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Title: Woman and the higher education
Editor: Anna C. Brackett
Release date: August 24, 2026 [eBook #79448]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79448
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION ***
THE DISTAFF SERIES
WOMAN
AND
The Higher Education
EDITED BY
ANNA C. BRACKETT
[Illustration: EXCELSIOR 1893]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MDCCCXCIII
Copyright, 1893, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS.
Page
GENERAL INTRODUCTION v
Mrs. BLANCHE WILDER BELLAMY.
PREFACE ix
Miss ANNA C. BRACKETT.
A PLAN FOR IMPROVING FEMALE EDUCATION 1
Mrs. EMMA WILLARD, 1819.
FEMALE EDUCATION 47
Mrs. EMMA C. EMBURY, 1831.
THE COLLEGIATE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 65
Prof. MARIA MITCHELL, Vassar College, 1880.
A NEW KNOCK AT AN OLD DOOR 79
Mrs. LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE, 1883.
A REVIEW OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN 103
Mrs. ALICE FREEMAN PALMER, 1889.
THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN ACADEMIES AND COLLEGES 131
Prof. LUCY M. SALMON, Vassar College, 1890.
THE PRIVATE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS 153
Miss ANNA C. BRACKETT, 1892.
INTRODUCTION.
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 “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 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_.
PREFACE.
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 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.
WOMAN AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION.
A PLAN FOR IMPROVING FEMALE EDUCATION.
BY MRS. EMMA WILLARD.
An address to the public, particularly to the members of the
Legislature of New York.
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 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 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 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; 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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. 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 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 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 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 “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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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
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 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 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 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 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; 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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: 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 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.
FEMALE EDUCATION.
BY MRS. EMMA C. EMBURY.
An address delivered at the Brooklyn Collegiate Institute for
Young Ladies.
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 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 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 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
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. 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 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.
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 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
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 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 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 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 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?
“There is none,
In all this cold and hollow world, no fount
Of deep, strong, deathless love, like that within
A mother’s heart. There’s too much pride, wherewith
To his fair son the father’s eye doth turn,
Watching his growth. Aye, on the boy he looks,
The bright glad creature springing in his path,
But as the heir of his great name—the young
And stately tree; whose rising strength ere long
Shall bear his trophies well—and this is love!
This is _man’s_ love!—what marvel?—_you_ ne’er made
Your breast the pillow of his infancy,
While to the fulness of your heart’s glad heavings
His fair cheek rose and fell; and his bright hair
Waved softly to your breath!—_you_ ne’er kept watch
Beside him, till the last pale star had set,
And morn, all dazzling, as in triumph, broke
On your dim weary eyes;—not _yours_ the face
That, early faded through fond care of him,
Hung o’er his sleep, and, duly as Heaven’s light,
Was there to greet his wakening!—_you_ ne’er smoothed
His couch, ne’er sung him to his rosy rest,
Caught his least whisper, when his voice from yours
Had learned soft utterance; pressed your lips to his,
When fever parched it; hushed his wayward cries
With patient, vigilant, never wearied love!
No, these are woman’s tasks!”
Mrs. Hemans.
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,
“My boys! my boys!
Hath vain affection borne with all for _this_?
Why were ye given me?...”
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 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 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 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This address was read in St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn.
THE COLLEGIATE EDUCATION OF GIRLS.
BY PROFESSOR MARIA MITCHELL, VASSAR COLLEGE.
This paper was read at the Congress of the Association for the
Advancement of Women, held in Boston, October, 1880.
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 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:
_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 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 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 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.” 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 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; 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
A NEW KNOCK AT AN OLD DOOR.
BY LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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,
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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:
“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 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 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 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,
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. 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.
A REVIEW OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
BY ALICE FREEMAN PALMER.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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; 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, 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 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. 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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.
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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1887-88, Chapter xi.
[3] See the President’s Report of Wellesley College for 1889-90.
THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN ACADEMIES AND COLLEGES.
BY PROFESSOR LUCY M. SALMON, VASSAR COLLEGE.
Copyright, 1890, by George A. Bacon.
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 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 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,
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 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 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 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 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, 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
“civlyzation doos git forrid
Sometimes upon a powder cart.”
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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
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 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.
THE PRIVATE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS.
BY ANNA C. BRACKETT.
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 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 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 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.
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. 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 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 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.” 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 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, 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; 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
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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.
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
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. 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
“need not fear the spight
Of grudging foes, ne favor ask of friends,
But in the strength of its own constant might,
Neither to one itself nor other bends.”
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
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
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
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 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 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 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
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, 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 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 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 _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 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; 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
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 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 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 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 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
“keep at bay
The changeful April sky of chance
And the strong tide of circumstance.”
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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_. 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.” 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 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
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 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] William F. Denning, F.R.A.S., in _Telescopic Work for Starlight
Evenings_.
[5] “Both Latin and German are at a stage in which structure is more
exposed to view than it is in the maturer languages of Greek and
French.”—_Earle’s English Prose, p. 508._
THE END.
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