly nurtured sister.

The woman’s college is organized under a different and far more complex conception. The chief business of the man’s college, whether girls are admitted to it or not, is to give instruction of the best available quality in as many subjects as possible; to furnish every needed appliance for the acquirement of knowledge and the encouragement [117]of special investigation. The woman’s college aims to do all this, but it aims, also, to make for its students a home within its own walls, and to develop other powers in them than the merely intellectual. At the outset this may seem a simple matter, but it quickly proves as complicated as life itself. When girls are gathered together by hundreds, isolated from the ordinary conditions of established communities, the college stands to them pre-eminently in loco parentis. It must provide resident physicians and trained nurses, to be ready in case of illness, and, to prevent illness, must direct exercise, sleep, hygiene, and sanitation, accepting the responsibility not only of the present health of its students, but also, in large degree, of their physical power in the future. It generally furnishes them means of social access to the best men and women of their neighborhood; it draws to them leaders in moral and social reforms, to give inspiration in high ideals and generous self-sacrifice, and it undertakes religious instruction, while seeking still to respect the varied faiths of its students. In short, the arrangements of the woman’s college, as conceived by founders, trustees, and faculty, have usually aimed with conscious directness [118]at building up character, inspiring to the service of others, cultivating manners, developing taste, and strengthening health, as well as providing the means of sound learning.

It may be said that a similar up-building of the personal life results from the training of every college that is worthy of the name; and fortunately it is impossible to enlarge knowledge without, to some extent, enlarging life. But the question is one of directness or indirectness of aim. The woman’s college puts this aim in the foreground side by side with the acquisition of knowledge. By setting its students apart in homogeneous companies, it seeks to cultivate common ideals. Of its teaching force, a large number are women who live with the students in the college buildings, sit with them at table, join in their festivities, and in numberless intimate ways share and guide the common life. Every student, no matter how large the college, has friendly access at any time to several members of the faculty, quite apart from her relations with them in the class-room. In appointing these women to the faculty no board of trustees would consider it sufficient that a candidate was an accomplished specialist. She must be [119]this, but she should be also a lady of unobjectionable manners and influential character; she should have amiability and a discreet temper, for she is to be a guiding force in a complex community, continually in the presence of her students, an officer of administration and government no less than of instruction. Harvard and Johns Hopkins can ask their pupils to attend the lectures of a great scholar, however brusque his bearing or unbrushed his hair. They will not question their geniuses too sharply, and will trust their students to look out for their own proprieties of dress, manners, and speech. But neither Wellesley nor any other woman’s college could find a place in its faculty for a woman Sophocles or Sylvester. Learning alone is not enough for women.

Not only in the appointment of its teaching body, but in all its appliances the separate college aims at a rounded refinement, at cultivating a sense of beauty, at imparting simple tastes and generous sympathies. To effect this, pictures are hung on the walls, statues and flowers decorate the rooms, concerts bring music to the magnified home, and parties and receptions are paid for out of the college purse. The influence of hundreds of mentally eager girls upon [120]the characters of one another, when they live for four years in the closest daily companionship, is most interesting to see. I have watched the ennobling process go on for many years among Wellesley students, and I am confident that no more healthy, generous, democratic, beauty-loving, serviceable society of people exists than the girls’ college community affords. That choicest product of modern civilization, the American girl, is here in all her diverse colors. She comes from more than a dozen religious denominations and from every political party; from nearly every State and Territory in the Union, and from the foreign lands into which English and American missionaries, merchants, or soldiers have penetrated.⁠[3] The farmer’s daughter from the Western prairies is beside the child whose father owns half a dozen mill towns of New England. The pride of a Southern senator’s home rooms with an anxious girl who must borrow all the money for her college course because her father’s life was given for the Union. Side by side in the boats, on the tennis-grounds, at the table, arm in arm [121]on the long walks, debating in the societies, vigorous together in the gymnasium and the library, girls of every grade gather the rich experiences which will tincture their future toil, and make the world perpetually seem an interesting and friendly place. They here learn to “see great things large, and little things small.”

This detailed explanation of the peculiarities of the girls’ college renders unnecessary any long discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. According to the point of view of the critic these peculiarities themselves will be counted means of invigoration or of enfeeblement. Living so close to one another as girls here do, the sympathetic and altruistic virtues acquire great prominence. Petty selfishness retreats or becomes extinct. An earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cultivated, and the break between college life and the life from which the student comes is reduced to a minimum.

It is this very fact which is often alleged as the chief objection to the girls’ college. It is said that its students never escape from themselves and their domestic standard, that they do not readily acquire a scientific spirit, and become individual in taste and conduct. Is it desirable that they should? [122]That I shall not undertake to decide. I have merely tried to explain the kinds of human work which the different types of higher training-schools are best fitted to effect for women. Whether the one or the other kind of work needs most to be done is a question of social ethics which the future must answer. I have set forth a type, perhaps, in the endeavor after clearness, exaggerating a little its outlines, and contrasting it more sharply with its two neighbor types than individual cases would justify. There are colleges for women which closely approximate in aim and method the colleges for men. No doubt those which move furthest in the directions I have indicated are capable of modification. But I believe what I have said gives a substantially true account of an actually existing type—a type powerful in stirring the enthusiasm of those who are submitted to it, subtle in its penetrating influences over them, and effective in winning the confidence of a multitude of parents who would never send their daughters to colleges of a different type.

The third type is the “annex,” a recent and interesting experiment in the education of girls, whose future it is yet difficult to predict. Only a few cases exist, and as the [123]Harvard Annex is the most conspicuous, by reason of its dozen years of age and nearly two hundred students, I shall describe it as the typical example. In the Harvard Annex groups of young women undertake courses of study in classes whose instruction is furnished entirely by members of the Harvard Faculty. No college officer is obliged to give this instruction, and the Annex staff of teachers is, therefore, liable to considerable variation from year to year. Though the usual four classes appear in its curriculum, the large majority of its students devote themselves to special subjects. A wealthy girl turns from fashionable society to pursue a single course in history or economics; a hard-worked teacher draws inspiration during a few afternoons each week from a famous Greek or Latin professor; a woman who has been long familiar with French literature explores with a learned specialist some single period in the history of the language. Because the opportunities for advanced and detached study are so tempting, many ladies living in the neighborhood of the Annex enter one or more of its courses. There are consequently among its students women much older than the average of those who attend the colleges.

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The business arrangements are taken charge of by a committee of ladies and gentlemen, who provide class-rooms, suggest boarding-places, secure the instructors, solicit the interest of the public—in short, manage all the details of an independent institution; for the noteworthy feature of its relation to its powerful neighbor is this: that the two, while actively friendly, have no official or organic tie whatever. In the same city young men and young women of collegiate rank are studying the same subjects under the same instructors; but there are two colleges, not one. No detail in the management of Harvard College is changed by the presence in Cambridge of the Harvard Annex. If the corporation of Harvard should assume the financial responsibility, supervise the government, and give the girl-graduates degrees, making no other changes whatever, the Annex would then become a school of the university, about as distinct from Harvard College as the medical, law, or divinity schools. The students of the medical school do not attend the same lectures or frequent the same buildings as the college undergraduates. The immediate governing boards of college and medical school are separate. But here comparison fails, for [125]the students of the professional schools may elect courses in the college and make use of all its resources. This the young women cannot do. They have only the rights of all Cambridge ladies to attend the many public lectures and readings of the University.

The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a woman’s college, with no degrees, no dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made up from volunteers of another college. The Fay House, where offices, lecture and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in the heart of old Cambridge, but at a little distance from the college buildings. This is the centre of the social and literary life of the students. Here they gather their friends at afternoon teas; here the various clubs which have sprung up, as numbers have increased, hold their meetings and give their entertainments. The students lodge in all parts of Cambridge and the neighboring towns, and are directly responsible for their conduct only to themselves. The ladies of the management are lavish in time and care to make the girls’ lives happy and wholesome; the secretary is always at hand to give advice; but the personal life of the students is as [126]separate and independent as in the typical co-educational college.

It is impossible to estimate either favorably or adversely the permanent worth of an undertaking still in its infancy. Manifestly, the opportunities for the very highest training are here superb, if they happen to exist at all. In this, however, is the incalculable feature of the system. The Annex lives by favor, not by right, and it is impossible to predict what the extent of favor may at any time be. A girl hears that an admirable course of lectures has been given on a topic in which she is greatly interested. She arranges to join the Annex and enter the course, but learns in the summer vacation that through pressure of other work, the professor will be unable to teach in the Annex the following year. The fact that favor rules, and not rights, peculiarly hampers scientific and laboratory courses, and for its literary work obliges the Annex largely to depend on its own library. Yet when all these weaknesses are confessed—and by none are they confessed more frankly than by the wise and devoted managers of the Annex themselves—it should be said that hitherto they have not practically hindered the formation of a spirit of scholarship, eager, free and [127]sane to an extraordinary degree. The Annex girl succeeds in remaining a private and unobserved gentlewoman, while still, in certain directions, pushing her studies to an advanced point seldom reached elsewhere.

A plan in some respects superficially analogous to the American annex has been in operation for many years at the English, and more recently at some of the Scotch universities, where a hall or college for women uses many of the resources of the university. But this plan is so complicated with the peculiar organization of English university life that it cannot usefully be discussed here. In the few colleges in this country where, very recently, the annex experiment is being tried, its methods vary markedly.

Barnard College in New York is an annex of Columbia only in a sense, for not all her instruction is given by Columbia’s teaching force, though Columbia will confer degrees upon her graduates. The new woman’s college at Cleveland sustains temporarily the same relations to Adelbert College, though to a still greater extent she provides independent instruction.

In both Barnard and Cleveland women are engaged in instruction and in government. [128]Indeed, the new annexes which have arisen in the last three years seem to promise independent colleges for women in the immediate neighborhood of, and in close relationship with, older and better equipped universities for men, whose resources they can, to some extent, use, whose standards they can apply, whose tests they can meet. When they possess a fixed staff of teachers they are not, of course, liable to the instabilities which at present beset the Harvard Annex. So far, however, as these teachers belong to the annex, and are not drawn from the neighboring university, the annex is assimilated to the type of the ordinary woman’s college, and loses its distinctive merits. If the connection between it and the university should ever become so close that it had the same right to the professors as the university itself, it would become a question whether the barriers between the men’s and the women’s lecture-rooms could be economically maintained.

The preceding survey has shown how in co-education a woman’s study is carried on inside a men’s college, in the women’s college outside it, in the annex beside it. Each of these situations has its advantage. But will the community be content to accept [129]this; permanently to forego the counter advantages, and even after it fully realizes the powers and limitations of the different types, firmly to maintain them in their distinctive vigor? Present indications render this improbable. Already co-educational colleges incline to more careful leadership for their girls. The separate colleges, with growing wealth, are learning to value intrepidity, and are carrying their operations close up to the lands of the Ph.D. The annex swings in its middle air, sometimes inclining to the one side, sometimes to the other. And outside them all, the great body of men’s colleges continually find it harder to maintain their isolation, and extend one privilege after another to the seeking sex.

The result of all these diversities is the most instructive body of experiment that the world has seen for determining the best ways of bringing woman to her powers. While the public mind is so uncertain, so liable to panic, and so doubtful whether, after all, it is not better for a girl to be a goose, the many methods of education assist one another mightily in their united warfare against ignorance, selfish privileges, and antiquated ideals. It is well that for a good while to come woman’s higher education [130]should be all things to all mothers, if by any means it may save girls. Those who are hardy enough may continue to mingle their girls with men; while a parent who would be shocked that her daughter should do anything so ambiguous as to enter a men’s college may be persuaded to send her to a girls’. Those who find it easier to honor an old university than the eager life of a young college, may be tempted into an annex. The important thing is that the adherents of these differing types should not fall into jealousy, and belittle the value of those who are performing a work which they themselves cannot do so well. To understand one another kindly is the business of the hour—to understand and to wait.

Boxford, Mass, 1889.

The old Greek legend representing the muse of history as of divine lineage, and the eldest of her sisters, rested on a philosophic as well as a poetic basis. With dim perceptions of the nature of a future life, men early sought it in the record of their earthly deeds, hoping thus to win immortality in spite of death.

History thus ministered to the individual, and in the dim twilight of the race sang the wrath of Peleus’s son and the fortunes of the exiled men of Troy. As the importance of the individual became merged in that of the nation, it was the jealousies of rival States and foreign conquests that employed her pen. Nations, like individuals, were of special interest to themselves, and their achievements [132]in war and politics were recorded by admiring and servile chroniclers. Men saw in history only an attempt to rescue from oblivion national and individual deeds worthy of emulation or demanding universal condemnation. Until our own period, therefore, the muse of history has, with few exceptions, been an annalist looking from a lower window. Men and events have passed before her, but she has not cared whence they came or whither they went. But as modern chemistry is the outgrowth of mediæval alchemy, and astronomy of the astrology of a still more ancient day, so modern history has been developed from these chronicles of a remote past. Clio no longer seeks alone to win enduring fame for her favored heroes, but she depicts the past, that men may live more wisely in the present. As the muse of comparative history, she goes to the mountain-top and makes the whole world hers by right of eminent domain.

Several influences have contributed to bring about this change, but the most important have come through the French Revolution. Those great intellectual movements that culminated in the overthrow of absolutism in France and the creation of new political ideals throughout Western Europe [133]gave to history a different conception of the relative position of potentates and peoples. The subject gained new dignity as it abandoned the homage previously paid to civil, military, and ecclesiastical rulers, and concerned itself more with the characteristics of nations. Voltaire anticipated Macaulay and Green by one hundred years when he wrote, “I wish to write a history, not of wars, but of society.... I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.” History has thus during the present century gained a new theme in the portrayal of those democratic tendencies of which its new purpose has been the result.

But not only did the French Revolution create a truer historical perspective within the different nations—it also widened the horizon of each. The armies of Napoleon and the allies, that swept over Europe from the Spanish peninsula to the heart of Russia, broke down the artificial barriers that had separated nation from nation. Provincialism was diminished, national interest was less self-centred, States for the first time became aware of the existence of institutions after which their own might profitably be modelled. The political, social, industrial, [134]and educational condition of nations became of more vital interest than the hours of dining and retiring of capricious sovereigns. The study of comparative history was born of the same destructive forces that overthrew the oldest and apparently most stable institutions of Europe.

While history has thus been indebted to political revolutions for new themes, it has also been indebted to changing intellectual standards for new methods of work. The early age had been one of credulity and adulation. But men came in time to see that “fables begin to be current in one generation, are established in the second, become respectable in the third, while in the fourth temples are raised in their honor.” Scepticism and speculative thought followed in turn, and these have been superseded by a demand for the study of facts, not for their own sake, but to determine the laws that govern them. Science and scientific methods have become controlling intellectual forces, and history, like every other subject, has come under this influence. As a result of this awakening, Voltaire in France, Niebuhr in Germany, and Arnold in England, gave the impulse to that form of historical writing which has made history pre-eminent in [135]the world of letters in our own century. It has not been forgotten that there were immortal names in Greece and Rome, and that the eighteenth century produced a Gibbon; but these are exceptions that show that the true historical spirit characterized the individual, not the age.

If history has thus been affected by the credulity of one period and the indiscriminating love of facts of another, now by speculative tendencies and again by scientific movements, is it not a chameleon unworthy of consideration among more stable subjects? The important place it has won for itself in the curricula of all our colleges and secondary schools must at this time be a sufficient answer to the question; but it is fitting to ask what are the dangers that at present beset the path of students and teachers of history.

The first danger is the failure to recognize the individuality of history. This is often due to a desire to acknowledge the indebtedness of history to science. Schools announce the employment in history of “laboratory methods,” publishers advertise text-books in history constructed on the laboratory plan, and a recent catalogue of a large and important university proclaims that no text-book [136]in history is used, but that one is being prepared by the professor and advanced students in the historical laboratory of the university. Historical laboratory, indeed! Is the old word library to become obsolete and referred in the next edition of Webster to the heading laboratory? Must our study-table give place to a more scientific article of furniture yet to be produced in some other historico-scientific workshop? The true student and teacher of history is ever foremost to confess his obligation to scientific methods, but he will never recognize in history a subdivision of physics or biology, or look forward to an historical Newton who will reduce the events of the past to mathematical formulæ or physical laws.

A second phase of the same danger assumes the form of a desire to make history the vehicle for our philosophical conceptions of the past, present, and future. This desire to know and to teach the philosophy of history is a reaction against that spirit which saw in the events of the past only an enumeration of facts, a skeleton without flesh and blood. This reaction has been inevitable, and in a sense is not to be regretted; but it has brought its own attending dangers. A class of teachers, by no means small in [137]numbers or restricted in influence, whose knowledge of history and of philosophy is based on Hegel’s Philosophy of History, supplemented by a course of lectures at the Concord School, is to-day instructing history classes in our high-schools that the ultimate aim of the world is the mind’s consciousness of its rational freedom. For the type of mind that has first grasped the idea that it is not all of history to teach Barnes’s text-books memoriter from cover to cover, the transition is easy to the Hegelian conception that in Greece the mind was introspective; among the Romans the mind was resolved into generality, which makes mind itself universal; while in Christianity the mind first withdraws into pure introspection in communion with the universal; then follows the reconciliation, which is the introspective mind transforming the world. (Diesterweg’s summary.) A disciple of this school, whose sublime indifference to the fact that the Norman Conquest came in the eleventh rather than in the first or the nineteenth century, had been the despair of his instructor, when asked what material he would select for a class in history in the grammar grades, replied promptly, “I would teach them the philosophy of history.” It [138]is this spirit that teaches in our academies and high-schools the philosophical, psychological and physiological aspects of the French Revolution, that discusses history, as has been said of Mr. Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, “in the past potential subjunctive,” and all this without any sound, accurate knowledge of the facts on which the conclusions of others have been based.

A third danger comes in the adaptation of the fatalistic “whatever is, is right,” into the fashionable “whatever is European, is right.” This, again, is but the expression of a reaction against a too fervid patriotism which would have nothing of the effete monarchies of the Old World; but special evils follow in its train. The college that employs laboratory methods and teaches the philosophy of history to freshmen glories in “original investigation” and the German seminary. He is of all men most deceived who dreams that the German Seminarium can be built upon anything but a German university basis. Doubtless the word seminary is often used with us to characterize a form of instruction affording special freedom of intercourse between professor and student, and in this sense its use is not objectionable, [139]but the typical German seminary in an American college is an anomaly.

A fourth danger comes from another adaptation of the old saying into “whatever is new, is right.” This, again, is a reaction against certain misconceptions of the subject-matter of history. Since Mr. Green wrote his Short History of the English People, in protest against the previous exclusive consideration of military and political affairs, it has become the fashion to decry every history that does not treat of “the people.” The protest has been well made; but there is danger that the teacher who welcomes emancipation from the drudgery that compelled the memorization of all the campaigns of the Revolutionary War will forget that

There is a temptation to overlook the fact that we are conscious of our political constitution, as of our physical body, only when it is out of order, and that the study of preventive politics, like preventive medicine, has a proper place. The fault of all early writers and teachers of history was not in the consideration, but in the exclusive consideration [140]of military and political affairs. He errs in like degree who teaches that these phases of a nation’s life can be ignored. He is wise who sees them in their proper relation to other phenomena of society.

These four dangers, the loss of the individuality of history in, first, the scientific tendencies, and, second, the philosophical aspirations of the times, the attempted transplanting of foreign methods to American soil, and the recent ignoring of certain vital portions of history, all grow out of the proneness in the human mind to seize half of a truth and remain content with it. We have learned in medicine, but, alas! not yet in pedagogy, the fallacy of the argument that if a little of a thing is good, more must be better. Each of these methods of teaching history is half right, but wholly wrong. A scientific method in its study we must have; but to treat history as an exact science is to degrade it from its own exalted position, since all imitation is demeaning. The relation of cause and effect every beginner in history must be able to see; but to introduce Hegel, Schlegel, or Lotze into the class-room of the average academy or college is to caricature both history and philosophy. The German seminary is good—in Germany; and [141]the adaptation of many of its methods may be good for us, in so far as it teaches us to subordinate rhetoric to fact and to consult original documents. The history of peoples we must have, but of peoples concerned in war and politics as well as in literature and industries.

If we are to avoid these and similar dangers, we must clearly understand, first, the general principles that should control all teaching of history, and, second, the line of demarcation between history as taught in the secondary school, in the normal school, and in the college and university.

History, wherever taught, should ever keep in mind, as regards the choice of subject-matter, the practical end. Perhaps we come late in life to realize that history, like virtue, is its own reward, as we learn to appreciate Mr. Lowell’s definition of a university as a place where nothing useful can be learned. But the practical end must come first and lead up to it. This end must be the creation of an intelligent understanding of American history, American institutions, American ideals. This does not imply that we are to teach American history exclusively—far from it; but our national history is to be at once the beginning and [142]the climax of all historical study. The necessity for this is the greater since we have but recently come to recognize the importance of historical study. Not until the Civil War had made possible a true national life did we dare to bid defiance to sectional and local jealousies and study our own past. On the other hand, the study of European institutions was neglected, for the Monroe Doctrine took root educationally as well as politically. When the centennial anniversary of our independence lessened our prejudices and removed somewhat our insular character, a new interest came in the study of European history and politics. We have thus come to realize that both American and European history must be taught, in view of the large number of foreigners annually coming to our shores, the early age at which many American boys and girls leave school, and the grave political problems yet unsettled and demanding the serious attention of every mature mind. Bishop Potter, in his recent Phi Beta Kappa address on “The Scholar and the State,” has shown the necessity of keeping ever present, even in the higher paths of learning, the plain truths that history teaches, if we are not to be wrecked on the shoals where [143]other nations have gone down. From strange localities the encouragement comes to begin and to continue this work. On Rivington Street, in the slums of New York, in a district from which comes one-tenth of the criminals of New York City, a college settlement has been established, and in connection with it a free library. The librarian reports that the first demand of every boy is for a life of George Washington, and that when the biographies have been exhausted, the second choice is for a history that has “something about George Washington.” If a recent magazine article on “Why an Irish boy should make a good American citizen” could teach, not only our friends from the Emerald Isle, but immigrants from other nations as well, their duties as citizens of the Republic, and if Bishop Potter’s address could be placed in the hands of every native American, the teaching of history would receive greater encouragement than has yet been vouchsafed to it.

If the practical end should be our objective point, three general principles should lead us to it.

The first step in beginning any historical work is to give a bird’s-eye view of the whole subject. What Bunker Hill Monument [144]is to Boston, the Brooklyn Bridge to New York, and the Eiffel Tower to Paris, that the general outline is in all historical study. One school of writers has often of late urged the theory that historical study should begin with local history, that the town and county should come first, the nation last. But this is much like attempting to draw a map of the United States by locating New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Key West, and then drawing the coast-lines. It is the historical Cuvier, not the novice, who can take an isolated portion of local history and reconstruct from it an historical whole.

A second general principle is that in history, as well as in pure and applied science, the student must become familiar with the terminology employed. The words state, constitution, law, pure democracy, representative government must be as clearly understood as straight line and angle, base and salt. In this way much local history and many political principles can be, indeed must be, taught by way of illustration. “Taxation without representation” is a glittering generality; but it has meaning when the principles of taxation are understood, and when it is evident why we never pay a direct [145]tax without complaining, and why some persons can look with equanimity upon the payment—by others—of an indirect tax of 20 per cent. on foreign books.

A third general aim should be to train the student to do independent work. This can be done by putting into the hands of the students, even of high-school boys and girls, a certain amount of original material. The amount as well as the kind must vary with the nature of the school and the time given to the subject; but to pupils of even the lowest grade the Constitution of the United States must be something more than “what is in the back part of the book;” the Declaration of Independence must teach him why the colonies revolted, and his Iliad must show him the condition of society in the Homeric age. The best working outfit for every grade is a text-book containing a brief outline of facts, supplemented by original documents, selected with reference to the needs of special classes. Publishers are ever ready to meet such demands, and have already given us the Old South Leaflets, The National Library, English History from Contemporaneous Writers, and Documents Illustrating American History, while the instructor can find compensation for one of his trials [146]in the large number of old English chronicles made available in the Bohn edition. Some persons indeed have cried out in alarm against the free use of original documents, even in our colleges, as an introduction of “university methods.” Such criticism, however, is due to a failure to understand what is meant by university methods, and to a lack of discrimination between independent work, which should be done everywhere, and original work, which properly belongs to the university.

These general principles we believe should govern all historical teaching; but there are certain specific principles that must be applied to the teaching of history in special grades. We may lay down the general proposition that in the secondary schools the distinctive aim should be the accumulation of historical knowledge, in the normal school the classification of such knowledge, in the college independent investigation, and in the university original investigation. This expresses, however, only the leading characteristic in each form of instruction, since in every grade must be found to a certain extent the distinguishing features of every other grade.

It has been said that in the secondary [147]schools the distinctive aim should be the accumulation of historical knowledge. A German university professor was once asked the first step in historical study. His brief reply was “Lesen.” “And the second?” “Viel lesen.” “And the third?” “Sehr viel lesen.” The principle applies to work in the secondary schools. But here the instructor must be like the skilful engineer who constructs a tunnel by beginning at opposite sides of the mountain, knowing that the two ends of the tunnel will ultimately meet without the variation of a hair’s breadth. At one end of the historical tunnel must be the reading, the much reading, the very much reading; at the other end, careful, systematic, dry—if you please—tedious drill. There must be the much reading, or the student early forms the pernicious habit of generalizing from one particular. There must be careful guidance to furnish a receptacle for this knowledge, or it is like water poured upon the ground. There must be general information, or the student becomes narrow; but general information alone is a jelly-fish, brilliant in coloring, but formless and without use. In the secondary schools everything is grist that comes to the historical mill, but it is here also that the student [148]must learn that “there is no northwest passage to the intellectual world.”

The special province of the normal school is to emphasize the classification of historical knowledge. To the average normal-school student a fact is a fact. His knowledge is a Chinese painting, an historical crazy-quilt. He never sees that in history, as well as in mathematics, 2+2=4. He has often much general information, especially concerning his own country, but it is an information and a zeal for information that leads him to ask “How many Presidents have died in office?” “Who was President for a single day?” “Who fired the first gun in the Civil War?” “Who was the youngest soldier in the Revolution?” and to affirm, in the same breath, “the reconciliation of the contradiction between its inner aim and life with its actual being is the process of the history of a nation. The collision between the ideal of a nation and the actual produces the process of history.” The normal-school student must first of all be taught historical perspective, and, second, that there is no historical multiplication-table or system of mechanical memorizing either of details or of general principles that can be applied to the solution of historical problems.

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If the secondary school is to encourage the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the normal school the classification of historical facts, it is the college and the university that is to be the investigator of historical subjects. It is said that every lawyer owes a debt of gratitude to his profession. So the obligation rests upon every special teacher and student of history to contribute something to the sum of historical knowledge. This contribution cannot be made during a college course, but the college student must be an investigator for himself, the tools must be put into his hands, and he must learn their use. Like the high-school boy, he must be an omnivorous reader, but he must also be a critical reader. Hume and Freeman are to be to him not merely names of historians, but of historians representing different schools of thought. Macaulay’s every school-boy knows that taxation without representation was the cause of the Revolution, but the college student must know, if the school-boy does not, why but one of the twenty-seven complaints in the Declaration of Independence refers to the subject of taxation. The college student must know that Magna Charta is the corner-stone of English liberty, not because Bishop Stubbs [150]and all the historians say so, but because he has himself studied that great instrument and the subsequent development of constitutional liberty. The college student must learn the condition of the Church before the Reformation, not from Fisher, Hausser, and Alzog, but from Chaucer, Dante, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus. He must know that history is not a simple substance, but a compound. He must be able to see that into it enter, as component parts, politics, economics, statistics, finance, sociology, jurisprudence, archæology, philanthropy, comparative philology—every subject that concerns itself with the life of the individual or the nation. He must be familiar not only with the process of analysis, but also with that of composition.

What results are we justified in thinking should follow our best efforts in secondary school and college?

In the first place, history can do more than any other subject except science to break down the barrier that too often rises between the instructor’s desk and the class-room seats. No subject except science lends itself so readily to co-operative methods of work. Professor and student, teacher and pupil are alike seekers after truth, and the [151]library door swings outward for all. If, as has been said, aristocratic politics broke down with the French Revolution, and aristocratic economics are fast disappearing in the light of the economic discussions of the day, so aristocratic pedagogics must yield to that spirit which makes students of both instructor and instructed.

Again, history is pre-eminently adapted to teach the fact that knowledge is singular in fact as well as in form. To the ordinary mind Greek is Greek, geology is geology, and history is history. Cæsar’s “first impressions” of Britain, and Cicero’s arraignment of Verres, which must have exhausted all the editions of the Roman Herald and Evening Post, are to the average school-boy not history, politics, and literature, but Latin. The average college student turns for his history, not to his Cæsar, but to Mommsen’s chapter on the “Subjugation of the West,” which in its narrative portion is but a paraphrase of the Commentaries. Nothing is more difficult to overcome than this belief that each branch of knowledge is isolated. History, more than any other subject except literature, must show how every study in the school or college curriculum dovetails into every other study, making from seemingly [152]isolated parts a compact whole. History must show that, while it itself works by scientific methods, science works by the historical method; that mathematics and music are first cousins; that art and philosophy are related; and that the study of Sanscrit roots has made “the whole world akin.”

These are but suggestions of what history can and should do. History does not wish to supersede any or all other subjects in the academic or the college curriculum. It asks only a fair place and reasonable treatment.

1890.

There is no science of education. There are many theories, and there is an art of education. Every true teacher is and must be an artist, working on the most plastic of materials, and changing her methods as the state of the material gives notice to her practised mental eye that change is needed. It is this fact which makes experience of so much value in the profession, and this which makes the problem of normal schools so difficult. It is only the quickened insight of a mind originally fit for the work which can determine the mental state to be dealt with at the moment, and can then select, out of all the means at command, the very question or the very explanation that will enable the child’s mind to take hold of the truth to be conveyed. The maker of Damascus blades cannot tell you how he knows that the steel has had exactly the required amount of heat. He sees the color and he [154]knows; that is all there is of it. If you do not see it, he cannot help you, any more than the laundress can tell you how hot the iron must be for the material she is going to put it on. She holds it to her face, or touches it with wet finger, and decides. The cook puts her hand into the oven and says that we must wait a little longer before setting the bread in, and she is right. The problem of real teaching is of this order, only more complicated because of the material; for steel and cloth and dough can be depended on to answer a certain quantity of heat with a certain reaction, while the human mind has left to it freedom in its way of working, and no two human minds are alike. There are no unfailing rules which can be given to the incipient teacher, and no patent methods will avail. All depends upon the circumstances at the very time when she has to act, and those her instructors cannot by any possibility know. The only rule without exception that occurs to me is that she should never punish when she is angry; but this would be a very slender stock to go into business with, and the imparting of it would hardly justify a legislature in building normal schools.

The truth is that education, having no [155]principles of its own, must use those furnished by the sciences, especially by psychology. But the conclusions and the generalizations of psychology, so far as it is an empirical science, are drawn from observations on the adult mind, and therefore are not always to be depended on in our dealings with the child mind, which is, as Professor Royce says, “possessed by an incapacity of a relatively diseased sort;” and he adds, “the wise teacher is a sort of physician who is to help the child towards getting that kind of health which we call maturity.” He says wisely that the mind of the child is a “chaos of unreason.” It is the part of the teacher to create from this chaos a world which shall no longer be without form and void, and to brood over the face of the deep. She is not without assistance from within, for the spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters and waits to answer to her call. But does she know how to call? That is the question, the answer to which determines whether she be a teacher or not. The problem in the education of every child’s mind is like the problem with the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman, only that we have with common children more means of reading it than Dr. Howe [156]had of reaching hers, and so of putting it into communication with the rest of the race. He says that the first efforts at her instruction were like letting down lines one after another into the bottom of the deep sea in which her silent soul lay, and waiting the moment when she should seize hold of them and be drawn up into the light. In teaching we are continually doing this. We let down our lines and wait. We have more lines than Dr. Howe had with her; that is all the difference; and when we see the light flash along the face, we know, as he did, that we have reached the intelligence we were feeling for. Perhaps the best training any ambitious girl could have for teaching would be found, not in a normal school, but for one year in an asylum for idiots, one year at Hampton, and one in a school for the blind. She would learn in such work as this how to reach the intelligence which lies waiting. The greatest teachers, as a rule, have not been those who have had most special training for their profession. They have been the broadest men and women who have learned of the doctrine by doing the work, and who have found their greatest pleasure and reward in the doing of it.

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When it is distinctly seen that education is not a science, but an art, it is perceived why so many so-called normal schools fail of their purpose, and why the educational journals which appear from time to time, only to return to the silence from which they arose, are for the most part such very useless reading. Of course the education of the child is obtained only in a limited sense in school. She is educated in general by every circumstance of her life from the time when her eyes first open to the light. But in this article the word “education” will be understood as meaning only that portion of the “conscious direction by mature persons of the growth and development of the young” which takes place in school. The girl gains information at home or in travelling, very varied information, but all this comes to her not in definite order, not in definite relation, and with the important and the unimportant thrown together haphazard. She cannot be said to be educated unless her mind has been worked upon in a systematic way, the proper food for its natural growth given to it at the suitable time, its activity rendered orderly, and itself supplied with categories under which it can arrange any information afterwards acquired. [158]As it is now, the so-called education of many American girls has produced a mere hodge-podge of bits of information, of no use to themselves, and, what is of more consequence, of no use to any one else. She would be thought a strange woman who should administer medicine to her children merely because it happened to turn up in some house where she was passing the summer, or because it had been left over in her own hands, the remnant of what had been years ago administered to herself. Yet this is exactly what the mother does who arranges lessons in German for her children only because a German lady happens to be spending her summer in the same hotel, or who insists upon a teacher’s giving her child the same subjects, in the same way, as those used by her own teachers when she was a girl. The old medicine may have been good in the old time, and the old physician may have been quite right in prescribing it for a headache, but it does not follow therefore that we are to keep the bottle on the table and give it whenever there is a headache in the family. It is only the skilled physician who can say whether it is the medicine proper at another time or for another patient. Many people [159]seem to imagine that it is only the number of beats in a minute that the physician considers when he feels the pulse. If it were so, the science and art of medicine would be reduced to the level of a trade. What the physician learns from the pulse is the very thing which his experience has rendered him, and not you, capable of learning, and the thing which you can acquire only as he did. To him the pulse speaks, and he knows what its quality and its quantity mean. Then the temperature and the respiration also speak, and combining all the information that these and many other signs give him, he prescribes intelligently for the trouble which is the cause of all. This is medical insight, and, as Professor Royce says, “The teacher who can make out what the child’s actual state of mind is, has developed the true sort of psychological insight.”

To develop this is to grow into a teacher. “The habit of merely judging minds as good or evil, without observing what state it is, what mental coloring, what inner live process, that makes them good or evil,” is the habit of the unprofessional mind; and, as Professor Royce goes on to say, “this habit is so ingrained in most of [160]us that it is always hard to learn to substitute diagnosis for mere estimation, and a loving study of the process for mere external liking or disliking of the person.” A teacher might be defined as one to whom everything that children do or say has become a sign. She thereby loses much careless amusement which other people find in their sayings and doings, and she shrinks, with a protest which she has often no right to express, from many an account of the subjects which are being taught to them, or the ways in which they have responded to some way of managing. She stands in the realm of realities, not in that of phenomena, and gains thereby much more pain than pleasure; for, like a surgeon continually surrounded by children with badly set or deformed limbs, she at present must live in the company of minds that have, as a rule, been under the treatment of ignorant and unthinking practitioners. Human vivisection is by no means rare in many an American home, where most of the time is spent in exploiting growing children for the amusement or interest of the parents or visitors. The child is interesting to its parents, and many a question is asked of it “just to see what it will say.” [161]Thus many a subject is suggested before the mind is in the proper state for its reception, growth according to the divine plan is thwarted, reflection confused, and what should have been a pleasure to the child becomes a pain.

Too much stress cannot be laid upon the necessity of harmony between the state of growth of the girl’s mind and the nature of the study in which she is engaged. Professor James calls attention to the fact that every instinct has its own time of ripening. When the speech instinct has ripened, and not before, the child begins to talk. Earlier, when the walking instinct has come to maturity and needed expression, he begins to try to walk. When the flying instinct is ripe, the little birds quit the nest. It makes all the difference in the world whether the girl takes up a subject at the time when her mind is in the proper state for it, and those mothers who will not allow her to learn to read till she is seven years old are wrong. The mind has by that time passed the stage at which it can do without disgust the work necessary to learn the perfectly arbitrary signs that express language, and passively protests against the unsuitable labor. Equally [162]wrong are those teachers who fancy that because two girls of widely different ages know about the same amount of French, they may be put into the same French class. The method of teaching must differ entirely with them, even though they should have the same lesson to learn from the same text-book. This fact is one reason why it is desirable to have the school so arranged that one teacher shall not be confined to one class, but shall have opportunity to act on minds of different ages. This tends to make better teachers through the varied interest which it promotes, and the wider outlook which it presents over the mind at different stages of growth, and we cannot have a good school without good teachers, no matter how many pupils we have. We must in some way keep our teachers fresh, or we lose the whole game. A London astronomer⁠[4] remarks, in the preface to his recent book, “Virtually, the observer himself constitutes the most important part of the telescope; it is useless having a glass of great capacity at one end of a tube and a man of small capacity at the other.” In teaching, [163]the teacher is the observer; the school, if properly organized, is the tube; the subjects taught, the glass; and the girl, the heavenly body to be learned about. The analogy is as perfect as any analogy can be between matter and spirit.

The true teacher does not need to be told of the vivid pleasure which shows itself on the girl’s face when a perception of relations between hitherto disconnected facts strikes across the mind, and when what has been so far troublesome and annoying chaos, at the right question suddenly slides into order and conformity to law. She does not need to be told, because that is the reward she is looking for, and if she have the power of the teacher, she can never fail of it. Professor James, in his Psychology, recognizes the great pleasure generated by a real conviction by characterizing conviction as a lofty emotion. To be able to create this lofty pleasure, and to repeat the process till the child herself seeks for it, is to be a teacher. But the teacher’s function is a higher one than that of simply creating pleasure, however high and however vivid; for to accomplish anything she must hold the attention of the pupil, and teach her how to bring back wandering attention; [164]and “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

It is just here that the school, as a factor in the little girl’s education, differentiates itself from the home, which should have prepared her for its training. Those schools which advertise themselves as like homes simply proclaim that they do not know what the function of either is. In the home the child is a part of a whole, held together by natural relation and affection; in the school the wholeness is constituted by human law acting on individuals who are in a great degree independent. In the home, tenderness and pity come in and often save the offender from the result of her action; in the school they can never do so. It is in the school first that she feels herself a responsible member of a community, where each one has the same rights as herself, and where the other members do not belong to her. She may defend the members of her own family, even though they do wrong, because they are hers, but in the school she first learns to judge action in and for itself as right or wrong, expedient or inexpedient, and this not alone for her, but for the [165]community of which she finds herself a component part. Then, too, the affairs of the home cannot be carried on with that regard for absolute punctuality which marks the business of any well-conducted school; to try to do so would destroy the comfort of the home, for its members would feel all the time as if about to start on a railroad journey, and that would certainly not be feeling at home. The school is an institution, in its every minutest detail arranged for the conscious direction of children, while the home must largely include in its purposes the comfort and rest of the adult members. The true home brings up the child as a member of a family, a natural relation, instructing her in the ways of civilized society, teaching her obedience and respect for her elders, reverence for authority, human and divine; the school receives her after this has been done, corrects her opinion of herself and her own people by putting her into relation with the members of other families, makes of her a responsible member of a community, holds her strictly to regularity and punctuality, gradually leads her to the thought of real individual responsibility by making her bear with strict impartiality the legitimate results of all her actions, [166]makes a steady demand upon her voluntary attention for periods of time suited to her age, gives her rest at proper times, but demands of her always that work shall he work, and play, play. Here she learns the difference between personal and impersonal authority, for the teacher during school hours, she cannot help dimly feeling, is not quite the same person that she is when she meets her elsewhere, while her mother is always her mother. Then, intellectually, she is stimulated by the company of others of her own age who are doing the same things that she is doing, and measuring herself by them, she gets her estimate of herself healthily corrected. Every day she comes into contact with older girls, the members of higher classes though under the same discipline, who seem to her very wise, and, if the school be a successful one, very good. This opens to her glimpses of fields lying far beyond her own outlook, to the full sight of which she hopes by patient continuance in well-doing to attain. As she goes on, she finds other children in classes below her, who seem to her very small, and who are puzzling over difficulties which she has surmounted, and who, if, as I have said before, the school be a successful one, find [167]more difficulty in self-control than she. Thus, in the daily and intertwined life of the whole school, she is living over again her past, and taking glimpses of the promised land of her own future, and all this, of incalculable value to her, could not be attained in her own home.

The managing a school so that it may be in this way a unit, an organic unit—the interweaving of all its parts by the teacher who holds it all in her consciousness—is one of the most important things which she has to do. In comparison with this, the selection of text-books is a very minor matter. One thing, however, is essential, and that is, that in this her assistants shall work intelligently with her. They must be of original character and have their own ways, for otherwise they would not be teachers at all, but they must be plastic enough to be moulded into some degree of conformity with the thought of the head teacher, and they must have the capacity for growth which will bring them finally to seize the principles underlying the whole fabric, after which they may safely be left entirely to their own devices, for then they will work in harmony with the school. Nothing is sadder than a school where no [168]two roads meet, where the girls go from one teacher, with a certain set of requirements, to another who makes entirely different demands, till all rules take on the appearance of arbitrariness and caprice, and nothing has any fixed value. No lesson could be worse than this for a girl, who is by nature—or shall I say by all her education—inclined to look upon law without any comprehension of its tremendous significance, and to regard her own whims and fancies as of equal value with law, because she is accustomed to see them so often yielded to through the fondness of her own people. Especially therefore in girls’ schools should this unity be insisted on, for girls stand in need of it much more than boys. The latter are sure to get levelling enough when they come into contact with the outside world, but the girl remains a sort of queen in her father’s house till she becomes queen in that of her husband, and she is, as a rule, sheltered from the rude contact with the demands of business and of civil law, which is the only thing to make any one realize their reality. We never can know that a thing is hard and pitiless in its unyielding till we strike against it. Almost as bad is the school that puts the little girl [169]in a class-room and keeps her for a whole year under the exclusive influence of one teacher. The child needs to come under differing influences, the more the better, if the underlying controlling principle be the same. The school must be composed of classes in sufficient number to cover the whole school life of the girl, and none of these classes should be too small; for the class must be used as a means of influence on each individual in it, both intellectually and morally. The differences of opinion among its different members, the different experiences of the little girls, the various points of view assumed as a result of these latter, and, above all, the errors that are made, afford to the skilful teacher the very best material with which to influence the young mind. Then these add to the zest with which she carries on the work, and therefore to her power. To teach a class is as much more inspiring than to teach a single pupil as to play first violin in an orchestra is more inspiring than to perform on the jew’s-harp. To manage a great school of the kind that I have hinted at is to conduct the orchestra.

Herbart says, “Instruction must be carried out, first, with energy, in order that [170]interest may be awakened; second, with breadth, in order that interest may be many-sided; and, lastly, with unity of purpose, in order that intelligence may not be distracted.” For all of these purposes the influence of the class on the individual mind may be said to be imperatively necessary. It is required of the teacher, and not unreasonably, since she must be an artist, that she shall continually do the impossible—that is, that while she gives her whole attention to the one child who is reciting, she shall at the same moment be fully conscious not only of the presence, but also of the state of mind, of every other child in the class. She must always work on the class, not on the individual member, and must hold with a strong hand the whole of it, not only as to order, but also as to intellectual activity, under the power of her dominating authority. Authority is a stumbling-block to the American, and perhaps to all those who live in our time, but all the more is it needed. It is quite impossible to teach, in any sense of the term, a mind which refuses to be dominated to a certain degree by the teacher; and here comes again the impossible into the teacher’s experience, for while she dominates, she [171]must also leave free. That the impossible is done, however, can never be doubted by any one who has watched the work of a recitation in skilful hands, and has had enough insight to feel the delicate reciprocal play which goes on all through it between teacher and class. Indeed there must always be “a function of authority which exceeds any given stage of the disciple’s experience.” So the teacher must always be in two places at once—her own mental place and that of her little pupil; this demands the greatest sensitiveness of nature on her part, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that a woman, other things being equal—and often where they are not perfectly equal—may be a far better teacher than a man.

While emphasizing the absolute need of unity in the school, we must not forget the equal need of a great degree of fluidity or plasticity. For we are dealing with human minds, and not with material whose laws are definitely known, and, as has been said before, with material of which no two samples are alike, and all sorts of adjustments are continually to be made. Especially is this the case in a private school for girls, where the pupils come to us from all sorts of teaching and worse than no teaching, [172]and do not all enter classes at the same time. Here again the impossible demands to be done, for neither unity nor plasticity must be sacrificed; the two must be harmonized; and as the conditions are continually changing, so a constant adjustment becomes necessary. All parts must continually work together for one common end. It is of no more significance to the teacher of a school like this that a thing is impossible than it was to Beethoven that the human voice was not capable of singing the chorus in his Ninth Symphony. He had nothing to do with the capacity of the human voice; the music demanded that the chorus should be written so, and so accordingly he wrote it. A changeless school programme cannot be arranged for an entire year, nor indeed for any considerable part of a year. Continual changes become necessary, but these must be made with the least possible effect upon the pupils, and the least possible disturbance of the regular routine of the school. Such things can be done, and successfully done, but only when all the teachers in the school are always in touch, all working with a strong pull in the same line, and this because they are all under control of a competent head.

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In a school thus managed, disorder becomes impossible, and the problem of government an insignificant factor. For, in the first place, there is no time for the wandering of attention, which gives room for disorder; and, in the second place, the whole spirit of the united school is against it. Governing does not consist in allowing disorder to happen, and then punishing it. It consists in seeing every smallest wandering of attention at its very beginning, and so preventing disorder. To do this the teacher must be conscious of every pupil at every second. Nothing is easier than this when one can do it. The experienced teacher seems to have acquired a kind of sixth sense, by which she knows at once when she has lost the attention of any one of twenty pupils whose minds should be on the same subject. She feels that in that particular part of the room the electric current is not running; that is all there is of it. To a certain degree, every one who addresses an audience has this consciousness, feels the connection between himself and his hearers as a mass, and is inspired or deadened by its condition; but the teacher must feel it with every individual mind of the class, and there is no more vital contact [174]than that of teacher and pupil. Especially is the matter of order and government important in girls’ schools, where the popular mind thinks it to be of small consequence. But in this matter, as well as in that of learning, while the mind of the guide must retain continually a strong dominating influence, the governing force must come from the little girl herself, and hence to arouse and cultivate the power of self-control must be the first aim in every regulation of the whole school. It is not so much knowledge as power that the growing girl and the mature woman need, and that is what the school must, above all, give her, or fail lamentably of its mission. There can be no greater reward for a teacher than to have one of her girls, grown to womanhood, come to her and say: “I have been through such or such a hard experience, and I know that if it had not been for the self-control which I learned in this school, I should have failed; but I thought of the school and of you, and I went through it. I had to come and tell you so.” The school to which such testimony can be brought is a success, and has no need of long rows of percentages of ninety-nine against the names of its graduates in competitive examinations. [175]But such testimony can be won only through the eternal vigilance of its principal in every smallest detail of its management. The unthinking will call her a martinet, and the mothers who are tender of their children will think her severe. But the tenderness which seeks to arm the woman for the battle of life, and to give her adequate views of her responsibility, is perhaps not unworthy of its name, and

As to bad schools—schools that in stretching after the mint and anise and cumin lose all that might have given success—they are many. It seems sometimes that there is no profession in which there is so much humbug as in that of education; and the utter inability of the parent to determine what kind of a school it is into which he decides to put his little girl has, to those who stand behind the scenes, very much of the pitiful. When, however, we think of one or two other professions, we doubt, and are silent. One is reminded of the nurse-maid who never stood in need of [176]a thermometer for the water for the baby’s bath, because if the baby came out red, she knew it had been too hot, and if it came out blue, she knew it had been too cold. Too many a father finds, when it is too late, that he made a mistake in the school to which he trusted the training of his little girl. But how could he have known before? There was much shrewdness in the employer who, quite unmindful of the applicant’s having afterwards been graduated from Yale, engaged him at once as soon as he knew that he had been expelled from a certain university. For a girl to have been at some schools for any length of time is a certificate of frivolity, lack of consistent purpose and thoroughness, and, what is of far more consequence, of any real reverence for truth or her own womanhood.

Dr. Fitch says, “Human beings, whether male or female, come into the world not only ‘to get a living,’ but to live; and the life they live depends largely on what they know and care about, upon the breadth of their intellectual sympathy, upon their love of truth, upon their power of influencing and inspiring other minds;” and “even if the knowledge or power may seem to have no bearing at all upon the special business [177]or definite duties of a woman, yet if it be felt by its possessor to make life more full, more varied, and more interesting and better worth living, no other justification is needed for placing the largest opportunities within her reach.” Two points in these words deserve special notice—the first, that it is the satisfaction of the woman herself in the knowledge acquired, and not the opinion of the outside world, which should decide what she should study; and the second, the stress which Dr. Fitch lays upon the desirability of rendering her life more varied than it has been in the past. For these have a bearing on the arrangement of the school studies for the little girl, though they are often entirely left out of account by those who are ready to tell the teacher what should be done in school. While it is true that knowledge should be varied—a little in many directions is far better, perhaps, than a great deal in only one—it still must be insisted on that the main object of the school is not to convey information, but, if the term may be used without offence, to make the girl “level-headed,” so that she shall have possession of herself, and be able to meet any demands, no matter how unexpected, which may front her in the years to [178]come. Professor James says, and truly, “To give power to suspend belief in presence of an emotionally exciting idea is the highest result of education.” But Professor William G. Hale had said this before him, and not only theoretically, but practically, in every Freshman recitation in his class-room at Cornell University, for the power to suspend belief is the very essence of all the teaching to translate. There could be no more apt illustration of the way in which character is affected for better or worse by intellectual teaching—which at first sight would seem to have no connection with morals—than the way in which those students are taught to suspend their judgment over an ablative or genitive till the rest of the sentence has shown which ablative or genitive it really is. No woman who has been taught after this model will be very likely in difficult circumstances to make up her mind as to a course of action till she has carefully taken note of all the elements which should go to form a decision. And if this were the characteristic of American women, how it would transform American homes!

The girls who go to private schools are, as a rule, from families of at least moderate [179]wealth. But in our fluctuating country this is no proof that they will go through their lives without feeling the necessity of doing something at some time for their own support or the support of others. What that will be we cannot tell, for the march of invention is so swift that if we should prepare the girl for any one industry, she might find herself unable to make her living out of it when the need should come. She will probably be, we may say, a wife and a mother. But if we assume this, we still do not know how to fit her for the duties of those positions in a definite way. The best thing still is to make the most of a woman we can out of her, and then to trust the disciplined woman we have fashioned to answer for herself the demands to come to her in the misty future, which she will see, and which she can judge, but which we shall not see and which no man can foretell. The province of education is to lift the individual out of her naturalness, and not to allow her to remain in it. All education is this. The child would prefer to take her food in her fingers, for it is natural to her to do so; but education takes her immediately in hand, and makes her eat in the way not of nature, but of civilization. There is no natural [180]way of education; it is all completely unnatural, and must be so. The natural child protests against discipline of whatever kind, and seeks to follow her cravings; but out of this fools’ paradise—which would be no paradise at all, as her teacher knows—she must be driven, and out of it she must be kept, though it be with a flaming sword. It has been said that the natural man washes up on the shores of knowledge as the shipwrecked Irishman on the desert island, exclaiming: “Is any government established in this country? If so, I’m agin it!” This not too strongly illustrates the opposition made by the natural mind to the training necessary for its attainment of the stature which rightfully belongs to it as heir of all the ages. If the home do its work well, the task of the teacher and the school is comparatively easy; but there are too many American families, as every teacher knows, where this work has not been done, and where, consequently, much effort has to be spent in supplementing the lack of skill or the foolish indulgence of the mother. When a little six-year-old girl on her first day at school tries to strike her teacher over the head with her heavy slate because she is told to do some little thing, we may not [181]unreasonably assume that that home has failed of its purpose, if indeed it ever had any.

The main object of the school may be said to be to create character, and for this end it should seize upon every opportunity of strengthening the will and of making it controlled and consecrated. There is no lesson and no regulation which may not be consciously used for this; and when everything is used for this purpose, everything will fall into its proper place, and the school will be what it should be. The soul, which is the person, is not divisible; we cannot work on the intellect without affecting the play of the feelings; nor can there be in the life of man or woman any great moral lapse without the intellect’s suffering. Wherever God’s distinctions are blurred in any one of the so-called faculties of the soul, the power of distinction is blurred in all. The soul is one, and any school will be a failure, no matter how much money it may make, where this truth does not stand at the foundation of every detail of its work. Two hundred years ago Mary Astell wrote, as she was pleading for a wider education for her countrywomen, “The great secret of education lies in affecting the soul with a lively sense of what is [182]truly its perfection, and exerting the most ardent desires after it.” We can find no wiser word in all the pedagogical societies of to-day. I quote also, as bearing on the same point, from an article by the Rev. L. A. Griffin in the Unitarian Review: “The teacher reflects not ‘What shall I have when I am forgotten?’ but ‘What shall I be when I forget? When all I know has vanished, leaving only its effect on character, what shall I have?’ Shall the inner man recall his aliment any more than the outer? In both alike it passes away, for its function is fulfilled; it was not to be stored, but assimilated. Men will hereafter boast of what they knew no more than of what they ate. There is naught we know now that we may need to know hereafter, but what we are now, in every worthy quality of the spirit, that we must needs be, so long as it pleases God to continue us in life.” It might be well for teachers to ponder these things in their hearts.

The teachers who attain to and hold this doctrine firmly, carrying it out in every smallest detail of their daily work, constitute the profession, and they need no diploma from any school of pedagogy. The rest belong more or less to a trade-union, [183]which seasons its talk with the usual amount of cant. Next to religious cant, there is nothing so disgusting as educational cant. The members of the profession are all artists, and they live in regions and partake of divine pleasures of which the world knows not. In the great future professional Verein, if this ever exist, they will associate with Theodore Thomas, whose whole career, as George William Curtis says, has been a campaign of education, “because of its dignity, its absolute fidelity to a high ideal, and its total freedom from charlatanry of every kind.” But such company as this is to be won only by a very high quality of courage and persistence. Of the forces at work tending in the other direction, we may know more clearly when we come to consider some of the conditions under which the teacher of the private school for girls must work in any American city.

Professional teachers know that they cannot test the worth of their effect on their pupils by abstract arithmetical signs. They know that the girl is not an arithmetical problem, but a living soul, and they are ever aiming at moral and educational influences, to which marks and daily percentages are only impediments. Sometimes they labor [184]for these ends under fetters which make of their most worthy efforts only continual failures. I know of two strong women at this moment who are working under protest as heads of large schools, because they cannot get authority from the trustees of the schools to abolish the use of what one of them wittily calls “weak stimulants” to induce her girls to study. She sees the evil effect of the marks, prizes, and rewards which are daily and yearly given, and knows that she is gaining only a factitious success while she is using them. Again and again she has begged to be allowed to abolish the whole old system, and to show what she could do, both intellectually and morally, if she could bring to bear only the real stimulant of interest in work for the work’s sake. She has represented the evil effects, which she cannot avoid seeing, on the characters of the girls; but her protest has been so far of no use, and she does the best she can, knowing that the whole tendency is in the wrong direction, but unable to straighten it. The other in the same situation came to me a few years ago with the question how, since she was not allowed to do the educationally right thing, she was to diminish as far as possible the evil effect [185]of the wrong order. After a long conversation, in which she showed by her questions that she knew exactly what she wanted to get at, she said, with a deep sigh, “I see; it is of no use to try anything unless you can make the thing right from the bottom up.” She had got a new insight into the way in which a school might be founded so on principle that “the stout-hearted trunk below and the firm-set roots” would take care of the branches and the twigs, out to the farthest little tips, but it grew for her in a land that was very far off.

I am sure that I utter the simple truth when I say that if the private schools for girls are failing to-day, they are failing not primarily because of the low aims or the lack of insight of the women who stand at their heads. I know, and pretty well, a great many principals of girls’ schools, and I know that in a large majority of cases they want and try to do better things for their girls than the mothers will let them do. They deserve that some one who knows should make widely public this testimony to their character and their aspirations, as well as to the discouragement under which they are forced to do their daily work. An Englishwoman said lately, in the London [186]Journal of Education, with a keenness of insight for which every teacher will respect her: “In England the choice of schools is almost entirely in the hands of the parents; but here [in America] it is very frequently entirely left to the children, and as at the end of every school year pupils are free to leave without notice, the principal is obliged to depend for her school connection on the whims and caprices of the girls. This necessitates a constant attention to their comfort and happiness, which, though beneficial in many respects, is apt to allow the consideration of temporary ease to overrule that of the girl’s highest good.” The truth is that there are to-day in every American city a large number of highly educated and cultivated women of the noblest character and aims who are too often literally at the mercy of the whims and caprices of a lot of ignorant, often under-bred, and petted little girls.

The conditions under which the girls’ private school must exist remain to be more fully spoken of. The average mother is most especially anxious that her little girl shall not suffer from the home treatment which she feels was a mistake in her own case; but instead of considering from any philosophical [187]point of view the treatment which is needed, taking into account the different nature of the child, the different circumstances, and the different influences which are around her, and then making and working upon a reasonable plan, she resolves to do only the diametrical opposite of that which was done with herself. As the little girl grows up, she does the same with her own children, and thus there results in one family a pulse of sternness and indulgence which bids fair to perpetuate itself, not in favor of advancement, unless there can be secured for the girls of this generation what I have already referred to as being the chief end of all education—an ability to poise the judgment in the presence of emotionally exciting causes. If we can secure this, we have secured potentially everything. It must be noticed, however, that this assumes the existence of the cultivation of something that can be called judgment—a thing hardly to be tested by the percentages which so many schools produce as evidence that they have done the work rightfully belonging to them.

Parents may be roughly divided into two classes—those, to use a proverbial expression, to whom all their own geese are swans; [188]and those who are persuaded that their swans are geese; there is a middle class, but it is so very small that it may almost be disregarded in a description. Strange to say, the second class is quite as large as the first. Then, again, with regard to confidence in their own judgment, they may be divided also into two classes—those who desire no suggestions from the teacher, and become very angry if they are offered; and those who will not be satisfied till she tells them whether they shall put corned-beef, tongue, or ham into the sandwiches which the child is to bring for luncheon if they should decide to send her to that school. Between the danger of offending if we suggest anything, and that of offending if we do not at once answer categorically any question which may be sprung upon us, the problem of first conversations with parents presents considerable difficulty.

The teacher’s position in the educational world is that of the physician, and not that of the trained nurse; this is a point which is not generally understood, and one that needs to be insisted on. It is as respectable to be a nurse as to be a doctor, but the fact remains that if you are competent to be the latter, you do not consent to be put by the [189]relations of the patient into the place of the former. What physician would accept a case if the father and mother of the little patient, to say nothing of the aunts and uncles and grandmothers, were to prescribe the medicines, and he were expected only to give them? And yet this is exactly what parents too often propose to do in the case of the education of their girls. There is no fancy in this statement. I have known of a father who took five children at once out of a school, though he had engaged places for them months before, because the teacher arranged to change one study for one of the five; the girl was gaining nothing in the study which was to be dropped, and the one proposed was in the same line, and yet, by its difference and novelty, might be hoped to accomplish that which the other had failed to do. That was the judgment of the teacher, and she had known the girl for years and understood her character, as she did that of every other girl in her school. She declined to be put in the position of a nurse, and to teach the child only what the parent prescribed. It was a question of principle, and of respect for the profession. The five sisters left the school. The father was a physician. This story could be paralleled [190]over and over again from the remembrance of every professional teacher.

One often regrets that she cannot, at least for a time, live in a country where the question of precedence is fixed, and sometimes looks back longingly to the caste system in India. It is easy to remember the time when many a New England village, at least, had circles of what was really “the best society,” into which no amount of wealth could give entrance. We all know that there was such a time even in New York, but that time is long gone by; it takes people of steady heads to live there now and not get drawn into the great currents of society which swirl around them, not to desire to make as much show as their neighbors, not to have all simple and sweet home life spoiled by the outside influences. It is doubly hard if one has lately come into possession of money, and sees the whole city filled with all sorts of indulgences and show which his money can purchase. So it often happens that a family which, if it had lived in some country place, would have been a delight to see, gets carried off its feet by the mad rush of the currents around it, fascinated by the glitter, and loses all its own character by becoming one more of the struggling [191]drops which are trying to overtop each other in the social ocean. Now the private schools for girls, as has been said before, are composed almost entirely of daughters of wealthy families, and the parents are subject to all these influences.

It is a hard thing to utter, and yet it is the truth, that the mothers do not really mean what they say when they tell you that what they ardently desire is the best education possible for their girls. They may think so, but what they really want for the little girl is that she shall grow up into what an Englishwoman says “we expect American girls to be—bright, witty, apparently intelligent, and possessed of sufficient knowledge to conceal an ignorance of which they may or may not be conscious.” The President of Wellesley College once showed a foreign gentleman who was supposed to have a great interest in education, over the buildings. He listened to the work of the eager students, saw all the beautiful things which had been provided, and as he said farewell at the door, remarked, with great interest, “This is all very fine, but may I venture to ask, how does it affect their chances?” The story carries its own suggestion. It is really true [192]that what the mother is in many cases thinking of, when she selects a school for her little girl, is not whether the teaching is what it ought to be, but how association with the girls already members of the school in question will “affect her chances.” To a real teacher the tardily acquired knowledge that the school to which she has given her life and all her power is regarded simply as a social “Exchange,” only as a means by which some young woman may press her way into a certain “set,” comes as an insult. If that is what the school is for, were it not better to do any other work than this? Pearls are very beautiful things, and it takes much deep-sea diving where the billows go over one’s head to gain them. She may perhaps find some bitter consolation for her pain by recognizing the fact that people do not hesitate to use the churches of the city for the same purpose, but her work drags heavily after the discovery has been made.

The girls that attend private schools—mostly from the moneyed class—have scarcely any remembrance of nursery life, and of simple games and pleasures. From their earliest years they have been satiated with all sorts of ingenious toys, fit things for [193]adults, but not for children. Many of them have spent every summer of their lives in large hotels, amusing the loungers on the piazzas with their speeches and their dresses; they have been carefully shielded from pain and trial of any kind. Effort has been a stranger to them. What wonder that it is difficult to lead them to make real and persistent effort on their school tasks! What wonder that they balk at any honest and unsparing work! Many of them are under the spell of hereditary tendencies handed down from ancestors of varied nationality, who earned their bread by the sweat of their brows and the skill of their hands, while their children and grandchildren have nothing to do. Among no children, perhaps, is the tendency to mental mechanism so strong as among the Americans. It is not, perhaps, entirely the fault of the teachers that this tendency has had its course and been glorified in our schools. But it is the teacher’s great duty to fight it, if she would produce in never so small a degree out of these languid, amusement-desiring minds anything which may be fit to stand the storm and strain of life—to

[194]

Few people realize in the least degree the change in the popular philosophy which, in this country especially, has transformed the whole aspect of teaching within forty years. Miss Beale, the well-known principal of the college for girls at Cheltenham, England, says: “The tabula rasa theory of Locke, the impressionist, has given way to the mixed idealism of Kant, who emphasizes the constructive power of the mind; and for passive creations we have substituted the theory of active development. Once we thought rather of the child as acted upon; now we think much more of making her active, of invigorating, of showing her how to learn.” It is probable that not many have realized how all-powerful has been this influence in every smallest school-room in the land. There could be no more beautiful and striking example of the secondary nature of the work of education, and none more wonderful in showing the fruitful power of really great thoughts—how they filter down and penetrate the strata of thought and life which would seem farthest removed from them. The teacher of children now does not keep in mind the subject she is teaching so much as the mind of the child; that it is which she is working on, and the studies are only [195]the tools that are used; it is the live mind of the child that she is watching, and by its reactions she directs her labor. The parent should decide upon the school to which the little girl is to go by the best light he has, and when the decision is made, he should leave the child to the teacher, in the same way as he would leave the arrangement of the pipes in his house to the best plumber he knows. If the teacher be not better fitted to direct the education of the child than is the parent, then she is not a fit person to be at the head of the school, or, indeed, to teach at all.

In addition to all these conditions under which, at least in America, the school has to work, there must not be forgotten the present excited state of the public mind with regard to education. This produces, to supply a constantly increasing demand for better results, a vast number of new “systems” and “crazes,” towards which the teacher is pushed, if she have not strength enough to keep steady in her course. The schools do not depend so much as of old on the services of teachers or lecturers who come in only for special hours, and who therefore cannot work into the general effect of the whole school, and this is well. But, on the other [196]hand, we have all sorts of so-called new ways presented. I think if Pestalozzi and Froebel were now living, they would ask for new names, so weary would they be of having all sorts of crude and absurd labor ascribed to them, though the spirit in which they worked is in the schools—especially the girls’ schools—to-day everywhere. But to do just what they did in other countries, circumstances, and times, is to destroy that spirit. Then we have those who claim a great discovery in the “natural method” of teaching, and who forget that the natural order of acquisition must always differ widely from the logical order of exposition. In the study of languages these people would have us throw away all that we have already gained of facility, and reduce ourselves to a state of primitive ignorance, assuming that because a child through his poverty is obliged to learn in such a way, we with our experience and stored minds must also do so. They would have the carpenter throw away his tools and build houses with his hands, or the implements which he should be able to fashion for himself, not those which the practice of all the ages has given him as his birth-right. They forget that the child mind and that of the adult are so different as to be almost [197]of different stuff, and insist upon teaching us as if we were children, in spite of our humble protest that we are no longer so. They remind us of the old people who used to insist upon it that we should go to bed when and because the chickens went to roost. Even in our childhood we dimly felt that the reasoning was faulty somewhere, long before we timidly ventured to suggest that we were not chickens, and also that we did not go to roost. Because a child who knew nothing had to learn English in the “natural way”—though even this assertion is not absolutely true as it stands—it does not follow that she must learn French in the same way after she has acquired some knowledge of English, and it by no means follows that any foreigner who may have immigrated is the best teacher for her. The manual-training craze is one of the latest. It is true that for a joint to fit or a seam to go into its place without a wrinkle, the maker must work with accuracy; but it is also true that she must be accurate with an example in arithmetic if she is to solve it, and there is no one of all the qualities claimed to be won for the mind by manual training which cannot also be secured without it, if the school be what it ought to be. The colleges for [198]women were expected to raise the level of teaching in the girls’ schools, and some principals have gone so far as to say that in future they will have none but college-trained women for teachers. But it is a great disadvantage to a teacher to have been for four years entirely out of touch with children and with the regulations which, not in place in a college, are yet imperatively necessary in a school for children. And, again, the new methods of teaching penetrate the colleges slowly. The larger part of the work in them is, as it should be with comparatively mature minds, in the form of lectures, not of recitations, and generally the college graduate is entirely ignorant of what a recitation is. It takes her a long time to get out of the ways to which she has been accustomed, and to grasp the conditions under which she must labor with the mind of the child, so poor in material, and generally so wanting in anything that can be called imagination. To know about a subject, and to know about teaching it, are two entirely different things. What we do need for those intending to teach is a normal school with a course of at least a year at the top of the college course. I can imagine no more delightful work, unless it be giving a child its [199]first lessons in language, than to have the management of such a school; but such a school, with the competent teacher as its head, lies far in the future. Towards it all the psychologists are working. In view of the great problems which teaching presents, and the great value of wide experience in it, it might be worth while for the colleges to insert a course in Humility for the last part of the Senior year, especially for the benefit of those who are proposing to teach. The profession to which Dr. Arnold belonged is not to be stormed by girls simply because they have read Latin and Greek, and the questions which waylay its every step are not to be so lightly settled.

For the girls’ school the question of health is a grave one. If the children in the average American home were properly fed, properly dressed, and properly exercised, if they had plenty of fresh air and plenty of sleep, if they were allowed to grow in quietness, with simple pleasures, and in an atmosphere undisturbed by the passions and ambitions of the grown-up world, our task would indeed be easy. If the mothers could understand that health and activity of the mind are an essential to health of the body, we should be in a sort of paradise. There is one phrase [200]which I am sure no teacher of girls who may read these pages will be able to see without a smile. It is this: “Health is the first consideration.” It generally comes from the lips of mothers of homes where little if any reasonable thought is given to the question of health till the doctor becomes a frequent visitor, and kindly provides this formula. The teacher can do nothing with a child if she be not healthy. To her, indeed, health is the first consideration, and all her efforts are towards its maintenance. But such as the mothers have made the children that they bring us to teach, we have to work with them, and to do the best we can. This is little enough in many cases.

I have noted some few of the difficult conditions under which the teacher of a private school for girls has to live. If she have no one dependent upon her, so as to make the money-success of her enterprise a matter of life or death, even in that case she will need all the persistence of Grant and all the dash and courage of Sherman to carry her for years along the paths which she is under bonds to her profession to follow, and to be true to herself and to justice. Personal influence must have no power to make her think of surrendering a principle; failure [201]arising from causes entirely beyond her control to carry out her plans for the whole school, or for individuals, must not avail to weaken her courage; she must learn to live above immediate results and in the region of purposes. If she be not too much hampered by pecuniary needs for herself or for those dearer, she may carry out her ideal, and do really good and lasting work to a limited extent. If, however, she be so hampered, we should blame not her so much as the unthinking demand of the public which has forced her to surrender, as she often does, though at the cost of some of her own self-respect. If the object of a school be simply to make money, then, of course, it falls under the head of business enterprises, and anything short of dishonesty is allowable. If the school is to be kept up, pupils must be found for it; and it is so easy to agree to do this or that thing to secure two or three pupils when the last year’s accounts showed a deficit! It is only to throw a handful of incense into the flame perpetually burning on the altar of “society.” And yet this cannot be done. To hold a school up to the highest standard of excellence, and this by unceasing vigilance, is one thing; to manage it so as to make the most money and [202]to gain the most friends, is another. The teacher who tries to do both will probably not succeed in the first. The aim must be single, and the purpose unfaltering, the courage lofty, and there must be no looking for results; they are in safe hands, and do not belong to the worker.

As to the studies which should hold the foremost place in a school for girls, it may be said that they should not be mathematics, the training power of which lies along a very narrow track. It is hardly worth while to force very much work here if the girl be not inclined to it, this because it is wasted labor, not simply because she does not like the subject. I believe, although there are minds that seem to lack entirely the mathematical sense, that in most of the cases where there exists a thorough dislike of arithmetic, it is simply because of poor teaching at the beginning. In some of these cases, if the pupil be not too old, the evil may be remedied; but if she is, we may often flank the trouble by algebra under good teaching; and this is a far better way than keeping her on arithmetic when she is really too old to be studying it. In mathematics, perhaps, more than in any other branch, we too seldom have children intrusted [203]to us till they have been already spoiled in the hands of anxious parents who are not teachers, or of ignorant nursery governesses. In fact, in private schools in America too often we get no chance at the girl’s mind till it is already half spoiled; and then, after we have done all we can to remedy the trouble, and are just getting her where she can do something, she is taken away from us to go into society. Our work is thus cut at both ends, and it is not our fault, but our misfortune, that we do so little.

There exists of late years a widely spread impression that natural science should be the main object of study. It must not be forgotten, however, that science is not a mere collection of facts, but a system of laws deduced according to some principle of wise selection from them, and all facts are not of the same value. There would be no object, scientifically speaking, in measuring the length and width of rose-petals and carefully noting the same in neat little books. The lessons given in many schools under the head of natural science are not lessons in science at all. The child’s mind is not up to the level of scientific teaching, and all that it can do in the line of nature is to collect or to learn facts, which, because it has [204]no means of classification, soon drop out of the memory. Fortunate is it that they do so; it is difficult to imagine where we should get sensible women enough to run the world for the next generation if God had not mercifully given to children the power of forgetting. The main thing to be gained by lessons in natural science is a feeling of reverent wonder for the Creator. The moral lessons which may be thrown in as one traces His ways of working in mineral, plant, and animal, such as economy, foresight, care, adaptation of means to ends, and order, are of great value; in fact, this is perhaps the best chance that we have for moral teaching. But the disciplinary value of these studies for young children is greatly exaggerated; and we must never forget that with children it is the disciplinary value of a study that we, as teachers, have first to consider. The main part of education comes after the school days are over. If the school succeed in putting the girl in possession of herself, so that she may be able to use her faculties intelligently for her future growth, if it open to her paths of rest and refuge from the too pressing care, or perhaps the otherwise overpowering sorrow which may come to her, it has done its work. As an [205]English educational writer asks, is the value of natural science teaching practical, cultural, or disciplinary? Questions such as this form a large and, I might almost say, the chief part of the teacher’s work, though the parent who wants more time given to natural science has probably not been aware of their existence, and yet sets her opinion over against yours with an amusing assumption that it is of equal weight. I doubt whether in any other profession this is so much the case.

When we come to language in all its varied manifestations, we have reached a subject which affords unlimited scope for disciplinary work, while at the same time it opens fields of pleasure and profit that are practically infinite. It is often said with great unction that to study natural science is to become acquainted with the works of God, while to study language is to spend our time over the works of man. But it is hard to see why the nest of the bird and the cell of the bee are more divine, or can do more good to the mind, than the wonderful vessel of language which man has shaped and fashioned to save and bear down the stream of time for the advantage of those who are to come all that he has done and [206]thought, “that nothing be lost.” In language we have, as has been said, “a condensed generalization of human experience.” What could be a more valuable tool for us? It is foolishness to compare words and things to the intended disadvantage of the former. Words are things, and of all the inventions which man has painfully thought out, they are the most important things. To language, then, we should assign the first and the largest part in the school course, not only because of its unequalled disciplinary power, but because of the fields of pleasure and of further discipline which it opens up. As to which language we should take first, after the vernacular has been in some measure acquired, for disciplinary purposes, “that would be most successful which is in its idiom most remote from the reader’s own, and in its literature most rich and varied.” This is, of course, the Latin,⁠[5] which, in the hands of a skilful teacher, will do more in the way of discipline and of development, even for little girls of nine or ten, than any other subject, while at the same time it affords [207]so much solid enjoyment that under such circumstances the Latin lesson is the last one which they would miss, and that for which they will beg to be allowed to come to school, be the weather never so stormy. With a year’s Latin taught in this way, all paths are open. French builds itself on it, and comparisons between the idioms of the three languages offer unlimited advantages for all sorts of perceptions, and for the training of the growing judgment. When by-and-by German is added, these opportunities are still more enlarged. But by that time the girl is reading with facility difficult French constructions, and her English is so well in hand that she may with advantage be allowed to drop her Latin (if, indeed, she do not beg to be allowed to continue it for her own pleasure). When such a result is reached, we may feel measurably satisfied. There is no more valuable training than translation, by which I do not mean substituting one word for another, but the “reducing of the actual to fluidity by breaking up its literal sequence,” and then crystallizing it again in another idiom. There is no school task more valuable in inducing the state of mind which suspends the judgment, waiting till all the circumstances [208]which can by any possibility bear upon its conclusion have been fairly recognized and weighed—a habit of mind which is one of the highest results of education. It is impossible here to do more than to hint at the possibilities of the different lines of study in æsthetics, history, and literature. But I should say all in one word in saying that the main object of all teaching in a private school for girls should be disciplinary, and that the proportion in which different studies are able to serve this end should decide the relative amount of time given to them. The order in which they should be taken up must be decided not only by their relative dependence, but by the mental readiness of the pupil. To decide this is the function of the teacher, and her diagnosis must shape the prescription. There is, however, one more consideration of prime importance—the mental advance should be always along the whole line at once. I mean by this that there should never be a time in the girl’s whole school course when she is not employed at the same time in all the different departments of human acquisition, if her culture is to be in any degree worthy of the name. She should not be allowed to spend much time on arithmetic and almost [209]none on language; neither should she study even language to the exclusion of history or natural science. Every branch of human knowledge should supplement, confirm, and support the others. That is a poor school where the pupil does not find that nothing can exist apart from other things, and where, through the mutual understanding and constant harmony of the teachers, she does not find the same persistent thoughts coming up in all the lessons. In no other way can her work be rendered a whole to her, and if it be not so, it will be of little use, as it will certainly give her no pleasure. When we hear the girls in recess discussing some point in a lesson instead of dress and the theatre celebrities, we know that the first step has been gained—that of creating interest and of making knowledge for itself an object of desire. Till this has been done, nothing has been done.

The work of the school should be by recitations, and not by lectures; and a recitation does not consist in asking questions and receiving answers which have been learned beforehand, as many seem to think. In order to show what it really is in the mind and purpose of the modern teacher, I may quote from an article in a Journal of Education. [210]It comes, as most of the new life in the profession does come, from the West—from S. S. Park, of St. Cloud, Minnesota. “We may roughly define the act of reciting as that mode of the pupil’s thinking which is under the systematic and continuous direction of the teacher’s superior insight and skill. The teacher carries on a train of thought by means of which she applies means to stimulate the pupil to act this way or that, as she may propose. The pupil exercises her power of thought under the guidance of the teacher. The function of the teacher is intellectual stimulation and direction; that of the pupil is free exercise of her powers, receiving aid only when she cannot go forward by herself. The subject is a series of symbols and ideas independent of teacher and pupil, which both translate into intelligent insight into some phase of life and its conditions and results. The teacher rethinks her own thinking in the light of the expression her pupil gives to the idea she is seeking to master. Double consciousness furnishes the intelligent condition for action upon the pupil. Second, the teaching act consists in directing the pupil’s attention so that she recombines ideas already in her thought, and thus suggests new conceptions.” [211]In other words, the object of a recitation is not so much to find out what the girl knows as to make her think, and lead her into right ways of thinking, and in every recitation the teacher should always be clear in her own mind as to just what she wants to accomplish in that particular hour, and aim straight for it every minute—as Goethe says, “directly if in favorable circumstances, but if in unfavorable by circuitous paths, in which, however, we are always approaching the direct path.” It will be noticed that, as I have said before, the teacher’s mind must always dominate, and also that there can be no recitation, properly so called, which does not essentially consist in the play of thought continually going on between teacher and taught. It is this which gives charm to the work, and lends to it fascinating interest, no matter how often one may teach a subject; for though the subject may remain somewhat the same, no one of the other two factors can be the same at any two times. The combinations are infinite.

Much has been said lately of the necessity of thoroughness in girls’ schools. In the abstract meaning of the word there can be no such thing as thoroughness with a [212]child; her knowledge, from the very nature of the case, must be fragmentary, and therefore lacking in thoroughness. If her teaching is to consist, as in old-time schools, of pages of the dictionary learned by heart, or simply of arithmetical rules and algebraic formulæ, she might perhaps be thorough in those, but no knowledge can be considered “thorough” in the proper sense which is not a part of a whole. It is in the gradual approximation to some degree of wholeness that the interest of the school-days—when they have any interest—must consist, and we shall wander widely from the path of any reasonable thoroughness by narrowing the number of studies to two or three, and holding the girl strictly to these for a year. It is more our duty to open various paths, the more the better. The situation of a place can be determined only when we have its latitude as well as its longitude; to determine the location of so simple a thing as a point we must have at least two lines; and in the domain of live knowledge a fact is securely grasped by the mind only when it lies where many lines meet. The woman teacher never forgets the possible necessity for the future woman and the head of a family to have some place of refuge to which [213]she can escape out of the wearying and pulverizing details scarcely to be avoided by her, if the home is to be comfortable for others, and she seeks to open all the paths of interest possible. She is more concerned to do this and to lay foundations for future work than to build very high for the present. Indeed it is not for the present that she works at all.

All teaching in the modern school-room must be comparative, and it cannot be so if we have nothing to compare. The unity of the school must never be destroyed by dividing it into departments, for in so doing we sacrifice the opportunity for comparison in a higher sense. And always it is the class that must be looked out for more than the individual, always the whole school more than the class. It is only in this way that the individual can be cared for. Human society must be content to work on the individual not immediately but mediately, and the teacher is not freed from this necessity in the small society to which she must be a minor providence.

I can do no more here than to point out some of the conditions of the girls’ private school in our large cities, and briefly to hint at its possibilities. It must always hold [214]fast to the principle that the development of moral character is its highest, and indeed we might say its only aim. But to secure this, it must always cultivate inner freedom—“the agreement of the will with its own law-giving judgment.” The school which puts such a motived force into the characters of its girls that they cannot lose it in all their after lives—the school, the memory of which they can never escape, and whose stamp they can never efface, whose aid is sure to come up strongest whenever need is sorest—that school, the thought of which is always followed by “a great wave of gratitude and love,” is the only one that has done its work.

1892.

THE END.