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 ERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
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 LIBRARY OF THE UNIVER 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE UNIVER 
 
THE DISTAFF SEEIES 
 
WOMAN 
 
 AND 
 
 The Higher Education 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 ANNA C. BRACKETT 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 M-paccxcin 
 
 UNIVERSITY ] 
 
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 EDUCA- 
 TION 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 AA-NA 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 period- 
 ical 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 depart- 
 ment 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 rec- 
 ord of literary work, limited, through necessity, 
 both by sex and locality, but, as far as possi- 
 ble, accurate and complete, and to preserve this 
 record in the State Library in the Capitol at 
 Albany. 
 
 It includes twenty-five hundred books, begin- 
 ning 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 hun- 
 dred and forty years. 
 
 It includes also three hundred papers read be- 
 fore 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 his- 
 toric, 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. Pro- 
 fessor Maria Mitchell's article was published in 
 Education, Mrs. Runkle's in The Century Maga- 
 zine, 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 seven- 
 ty years needs no emphasis for those who read 
 in these pages the pleading words of Mrs. Wil- 
 lard 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 profes- 
 sors 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 signifi- 
 cant 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 tc 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 ex- 
 ceedingly suggestive: In 1819 Mrs. Willard ap- 
 peals to the " enlightened politicians " of her 
 time; in 1881 Maria Mitchell writes, "All that 
 women ask for is the enlightenment of our pres- 
 ent rulers." 
 
 ANNA C. BRACKETT. 
 
 NEW YORK, 1893. 
 
WOMAN 
 
 AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION. 
 
A PLAN FOK IMPROVING FEMALE 
 EDUCATION.* 
 
 BY MRS. EMMA WILLARD. 
 
 THE object of this address is to convince 
 the public that a reform with respect to 
 female education is necessary ; that it can- 
 not 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 un- 
 dertaking, to persuade that body to endow 
 a seminary for females as the commence- 
 ment of sucli reformation. 
 
 The idea of a college for males will nat- 
 urally be associated with that of a seminary, 
 instituted and endowed by the public ; and 
 the absurdity of sending ladies to college 
 may, at first thouglt, strike every one to 
 whom this subject shall be proposed. I 
 therefore hasten to observe that the semi- 
 nary here recommended will be as different 
 
 * An address to the public, particularly to the members 
 of the Legislature of New York. 
 1 1 
 
from those appropriated to the other sex 
 as the female character and duties are from 
 the male. The business of the husbaudmau 
 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 educa- 
 tion will be considered by our enlightened 
 citizens as a subject of importance, the lib- 
 erality 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 exer- 
 tions ? 
 
 If the improvement of the American fe- 
 male character, and that alone, could be 
 effected by public liberality, employed in 
 giving better means of instruction, such im- 
 provement 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 govern- 
 ment on earth ; but if the female character 
 be raised, it must inevitably raise that of 
 the other sex ; and thus does the plan pro- 
 
posed 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 charac- 
 ter we have the charge of the whole mass 
 of individuals who are to compose the suc- 
 ceeding generation during that period of 
 youth when the pliant mind takes any di- 
 rection 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 lib- 
 erally 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 impor- 
 tance 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 con- 
 sulted, that of females becomes of sufficient 
 importance to engage the public attention. 
 Would we rear the human plant to its perfec- 
 tion, 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 edu- 
 cation 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 requi- 
 site to facilitate their progress in learning; 
 
but female education has been left to the 
 mercy of private adventurers ; and the con- 
 sequence has been to our sex the same as it 
 would have been to the other had legisla- 
 tures left their accommodations and means 
 of instruction to chance also. 
 
 Education cannot prosper in any commu- 
 nity 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 guar- 
 dian 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 de- 
 pendent 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 en- 
 force their obedience. 
 
 Feminine delicacy requires that girls 
 should be educated chiefly by their own sex. 
 This is apparent from considerations that 
 
; ^regard tlieir 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 ob- 
 served : 
 
 1. They are temporary institutions, formed 
 by individuals whose object is present emol- 
 ument. But they cannot be expected to be 
 greatly lucrative ; therefore, the individuals 
 who establish them cannot afford to provide 
 suitable acornmodatious 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, ac- 
 companied with so much noise and confu- 
 sion as greatly to impede their progress in 
 study. 
 
 2. As individuals cannot afford to provide 
 suitable accommodations as to room, so nei- 
 ther can they afford libraries and other ap- 
 paratus necessary to teach properly the 
 various branches in which they pretend to 
 instruct. 
 
 3. Neither can the individuals who estab- 
 
lisli these schools afford to provide suitable 
 instruction. It not uufrequently happens 
 that one instructress teaches, at the same 
 time and in the same room, ten or twelve dis- 
 tinct 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 Avhich 
 few can afford ; yet none of these masters 
 are responsible for the general proficiency 
 or demeanor of the pupils. Their only re- 
 sponsibility 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 en- 
 forced as are requisite for properly class- 
 ing the pupils. Institutions for young gen- 
 tlemen 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 pro- 
 cure libraries, philosophical apparatus, and 
 
other advantages superior to what can else- 
 where be found ; and to enjoy these, indi- 
 viduals 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 qual- 
 ifications for entrance, the kind and order 
 of their studies, and the period of their re- 
 maining at the seminary. Female schools 
 present the reverse of this. Wanting per- 
 manency and dependent on individual pa- 
 tronage, had they the wisdom to make salu- 
 tary 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 disadvan- 
 tages 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 iu 
 teaching is generally present profit. In or- 
 der 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 as- 
 tonishment, 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 establish- 
 ments, their preceptresses are not accounta- 
 ble 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 preceptress- 
 es ; 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 hu- 
 man 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 oc- 
 cupied 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 ac- 
 quirements of preceptresses. 
 
 Instances have lately occurred in which 
 women of bad reputation, at a distance from 
 scenes of their former life, have been in- 
 trusted 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 so- 
 ciety 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 accom- 
 plishments, they regard all others as super- 
 numerary 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 in- 
 struction 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 ac- 
 quiring a disrelish, if not a contempt, for 
 useful knowledge. 
 
 7. Although, from a want "of public sup- 
 port, 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 be- 
 cause these establishments are not dependent 
 on any public body within those limits, they 
 
have a power far more arbitrary and uncon- 
 trolled than is allowed the learned and judi- 
 cious 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 fe- 
 male 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 educa- 
 tion, and suffer it to become the sport of ad- 
 venturers of fortune who may be both ig- 
 norant and vicious. 
 
 OP THE PRINCIPLES BY WHICH EDUCATION 
 SHOULD BE REGULATED. 
 
 To contemplate the principles which 
 should regulate systems of instruction, and 
 consider how little those principles have 
 been regarded in educating our sex, will 
 show the defects of female education in a 
 
13 
 
 still stronger point of light, and will also 
 afford a standard by which any plan for its 
 improvement may be measured. 
 
 Education should seek to bring its sub- 
 jects to the perfection of their moral, intel- 
 lectual, 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 en- 
 joying and communicating happiness who 
 are best qualified, both by internal disposi- 
 tion 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 there- 
 fore be selected from one or both of the fol- 
 lowing considerations : either because they 
 are peculiarly fitted to improve the facul- 
 ties, 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 de- 
 voted to improvement. Among families so 
 rich as to be entirely above labor, the daugh- 
 ters 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 sous 
 of these families receive. While their sisters 
 are gliding through the mazes of the mid- 
 night dance, they employ the lamp to treas- 
 ure up for future use the riches of ancient 
 wisdom, or to gather strength and expan- 
 sion 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 ba- 
 bies 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 iu acquirements while their ad- 
 vantages 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 con- 
 tribute 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 vege- 
 table 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 heen made 
 the first object in educating our sex to pre- 
 pare 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 satel- 
 lites, 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. Submis- 
 sion 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, with- 
 out distinction of sex, under their authority , 
 when we receive them from the government 
 of our country, we must obey our rulers ; 
 and when our sex take the obligations of 
 
17 
 
 marriage, and receive protection and sup- 
 port 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 them- 
 selves agreeable to the other. The error 
 complained of is that the taste of men, what- 
 ever 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 an- 
 other as their highest object, teaches that 
 the rule of their conduct should be the will 
 of beings, imperfect and erring like them- 
 selves, 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 
 2 
 
18 
 
 " without form, aud void/' the mind is nat- 
 urally led to inquire after a remedy for the 
 evils it has been contemplating. Can indi- 
 viduals furnish this remedy ? It has here- 
 tofore been left to them, aud we have seen 
 the consequence. If education is a business 
 which might naturally prosper if left to in- 
 dividual exertion, why have legislatures in- 
 termeddled 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 govern- 
 ment 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 leg- 
 islatures to begin now to form the charac- 
 ters of the next generation by controlling 
 that of the females who are to be the moth- 
 ers, while it is yet with them a season of im- 
 provement. 
 
 Bat should the conclusion be almost ad- 
 mitted that our sex too are the legitimate 
 
19 
 
 children of the Legislature, and that it is 
 their duty to afford us a share of their pater- 
 nal bounty, the phantom of a college-learned 
 lady would be re.ady 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 educa- 
 tion that is here recommended, and to afford 
 a definite view of the manner in which, a 
 female institution might possess the re- 
 spectability, 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 board- 
 ing-schools, much may be learned with re- 
 gard to what would be needed for the pros- 
 perity and usefulness of a public seminary 
 for females. 
 
 I. There would be needed a building, with 
 commodious rooms for lodging and recita- 
 tion ; apartments for the reception of appa- 
 
20 
 
 ratus, and for the acconimodatiou of the do- 
 mestic 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 philosophi- 
 cal 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 atten- 
 tion to religious duties would of course be 
 required of the pupils by the laws of the in- 
 stitution. 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 de- 
 sirable 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 ex- 
 act enumeration of the branches of litera- 
 ture which might be taught would be im- 
 possible unless the time of the pupils' con- 
 tinuance 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 pro motive 
 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 legisla- 
 ture has provided us the means of instruc- 
 tion. 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 rny sex. 
 
 It is highly important that females should 
 be conversant with those studies which will 
 
22 
 
 load 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 knowl- 
 edge of this noble material on which it is 
 her business to operate that she may best 
 understand how to mould it to its most ex- 
 cellent 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 ac- 
 quainted with this science, they would com- 
 municate 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 in- 
 quirer to understand the cause of the earth- 
 quake. Bat how often does the mother, 
 from ignorance on this subject, give her child 
 the most erroneous and contracted views of 
 the causes of natural phenomena views 
 which, though he may afterwards learn to 
 be false, are yet from the laws of association, 
 
23 
 
 ever ready to return unless the active pow- 
 ers 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 presup- 
 pose 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 sys- 
 tematic treatise on housewifery. 
 
 3. Domestic instruction should be con- 
 sidered important in a female seminary. It 
 is the duty of our sex to regulate the inter- 
 nal concerns of every family, and unless 
 they be properly qualified to discharge this 
 duty, whatever may be their literary or or- 
 namental attainments, they cannot be ex- 
 pected 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 in- 
 jure the community. To superintend the 
 domestic department there should be a re- 
 spectable lady, experienced in the best meth- 
 ods 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 ex- 
 cessive and incorrigible, be punished with 
 expulsion. There might be a gradation of 
 employment in the domestic department, ac- 
 cording to the length of time the pupils had 
 remained at the institution. The older schol- 
 ars might then assist the superintendent in 
 instructing the younger, and the whole be 
 so arranged that each pupil might have ad- 
 vantages to become a good domestic mana- 
 ger by the time she has completed her 
 studies. 
 
 This plan would afford a healthy exercise. 
 It would prevent that estrangement from do- 
 mestic duties which would be likely to take 
 place in a length of time devoted to study 
 
25 
 
 with those to whom they were previously 
 familiar, and would accustom those to 
 them who from ignorance might otherwise 
 put at hazard their own happiness and the 
 prosperity of their families. 
 
 These objects might doubtless be effected 
 by a scheme of domestic instruction, and 
 probably others of no inconsiderable impor- 
 tance. 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 man- 
 ner 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 improve- 
 ment ; but how are we to alter so as to im- 
 prove, 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 he- 
 ing 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 ar- 
 ranged and taught 7 both in theory and by 
 practice, to a large number of females whose 
 minds were expanded and strengthened by 
 a course of litera^ 7 instruction, those among 
 them of an investigating turn would, when 
 they commencedhouse-keepingcousider their 
 domestic operations as a series of experi- 
 ments which either proveft 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 sys- 
 tem 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 draw- 
 ing and painting, elegant penmanship, mu- 
 sic, and the grace of motion. Needle-work is 
 not here mentioned. The best style of use- 
 ful needle-work should either be taught in 
 the domestic department or made a qualifi- 
 cation for entrance ; and I consider that 
 useful which may contribute to the decora- 
 tion 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 car- 
 riage might be derived from such instruc- 
 tion if the lessons were judiciously timed. 
 Exercise is needful to the health, and recre- 
 ation to the cheerfulness and contentment 
 of youth. Female youth could not be al- 
 lowed to range unrestrained, to seek amuse- 
 ment for themselves. If it was entirely pro- 
 hibited, 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 charac- 
 ter, by inducing a habit of treading forbidden 
 
28 
 
 paths. The alternative that remains is to 
 provide them with proper recreation, which, 
 after the confinement of the day, they might 
 enjoy under the eye of their instructors. 
 Dancing is exactly suited to this purpose, 
 as also to that of exercise, for perhaps in 
 no way can so much healthy exercise he 
 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 dissi- 
 pate 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, be- 
 
cause 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 beau- 
 ties, 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 Avhole business move 
 with regularity and uniformity. 
 
The laws of the institution would be 
 chiefly directed to regulate the pupils' qual- 
 ifications for entrance ; the kind and order 
 of their studies; their behavior while at the 
 institution; the term allotted for the com- 
 pletion 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 stim- 
 ulate 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 cer- 
 tain 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 in- 
 structors to give their scholars more atten- 
 tion, by which the leading facts and prin- 
 ciples of their studies would be more clearly 
 understood and better remembered. The 
 ambition excited among the pupils would op- 
 erate 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 semi- 
 naries 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 sll or any of the 
 ornamental branches, should be l^ft optional 
 with the parents or guardians. Those who 
 were to be instructed in them should be 
 entered for a longer terra, 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 pub- 
 licly known ; and those who were previously 
 acquainted with the branches first taught 
 
32 
 
 might enter the higher classes ; nor would 
 those who entered the lowest be obliged to 
 remain during the three years. Thus the 
 term of remaining at the institution might 
 be either one, two, three, four, or more years, 
 and that without interfering with the reg- 
 ularity 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 practic- 
 able to organize a system of female educa- 
 tion 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 in- 
 struction should form the softer sex. 
 
 It now remains to inquire more partic- 
 ularly 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 he well organized 
 its advantages would he found so great that 
 others would soon he instituted, and that 
 sufficient patronage can be found to put one 
 in operation may be presumed from its rea- 
 sonableness, and from the public opinion 
 with regard to the present mode of female 
 education. It is from an intimate acquaint- 
 ance with those parts of our country where 
 education is said to nourish 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 de- 
 ploring its faults. Her sentiments are shared 
 by many an enlightened parent of a daughter 
 who has received a boarding-school educa- 
 tion. Counting on the promise of her child- 
 hood, the father had anticipated her matu- 
 rity as combining what is excellent in mind 
 with what is elegant in maulers. 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 re- 
 
34 
 
 fined 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 bnds, 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 man- 
 ners, and whatever forms the distinguishing 
 charm of the feminine character, they can- 
 not 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 in- 
 struction second-handed. Snch 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 bene- 
 fits 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 sem- 
 
imiries over these would operate in two 
 ways: first, by requiring certain qualifica- 
 tions for entrance ; and, secondly, by furnish- 
 ing instructresses initiated in their modes of 
 teaching and imbued with their maxims. 
 
 Female seminaries might be expected to 
 have important and happy effects on com- 
 mon 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 in- 
 structors 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 calcula- 
 tions are all directed. If, then, women were 
 properly fitted by instruction, they would be 
 likely to teach children better th.au 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 wom- 
 en are necessarily debarred. 
 
 But the females who taught children would 
 have been themselves instructed either im- 
 mediately or indirectly by the seminaries. 
 Hence, through these the government might 
 exercise an intimate and most benelicial 
 control over common schools. Any one who 
 has turned his attention to the subject must 
 be aware that there is great room for im- 
 provement 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 instruc- 
 tion 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 np 
 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 individu- 
 als; 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 gen- 
 eral truth. The existence of nations can- 
 not in strictness be compared with the 
 duration of animate life; for by the opera- 
 tion of physical causes this, after a certain 
 length of time, must cease; but the exist- 
 ence of nations is prolonged by the succes- 
 sion of one generation to another, and there 
 is no physical cause to prevent this succes- 
 sion's going on in a peaceable manner under 
 a good government till the end of time. 
 We must then look to other causes than ne- 
 cessity for the decline and fall of former re- 
 publics. If we could discover these causes, 
 
38 
 
 and seasonably prevent their operation, then 
 might our latest posterity enjoy the sarne 
 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 what- 
 ever regarded the formation of the female 
 character. 
 
 In those great republics which have fallen 
 of themselves the loss of republican man- 
 ners 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 be- 
 come 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 in- 
 troduction 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 tempations to which, through the in- 
 fluence of wealth, mature age will be ex- 
 posed? and in giving strength and expan- 
 sion 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 experi- 
 ment whether education may not preserve 
 public virtue never yet been fairly tried. 
 Such a part has been left in all former ex- 
 periments. Females have been exposed to 
 the contagion of wealth without the preserv- 
 ative of a good education, and they con- 
 stitute that part of the body politic least 
 endowed by nature to resist, most to com- 
 
municate it. Nay, not merely have they 
 been left without the defence of a good edu- 
 cation, but their corruption has been acceler- 
 ated by a bad one. The character of women 
 of wealth has been, and in the old govern- 
 ments of Europe now is, all that this state- 
 ment would lead us to expect. Not content 
 with doing nothing to promote their conn- 
 try'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 diffus- 
 ing 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 relig- 
 ion. 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 un- 
 hallowed devotion. 
 
 But while with an anguished heart I thus 
 depict the crimes of my sex, let not the oth- 
 er stand by and smile. Reason declares that 
 
you are guiltier than we. You are our nat- 
 ural guardians our brothers, our fathers, 
 and our rulers. You know that our ductile 
 minds readily take the impressions of edu- 
 cation. Why, then, have you neglected our 
 education ? Why have you looked with 
 lethargic indifference on circumstances ruin- 
 ous 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 fe- 
 males 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 daugh- 
 ters 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 na- 
 tional prosperity, and so necessary to the 
 existence of a republican government? 
 
 1. Females, by having their understand- 
 ings cultivated, their reasoning powers de- 
 veloped 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, en- 
 forced 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 perform- 
 ance. 
 
 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 conjunc- 
 tion 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 as- 
 sociation they might in future life regard it 
 as respectable. 
 
 To this it may be added that if house- 
 wifery could be raised to a regular art, 
 and taught upon philosophical principles, it 
 
would become a higher and morr- interest- 
 ing occupation; and ladies of fr ^une, like 
 wealthy agriculturists, migM f' ii that to 
 regulate their busine -.. .vas an ag.- oable em- 
 ployment. 
 
 4. The pupils might be expected to ac- 
 quire 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 nat- 
 ural 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 philos- 
 ophy, and in that which teaches the opera- 
 tions of the mind, females would be enabled 
 to. perceive the nature and extent of that 
 influence which they possess over their chil- 
 dren, and the obligation which this lays 
 them under to watch the formation of their 
 characters with unceasing vigilance, to be- 
 come 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 pro- 
 moting their welfare, rather than in a heart- 
 less 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 with- 
 out any virtuous road to eminence is un- 
 safe 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 litera- 
 ture, which has heretofore been their only 
 honorable way to distinction ; and we will 
 offer them a new object, worthy of their am- 
 
bition : to govern and improve the semina- 
 ries 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 cor- 
 ruption 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 im- 
 portance entitles us? History shows not 
 that country. It shows many whose legis- 
 latures have sought to improve their various 
 vegetable productions and their breeds of 
 useful brutes, but none whose public coun- 
 cils have made it an object of their deliber- 
 ations 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 independ- 
 ence, 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 exe- 
 cute. 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, en- 
 lightened by the bounty of that beloved 
 country, to defend her liberties, to plan her 
 future improvement, and to raise her to un- 
 paralleled glory? 
 
 MlDDLEBURY, 1819. 
 
FEMALE EDUCATION.* 
 
 BY MRS. EMMA C. EMBURY. 
 
 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 per- 
 fect day/' it may seem idle and superfluous 
 to call your attention to so hackneyed a sub- 
 ject as that of education. But permit me 
 to observe that a subject of such vital im- 
 portance to us, both as individuals and citi- 
 zens, can scarcely be too often presented to 
 onr view. There is perhaps no country in 
 the world where the benefits of education 
 are so fully appreciated and so widely dif- 
 fused as in our own. Schools, both public 
 and private, have multiplied in every, part 
 of the, Union; and even our common semi- 
 naries are now conducted upon such enlarged 
 and liberal principles, as were formerly un- 
 known beyond the walls of a university. But 
 
 * An address delivered at the Brooklyn Collegiate In- 
 stitute for Young Ladies. 
 
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 ex- 
 clusive 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 trans- 
 lator 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 thread- 
 ed the pleasant mazes of the latter with such 
 feminine tact, as Madame de Stael, the won- 
 der of her own sex, the envy of ours ? Is it 
 the fairy - laud 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 tbau in the 
 productions of our universal favorite, Mrs. 
 Hemans? 
 
 From_the almost numberless examples of 
 female intellect a few only have been ad- 
 duced, with which we are all familiar, and 
 surely they are enough to convince any un- 
 prejudiced 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 preju- 
 dice and diving into the depths of science 
 after the yet undiscovered gems of truth ; but 
 who will dare assert that she is therefore in- 
 sensible to their value or incapable of grasp- 
 ing them f 
 
 It has been asserted by some, whose minds 
 were capable of a much wider range of ob- 
 servation than the remark would seem to 
 indicate, .that education, though it always 
 renders man an ornament to his station in 
 society, in variably unfits a, woman for the du- 
 ties 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 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
50 
 
 right' 7 seldom will voluntarily "the wrong 
 pursue." I speak uot now of what is usu- 
 ally 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 disci- 
 pline 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 mod- 
 esty and decorum, and publicly proclaims 
 herself the " apostle of infidelity." These are 
 things which, if they were the result of men- 
 tal 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 pres- 
 ent enlarged system of female education is 
 that it is calculated to render women ped- 
 ants and bookworms rather than useful 
 members of the domestic circle ; but to con- 
 fute 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 ex- 
 tensive acquirements. Indeed, is it not ab- 
 surd to suppose that our daily repast will be 
 less grateful because intellect and elegance 
 preside at the social board ? or that household 
 tires will burn less brightly because kindled 
 by a torch from the shrine of Minerva ? 
 
 The true cause of all these various objec- 
 tions 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 improve- 
 ment 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 strik- 
 ing proof of its benefits) has compared a well- 
 regulated mind to a watch, where every part 
 is so nicely balanced that no one can pre- 
 
52 
 
 ponderate. This is a very apt illustration. 
 Of the various faculties with which Heaven 
 has endowed us, each may be perfect in it- 
 self; but from some error in our adjustment 
 of them (if I may use the term), all may be- 
 come useless. It is only by the most un- 
 wearied self-discipline that this correct bal- 
 ance of mental powers can be eifected ; and 
 the ability to discipline one's self can only 
 be derived from education. 
 
 To employ the rapidly -developing facul- 
 ties of early childhood merely as sources of 
 amusement to ourselves is certainly not the 
 proper method of bestowing upon our chil- 
 dren 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 zeal- 
 ous laborers in the field of knowledge would 
 deem necessary. As soon as a child is capa- 
 ble of receiving different degrees of pleasure 
 from different objects, the task of instruc- 
 tion should commence; not, however, by 
 means of dry precept and tedious disquisi- 
 tion, for these would be incomprehensible, 
 but by resorting to all those thousand de- 
 vices which a judicious instructor is so in- 
 genious in contriving, in order to inform as 
 
well as amuse. Every opportunity of im- 
 parting knowledge should be eagerly seized, 
 for knowledge acquired at such an age be- 
 comes a part of our very nature ; and, what- 
 ever 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 weari- 
 ness of spirit, the mother has endured in 
 order to render his children the objects of 
 his pride as well as of his affection. To fos- 
 ter 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 
 v 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 uutilled field, 
 and then go his way rejoicing in the antici- 
 pation 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 in- 
 judicious 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 be- 
 gin in infancy. Even in the nurse's arms a 
 child learns to distinguish between pleasur- 
 
able and disagreeable objects ; and in the 
 same manner that is to say, by making ap- 
 peals to the senses may it be taught the dif- 
 ference 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 mater- 
 nal duties, for awful is their responsibility. 
 
 Could the secret biography of heroes and 
 sages throughout the earth be correctly as- 
 certained, 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, notwithstand- 
 ing 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 relin- 
 quish 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 acknowl- 
 edge 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 ob- 
 serve him placed at the head of that nation, 
 idolized by its citizens, respected by its en- 
 emies, admired by the world ; yet, uncontam- 
 inated by that ambition which is so gener- 
 ally 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 ns contemplate in every 
 point of view tlie 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 Wash- 
 ington was formed by his mother. 
 
 In a country like ours, where wealth is 
 continually fluctuating, where the fortune 
 which a fa i her 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 gov- 
 ernment 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 ifc hears '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 pa- 
 triotic bosom ? " The old systems of educa- 
 tion are good for nothing," said the First Con- 
 sul 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 f" 
 continued he. " Mothers" was the emphatic 
 reply. "True, madame," answered Napoleon ; 
 "letFrenchmeu, therefore, acknowledge their 
 obligation to you as having been the first to 
 educate mothers for their children." Na- 
 poleon 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 pen- 
 etration 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 daugh- 
 ters should be rendered capable of becoming 
 teachers of classical literature or professors 
 
59 
 
 of the sciences; but I would have them in- 
 timately acquainted with all useful branches 
 of human knowledge. I would have them / 
 sufficiently versed in the learning of the an- 
 cients 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 cornet h 
 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 inca- 
 pable 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 in- 
 quiry in the infant mind ; to direct that in- 
 quiry to subjects which may purify the heart 
 and elevate the intellect ; to impart the first 
 notions of a Deity, and afterwards to im- 
 
60 
 
 prove those vague ideas iuto a love and rev- 
 erence for tlie bountiful Creator and Ruler 
 of the universe these are tasks of which 
 no father, however affectionate, is capable. 
 They require woman's opportunities, wom- 
 an's tact, woman's delicacy j and, may I not 
 add, the peculiar devotedness of woman's af- 
 fection ? 
 
 "There is none, 
 
 lu 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. 
 
61 
 
 Bat 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 or- 
 der. Beautiful as is the picture of woman's 
 tenderness which I have just presented to 
 yon, 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,* by lips that 
 seemed touched with u 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 
 
 * This address was read in St. Ann's Church, Brooklyn. 
 
62 
 
 she may be able to say, in the emphatic 
 words of Scripture, " Behold, here ain 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 chil- 
 dren? It is a debt like that we owe to 
 Heaven the day of our death finds it yet 
 uucaucelled. 
 
 To you, my young friends, I would ad- 
 dress myself in the language of deep and 
 earnest interest. You are now at that de- 
 lightful 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 anx- 
 ious 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-break- 
 ing 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 worn- 
 
63 
 
 ar^s will soon claim your undivided atten- 
 tion. Let me pray you, therefore, so to dis- 
 cipline 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 re- 
 member that " of those to whom much is 
 given, much will be required;" and that gen- 
 ius and knowledge, while they lay claim to 
 the highest honors which man can bestow, 
 also bear with them the highest responsibili- 
 ties 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 ut- 
 terly unconscious of them. Pause, then in 
 the cool freshness of the morning of life, be- 
 fore you wax faint in the noonday heats 
 pause and form for yourselves the noble res- 
 olutions which should direct your future 
 life. Look back through the shadowy vista 
 of past years, and behold what are the foun- 
 dations 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 con- 
 duct, take heed that ye " keep your hearts 
 
with all diligence, for out of them are the 
 issues of life." Form your taste on the clas- 
 sics, 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. 
 
THE COLLEGIATE EDUCATION OF 
 GIRLS.* 
 
 BY PROFESSOR MARIA MITCHELL, 
 VASSAR COLLEGE. 
 
 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 Dative latitude, even if tlie 
 polestar is lower. I listened with great in- 
 terest 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 
 
 * This paper was read at the Congress of the Associa- 
 tion for the Advancement of Women, held in Boston, 
 October, 1880. 
 5 
 
66 
 
 thought of the girls." And he had daughters 
 only ! Let us think of the girls. 
 
 WHOM SHALL WE HELP TO A COLLEGIATE 
 EDUCATION ? 
 
 Our colleges are at present adapted to 
 what in England would be called the " upper 
 middle class." Can we extend their oppor- 
 tunities 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 in- 
 terest 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 an- 
 swer : 
 
67 
 
 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 pul- 
 pit, so there is to-day some tendency to send 
 a sickly girl to college partly because our 
 girls' colleges are governed by so good san- 
 itary laws. I should dissuade the delicate 
 girl from the attempt to take a regular col- 
 lege course. Let her study in the open air! 
 Let her take a regular course of study in 
 out-of-door practical sciences botany, geol- 
 ogy, mineralogy. Let her exchange the 
 crochet - needle for the needle of the sur- 
 
68 
 
 veyor's compass. The study of nature must 
 be study with nature ; if it requires one 
 hour with hooks, this may he followed hy 
 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 he a good institution. 
 Let a number of students club together, and 
 establishing themselves in a healthy and 
 unfashionable place, study its natural his- 
 tory. Such education would be fragment- 
 ary, 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 coining 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 
 thjuk 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 con- 
 sider 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 f 
 
 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 bestow- 
 ing unsuitable costume. Let her learn the 
 
70 
 
 value of money. Most girls would prefer a 
 loan, and the very carefulness to repay a 
 loan would be a check to unnecessary ex- 
 pense. 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 EDUCA- 
 TION OF WOMEN STILL HIGHER? 
 
 I never look at a group of teachers such 
 as are employed in the colleges for girls but 
 I am reminded of the expression of St. 
 Ambrose : " The noble army of martyrs." 
 
71 
 
 The work of a teacher should be such as 
 does not kill, for the value of human life is 
 quite as great in the case of the teacher as 
 in that of the student. 
 
 The pleasant smile with which a young 
 teacher greets her class as she enters upon 
 her duties should become more serene, more 
 inspiring at middle life. But how can it 
 be ? I find that the number of students to 
 one teacher is usually fifty! The amount 
 of work that teachers do is enormous. 
 There seems to be no "getting through." 
 They work five or six hours a day, and then 
 take to their rooms the written examina- 
 tions and problems for their evening recrea- 
 tion. 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 care- 
 ful watching over her health, the good 
 counsel given in morals, the patient endur- 
 ance with loose mental habits and I have 
 said to myself, "How little that parent 
 knows the enormous return which he gets 
 for his moneyed investment !" 
 
 We are constantly told that too many 
 women become teachers. Yes ; but the 
 number would not be too great if fewer 
 students were put into the hands of one 
 
72 
 
 teacher. A teacher should not cease to be 
 a student ; she cannot, with safety ; she 
 should have time for new acquisitions. I 
 would not say, give time by lengthening 
 vacations; but I would say, give time by 
 lessening the number of students. A young 
 girl needs the companionship in her classes 
 of a few, but the teacher should know each 
 pupil individually. According to rny 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 teaclier 
 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 tho 
 cast-off clergyman. And this in Massa- 
 chusetts. 
 
 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 girPs education is much greater than that 
 of a boy. Why should it be so ? Why 
 should not girls club together, board them- 
 selves in a wholesome and inexpensive way, 
 obtain some light employment which will 
 add to their means, and dress for almost 
 nothing? I touch the subject of expense in 
 dress with a sinking heart, for I know that 
 
74 
 
 no party is with me ; I stand almost alone. 
 We need organized missionary work on the 
 subject. Young women say, " It is our duty 
 to look pretty;" and one would suppose, 
 from the attention paid to it, that it was 
 the highest duty. In the very homes whoso 
 walls are unadorned with pictures and whose 
 book-shelves contain no standard works, the 
 wardrobe is defended on aesthetic 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 or- 
 dinary 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 alSle to give up the pomps and pa- 
 rades 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 
 up stimulus to work. The commencement 
 ceremonies are in the thoughts of an ambi- 
 tious girl from the time she enters college 
 until she graduates. The " part " at com- 
 mencement 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 work- 
 ing ; 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 tow- 
 ards 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 build- 
 ings. 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 astro- 
 nomical observatory, and every classic orna- 
 ment 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 vis- 
 itor 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 education- 
 al purposes which are exactly adapted to 
 the demand of the hour. Both were built 
 by women. The first is the Woman's Lab- 
 oratory in Boston, where every cent has 
 been spent for science and the investiga- 
 tions of science. The second is the build- 
 ing of the School of Philosophy at Concord. 
 It is a plain one-story building; its outward 
 decoration the vine which creeps up its un- 
 painted 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 endow- 
 ment 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 educa- 
 tion 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 ad- 
 mission of women to school suffrage in Mas- 
 
sacliusetts is a very great gain to the cause 
 of education. Perhaps it is larger to me be- 
 cause 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 move- 
 ment had reached the ears of women ; the 
 temperance movement had gone to their 
 hearts ; women had already become the lead- 
 ing orators; it was comparatively a little 
 thing to drop a ballot into a box. When all 
 the women of the laud are roused to an in- 
 terest 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. 
 
 Ix 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 some- 
 thing 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 Pepysiau spirit. For heside 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 peti- 
 tion : 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 educa- 
 tional 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 preeminently representing the in- 
 tellectual 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 
 Francoise de Saintonge was hooted through 
 the streets of her native village for propos- 
 ing so disreputable a plan as the establish- 
 ment 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 doc- 
 tors pronounced her in her right mind, but 
 her pious fellow-citizens stopped the spread 
 of immoral ideas by the conclusive argu- 
 ment 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 con- 
 stantlv 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 agaiiist such attainments in wom- 
 en, 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 at- 
 tempting 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 after- 
 wards, in advising her daughter concerning 
 the education of a bright little namesake, 
 she entreats that free scope may be ac- 
 corded the child's capacity, for the sake of 
 the pure delight of learning and of her 
 future happiness. But she adds the warn- 
 ing 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 
 6 
 
82 
 
 learned woman. So strong, almost to our 
 day, has been tbis balf-couscious contempt 
 of tbe feminine mentality, that even Charles 
 Lamb, that gentle and charitable so al, 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 English- 
 woman, 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 conserv- 
 ative, perhaps, for the thorough cultivation 
 of the female mind, urged on social, moral, 
 and religious grounds, and protesting against 
 the sentimental ism of Rousseau and the 
 now forgotten Dr. Gregory. Mrs. Hannah 
 More's dull novel of "Ccelebs 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 knowl- 
 edge of the Latin grammar incompatible 
 with a turn for house-keeping. 
 
 It was no scoffer, but the sweet-spirited 
 Fenelou, who taught that contact with 
 learning would be almost as fatal to wom- 
 anly delicacy as contact with vice. To 
 
Voltaire's love of epigram might be pardoued 
 his saying that "Ideas are like beards; wom- 
 en 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 Nie- 
 buhr, 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 Fa- 
 thers to establish schools. Girls were al- 
 lowed 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 lan- 
 guage correctly and the rudiments of arith- 
 metic." 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 mul- 
 tiply teachers? No, but to close the school 
 altogether. 
 
84 
 
 We smile at Monsieur de Sainlonge and 
 
 the sages of Boston. The two hundred and 
 fifty advertisements refute the ancient preju- 
 dices. The innumerable names of women 
 who have conquered success in literature, 
 science, art j as great organizers, administra- 
 tors, educators, refute them. The very dis- 
 cussion 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 incen- 
 tives, 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 be- 
 cause 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 
 lie fon ght 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 brnte 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, elee- 
 mosynary, must he 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 lias 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 do- 
 main, 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 them- 
 selves 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 re- 
 lieves them from drudgery. Moreover, the 
 great increase of wealth following on the 
 arts of peace, fosters a growing class of un- 
 employed 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 de- 
 velopment, must be equally valuable to 
 woman. If the languages, mathematics, 
 modern science, logic, metaphysics, psychol- 
 ogy, best train the faculties of observation, 
 
87 
 
 comparison, reflection ; if they give flexibil- 
 ity and strength to the mind, and rnonld it 
 to be always progressive, always acquiring 
 more knowledge by thoughtful experience 
 ought not their salutary discipline, as ad- 
 ministered in college, to be extended to 
 girls ? 
 
 It is answered, first, that girls, being dif- 
 ferent, 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 de- 
 velop 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 occu- 
 pations has called this or that talent into 
 action. There is surely no occasion to go 
 into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning 
 to explain so very simple a phenomenon." 
 Teachers of mixed classes agree that what 
 profits the one profits the other. Seneca 
 advocated the study of the Greek philosophy 
 
88 
 
 for women, who, lie said, Deeded it as a re- 
 straint upon their more impulsive tempera- 
 ment ; and Plutarch urged upon his country- 
 women 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. Famil- 
 iarity with scientific methods of study would 
 dissipate their general and perilous conn- 
 deuce in "luck," and in that impossible con- 
 dition 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 judg- 
 ment requiring more or less scientific knowl- 
 edge and a scientific habit of thought. An 
 exact mental training would mitigate the 
 evils and enlarge the best possibilities of 
 woman's existence. 
 
 This training both private schools and 
 
89 
 
 high-schools must fall short of. Girls' high- 
 schools afford four years of what is projected 
 as an eight years' term, and girls are ex- 
 pected to be satisfied with what is merely a 
 preparatory course for their brothers. Pri- 
 vate schools necessarily reflect the indefinite 
 and various demands of their patrons. Un- 
 due stress must be laid upon accomplish- 
 ments, undue cramming must be encouraged, 
 the period of study being far too short; the 
 methods of teaching must be empirical rath- 
 er than scientific, and the end aimed at tem- 
 porary and unreal, having no relation to life 
 beyond the examination and the class-room. 
 Our best private schools are indeed admir- 
 able, but there is no recognized standard of 
 worth, and the bad are as ten to one. Besides, 
 in apparatus, cabinets, libraries, and profes- 
 sorships, 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 sal- 
 aries, 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 he ham- 
 pered 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 candi- 
 dates to the universities. Were pupils from 
 the girls' schools admitted to the same ex- 
 aminations, 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 opportu- 
 nities of self-immolation must, of course, be 
 denied them. The average health of board- 
 ing-schools is indeed low. From the graded 
 and normal schools girls are withdrawn 
 more frequently than lx>ys by reason of 
 physical inability. But the monstrousness 
 of the prevailing curriculum, the high press- 
 ure, bad dressing, bad diet, external dis- 
 tractions, 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 civiliza- 
 tion, 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-con- 
 scious of employments. Yet there is a gen- 
 eral feeling that some vague danger, to 
 manners if not to morals, lurks in the de- 
 mand for the admission of girls to the pre- 
 cincts of the college. When the trustees of 
 Cornell were debating the wisdom of accept- 
 ing 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 pro- 
 priety of opening the classes to women. The 
 speculations of the officers of the older col- 
 leges (inheriting their traditions from semi- 
 monastic institutions, founded and admin- 
 istered by men vowed to celibacy, and 
 dreading the influence of women,) almost 
 
92 
 
 j uniformly discouraged and disapproved such 
 a step. The testimony of the colleges al- 
 ready 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 TlnT'sEan d ard of 
 scholarship would be lowered in concession 
 to feminine limitations; and thaTT~senti- 
 mentalism would be developed, with a con- 
 sequent deterioration of morals. In practice 
 it was proved that while the boys acquired 
 
 finer manners, the girls advanced in truth- 
 
 %j ^ 
 
 fulness, 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-educa- 
 tion may do for the bucolical regions of 
 Michigan and Cornell universities, the me- 
 tropolis, 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 uni- 
 versity 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 advan- 
 tages 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 universi- 
 ties toward the public schools for boys," 
 and "to obtain for the students of the col- 
 lege admission to the examinations for de- 
 grees 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 ad- 
 mission of eighty -six candidates, of whom 
 nineteen were graduated with honors, ac- 
 cording to the university standard, and 
 eleven passed the examinations which qual- 
 ify for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. These 
 examinations, however, presented only an- 
 houor standard, and it was not until Febru- 
 ary, 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 Newuham Hall was 
 erected for the accommodation of women 
 students coming to Cambridge to avail them- 
 selves of the new opportunities. Newuham 
 Hostel was presently added, and the two, 
 constituting Newnhain College, to-day over- 
 flow with students. 
 
 Following on the Cambridge success came 
 the opening, at Oxford, of Lady Margaret 
 Hall and Souierville College, the free ad- 
 mission of women to the examinations of 
 the University of London, and the granting 
 of liberal opportunities on the part of Edin- 
 burgh, Dublin, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Durham, 
 and St. Andrews. The University of Lou- 
 
don is a young institution, unhampered by 
 the prejudices and restrictions of its elders. 
 " Hence it has been able to take a more de- 
 cisive step than any other university in the 
 direction of improvement in women's educa- 
 tion. For several years it tried the experi- 
 ment of a special examination for women, 
 with a curriculum framed in supposed def- 
 erence to special feminine needs. But though 
 many women availed themselves of this ex- 
 amination, it soon became evident that the 
 successes they won were all on the old lines 
 in classics, science, mathematics, litera- 
 ture ; 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 stand- 
 ards, 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 
 
9G 
 
 degrees in all the faculties arts, laws, medi- 
 cine, science, music and permitting tliem 
 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 aud 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 ac- 
 counted for by the fact that at present the 
 numbers are much smaller, and are necessa- 
 rily 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 tread- 
 ing the usual path towards professional 
 life, and who have no special aptitude or 
 enthusiasm for study." This is the testi- 
 mony 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; 
 
97 
 
 "Having taken classes of ladies through the Ethics 
 and part of the Metaphysics of Aristotle, and the ' Re- 
 public,' 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 giv- 
 ing 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 Cam- 
 bridge 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 intrin- 
 sically 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 Col- 
 lege the women not unfrequently beat the men in the 
 lists. Last year two-thirds of those examined in Com- 
 parative 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 be- 
 lieve. She did extremely well in the paper, and has been 
 working at the subject since, and showing a very remark- 
 able linguistic aptitude not merely in ancient, but in 
 7 
 
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 otlier colleges eoine equally fa- 
 vorable reports of feminine application, per- 
 sistency, 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 Girtou the pleas- 
 ant 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 satisfac- 
 tory is the testimony to the moral safety of 
 the new system, not the slightest suggestion 
 of impropriety having arisen. 
 
 From the beginning the most distin- 
 guished men in England, both lay and cler- 
 ical, have been most friendly to this move- 
 ment for the liberation of learning. At a 
 recent distribution of prizes at the Oxford 
 higher local examination, the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury expressed bis great gratification 
 that opportunities for the highest iustruc- 
 
.99 
 
 tion were so rapidly opening to young 
 women. 
 
 The fortunate candidates for honors or 
 recognition long since began to reap sub- 
 stantial benefits from having received the 
 Cambridge certificate, not only in being pre- 
 ferred as teachers or governesses, but by 
 commanding better salaries. The standard 
 of girls' schools has been perceptibly ad- 
 vanced, and the character of pupils elevated, 
 u sentiinentalism 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 branch- 
 es of study, under the care of the teachers 
 already assembled." Columbia cannot jus- 
 tify their exclusion on the ground that Vas- 
 sar and Wellesley and Smith colleges invite 
 them. Boys are intrusted to her care when 
 
100 
 
 Harvard and Yale exist, because New York 
 parents prefer that home influences should 
 accompany college training; and girls do 
 not need these influences less. Besides, the 
 expense of girls' resident - colleges is very 
 great, compared with those of a richly en- 
 dowed 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 com- 
 mon, as at Cambridge, it is difficult to see 
 any sound objection to that economy of ^J 
 teaching. If it be found convenient to in- ' 
 struct them separately, again, as at Cam- 
 bridge, 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 ap- 
 prehended 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 souHs. above sex. But here, as 
 everywhere, the way of justice is the way of 
 expediency. Enlightenment is not in pro- 
 portion to the amount of knowledge on de- 
 posit 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 aver- 
 age mother and school-mistress for this high 
 task, what wasted powers, what mean ideals, 
 what mistaken views of life bear w r itness ! 
 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 uncul- 
 tivated desire for the higher satisfactions of 
 art which makes our homes museums of up- 
 
liolstery. It is her unenlightened loyalty to 
 the spirit of good which bids her cling to old 
 abuses that were once uses, to harmful su- 
 perstitions that were once faiths, and which 
 to-day constitutes her the most conspicuous 
 bar to progress. Tocqueville says that he as- 
 cribes the treachery of some of the first lead- 
 ers in the reform movements in France to the 
 unhappy influence of wives and sisters on hus- 
 bands 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 jew^Lofjii^h^culture, the roy- 
 alty of knowledge. 
 
 1883. 
 
A REVIEW OF THE HIGHER EDUCA- 
 TION OF WOMEN. 
 
 BY ALICE FREEMAN PALMER. 
 
 AMERICAN college education in the quar- 
 ter-century since the Civil War lias under- 
 gone 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 as- 
 sociations 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 diver- 
 gence 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 govern- 
 ment and instruction ; the requirements for 
 the bachelor's and master's degrees; the 
 stress to be laid on graduate work these, 
 and many sequents of these, touching the 
 
104 
 
 physical, social, and religious life of the 
 young men of the laud, are undergoing sharp 
 discussion. 
 
 The advanced education of young women 
 is exposed to all the uncertainties which be- 
 set the education of men, but it has perplexi- 
 ties of its own in addition. After fifty years 
 of argument and twenty-five of varied and 
 costly experiment, it might be easy to sup- 
 pose 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 ses- 
 sion devoted to the difficulties in " the high- 
 er 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 dis- 
 cussion 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 pur- 
 
105 
 
 poso of this paper to explain. The nature 
 of each, with its special strengths and weak- 
 nesses, will be set forth, in no spirit of parti- 
 sanship, but in the belief that a cool under- 
 standing 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 convic- 
 tion came that education was a right of per- 
 sonality 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 equippiug women 
 with the needful preparation was found in 
 the existing schools and colleges. Scattered 
 all over the country were colleges for men, 
 youug for the most part and small, and 
 greatly lacking anything like a proper en- 
 dowment. 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, arid were ambitious aud struggling. 
 " Why," asked tbe practical men of affairs 
 who controlled them, " should not our daugh- 
 ters go on with our sons from the public 
 schools to the university which we are sac- 
 rificing to equip and maintain ? Why should 
 we duplicate the enormously expensive ap- 
 pliances of education, when our existing col- 
 leges 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 im- 
 portant concerns of life; why should they 
 be separated in the lecture - room for only 
 the four years between eighteen and twen- 
 ty-two, when that separation means the 
 doubling of an equipment already too poor 
 by half f 
 
 It is not strange that with tbis and much 
 more practical reasoning of a similar kind, 
 co-education was established in some col- 
 leges at their beginning, in others after de- 
 bate, 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 prin- 
 ciple unflinchingly. From the kindergarten 
 to the preparation for the doctorate of phi- 
 losophy, educational opportunities are now 
 
practically alike for men and women. The 
 total number of colleges of arts and sci- / 
 eiices empowered by law to give degrees, iX 
 reporting to Washington m 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.* 
 
 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, char- 
 tered in 1804, is the oldest incorporated in- / ./ 
 stitution in the country to which boys and f/r 
 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. Ips- 
 
 * Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1887-88, 
 Chapter xi. 
 
wicli 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 separate!}'. The older, more gen- 
 erously 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 ac- 
 quiring knowledge take place under careful 
 guardianship, among the refinements of 
 home life, with graceful women, their in- 
 structors, 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 pow- 
 erful moral, often a deeply religious earnest- 
 ness, shaped the discussion, and finally laid 
 the foundations of woman's education in the 
 East. 
 
 In the short period of the twenty years 
 after the war the four women's colleges 
 which are the richest in endowments and 
 
 
109 
 
 students of any iii 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 thou- 
 sand students. But these resources proved 
 inadequate. There came an increasing de- 
 mand, especially from teachers, for educa- 
 tion of all sorts ; more and more, too, for 
 training in subjects of advanced research. 
 For this, only the best equipped men's uni- 
 versities were thought sufficient, and wom- 
 en began to resort to the great university 
 centres of England and Germany. In an at- 
 tempt 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 culti- 
 vated surroundings assure a scholarly atmos- 
 
\ 
 
 phere ; in short, in the shadow of all tha.fc 
 goes to make up the gracious influences of 
 an old and honorable university, it was to 
 be expected that earnest women would gath- 
 er to seek a share in the enthusiasm for 
 scholarship, and the opportunities for ac- 
 quiring 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 en- 
 tire ; 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 begin- 
 ning, 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 dan- 
 gers 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 Uni- 
 versity of Michigan, my own Alma Mater, 
 Wellesley College, with whose government 
 I have been connected for a dozen years, 
 
and the Harvard Aim ex, 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 condi- 
 tions of admission, of opportunities during 
 the course, of requirements for the degrees, 
 of guardianship, of discipline, of organiza- 
 tion. The typical features are identical 
 class-rooms, libraries, and laboratories, occu- 
 pied at the same time, under the same in- 
 structors ; and the same honors for like 
 work. Ordinarily all the instructors are 
 men, although in a few universities profes- 
 sorships are held by women. Usually no 
 dormitories or boarding-houses are provid- 
 ed for either the young men or women, and 
 no more surveillance is kept over the one 
 than over the other. This feature, how- 
 ever, 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 regula- 
 tions of home life, with a lady in charge. 
 But in most of the higher co-educational in- 
 stitutions the principle has from the first 
 been assumed that students of both sexes 
 
112 
 
 become sufficiently matured by eighteen 
 years of home, school, and social life espe- 
 cially under the ample opportunities for 
 learning the uses of freedom which our so- 
 cial habits aiford safely to undertake a 
 college course, and advantageously to or- 
 der their daily lives. Of course all have a 
 moral support in the advice and example of 
 their teachers, and they are held to good in- 
 tellectual work by the perpetual demand 
 of the class - room, the laboratoiy, 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 arrange- 
 ments 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 so- 
 ciety, clubs, and church. The advice she gets 
 comes from another girl student of sopho- 
 moric dignity who chances to be in the same 
 house, or possibly from a still more advanced 
 young woman whom she met on the jour- 
 ney, 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 anxie- 
 ties about co-education have been allayed, a 
 healthy and hearty relationship and honest 
 rivalry between young men and women ex- 
 ist. It is a stimulating atmosphere, and 
 develops in good stock a strength and inde- 
 pendent 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 attrac- 
 tion to men, and also in herself so delicately 
 organized as to be fitted peculiarly for the 
 graces and domesticities of life. The exer- 
 cise of her special function of motherhood 
 demands sheltered circumstances and refined 
 
moral perceptions. But ta . . over and 
 above all this, she is a human being a per- 
 son, that is, who has her own way in the 
 world to make, and who will come to suc- 
 cess 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 accu- 
 rate, 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 ed- 
 ucation is addressed to his rational person- 
 ality rather than to the peculiarities of bis 
 sex. Why, the defenders of co-education ask, 
 may not the same principles apply to women ? 
 Wby 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 differ- 
 ences 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 ^1 
 each scope for individuality. The strengths X 
 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, disin- 
 clination to claim favor, interest in learning 
 for its own sake ; friendly, natural, unro- 
 mautic, non-sentimental relations with men. 
 The early fear that co-education would re- 
 sult in class-room romances has proved ex- 
 
aggerated. 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 suc- 
 cessful 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 en- 
 couraged 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 ac- 
 quirement of knowledge and the encourage- 
 
117 
 
 ment 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 it- 
 self. When girls are gathered together by 
 hundreds, isolated from the ordinary condi- 
 tions of established communities, the college 
 stands to them pre-eminently in loco paren- 
 tis. 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, ac- 
 cepting 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 instruc- 
 tion, while seeking still to respect the varied 
 faiths of its students. In short, the ar- 
 rangements of the woman's college, as con- 
 ceived by founders, trustees, and faculty, 
 have usually aimed with conscious direct- 
 
ness 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, enlarg- 
 ing life. But the question is one of direct- 
 ness 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 num- 
 ber are women who live with the students 
 in the college buildings, sit with them at 
 table, join iu their festivities, and in num- 
 berless 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 iu 
 the class-room. In appointing these wom- 
 en 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 unob- 
 jectionable manners and influential charac- 
 ter; she should have amiability and a dis- 
 creet temper, for she is to be a guiding force 
 in a complex community, continually in the 
 presence of her students, an officer of admin- 
 istration and government no less than of in- 
 struction. 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 ques- 
 tion 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 teach- 
 ing body, but in all its appliances the sepa- 
 rate college aims at a rounded refinement, 
 at cultivating a sense of beauty, at impart- 
 ing 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 
 
tlie characters of one another, when they 
 live for four years in the closest daily com- 
 panionship, 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, service- 
 able society of people exists than the girls' 
 college community affords. That choicest 
 product of modern civilization, the Amer- 
 ican girl, is here in all her diverse colors. 
 She comes from more than a dozen religious 
 denominations and from every political par- 
 ty; from nearly every State and Territory 
 in the Union, and from the foreign lauds 
 into which English and American mission- 
 aries, merchants, or soldiers have pene- 
 trated.* 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 
 
 * See the President's Report of Wellesley College for 
 1889-90. 
 
121 
 
 on the long walks, debating in the societies, 
 vigorous together in the gymnasium and 
 the library, girls of every grade gather the 
 rich experiences which will tincture their 
 future toil, and make the world perpetually 
 seem an interesting and friendly place. 
 They here learn to " see great things large, 
 and little things small." 
 
 This detailed explanation of the peculiar- 
 ities of the girls' college renders unneces- 
 sary 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 invigoratiou or of 
 eufeeblemeut. Living so close to one anoth- 
 er as girls here do, the sympathetic and al- 
 truistic virtues acquire great prominence. 
 *Petty selfishness retreats or becomes extinct. 
 An earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cul- 
 tivated, 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 spir- 
 it, and become individual in taste and con- 
 duct. Is it desirable that they should? 
 
That I shall not undertake to decide. I 
 Lave merely tried to explain the kinds of 
 limn an work which the different types of 
 higher training-schools are best fitted to ef- 
 fect for women. Whether the one or the 
 other kind of work needs most to be done 
 is a question of social ethics which the fut- 
 ure must answer. I have set forth a type, 
 perhaps, in the endeavor after clearness, ex- 
 aggerating a little its outlines, and contrast- 
 ing 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 fur- 
 thest 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 power- 
 ful in stirring the enthusiasm of those who 
 are submitted to it, subtle in its penetrating 
 influences over them, and effective in win- 
 ning the confidence of a multitude of par- 
 ents 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 furnish- 
 ed entirely by members of the Harvard Fac- 
 ulty. 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 sin- 
 gle 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. 
 
124 
 
 The business arrangements are taken 
 charge of by a committee of ladies and gen- 
 tlemen, who provide class -rooms, suggest 
 boarding-places, secure the instructors, so- 
 licit 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 sub- 
 jects 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 Har- 
 vard 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 med- 
 ical 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 Univer- 
 sity. 
 
 The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a 
 woman's college, with no degrees, no dor- 
 mitories, 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 entertain- 
 ments. 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 man- 
 agement 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 iu dependent as in the typical 
 co-educational college. 
 
 It is impossible to estimate either favor- 
 ably or adversely the permanent worth of 
 an undertaking still in its infancy. Man- 
 ifestly, the opportunities for the very highest 
 training are here superb, if they happen to 
 exist at all. In this, however, is the incal- 
 culable feature of the system. The Annex 
 lives by favor, not by right, and it is im- 
 possible 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 euter the 
 course, but learns iu the summer vacation 
 that through pressure of other work, the pro- 
 fessor will be unable to teach in the Annex 
 the folio wiug 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 forma- 
 ation of a spirit of scholarship, eager, free aud 
 
sane to an extraordinary degree. The Annex 
 girl succeeds in remaining a private and un- 
 observed gentlewoman, while still, in cer- 
 tain directions, pushing her studies to an 
 advanced point seldom reached elsewhere. 
 
 A plan in some respects superficially an- 
 alogous 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 ex- 
 periment 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 col- 
 lege at Cleveland sustains temporarily the 
 same relations to Adelbert College, though 
 to a still greater extent she provides inde- 
 pendent instruction. 
 
 In both Barnard and Cleveland women 
 are engaged in instruction and in govern- 
 
128 
 
 meiit. Indeed, the new annexes which have 
 arisen in the last three years seem to prom- 
 ise 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 instabil- 
 ities 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 as- 
 similated 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 col- 
 lege 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 tlie 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 ren- 
 der this improbable. Already co-educational 
 colleges incline to more careful leadership 
 for their girls. The separate colleges, with 
 growing wealth, are learning to value in- 
 trepidity, 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 m^flHrathods of education assist 
 one another^! HR&* 11 ^ ne ^ r united warfare 
 against ignoi^l J selfish privileges, and an- 
 tiquated ideals^Trcis well that for a good 
 while to come woman's higher education 
 9 
 
130 
 
 should be all tilings 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 them- 
 selves cannot do so well. To understand 
 one another kindly is the business of the 
 hour to understand and to wait. The 
 
 BOXFORD, MASS, 1889. 
 
THE TEACHING OF HISTORY 
 IN ACADEMIES AND COLLEGES.* 
 
 BY PROFESSOR LUCY M. SALMON, 
 . VASSAR COLLEGE. 
 
 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 per- 
 cepti<^ns 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 spe- 
 cial interest to themselves, and their achieve- 
 
 * Copyright, 1890, by George A. Bacon. 
 
132 
 
 ments 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 wor- 
 thy of emulation or demanding universal 
 condemnation. Until our own period, there- 
 fore, the muse of history has, with few ex- 
 ceptions, 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 mediae- 
 val alchemy, and astronomy of the astrology 
 of a still more aucieut day, so modern his- 
 tory has been developed from these chroni- 
 cles 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 histor} 7 , 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 im- 
 portant have come through the French Revo- 
 lution. Those great intellectual movements 
 that culminated in the overthrow of abso- 
 lutism 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 aban- 
 doned the homage previously paid to civil, 
 military, and ecclesiastical rulers, and con- 
 cerned 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 demo- 
 cratic 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 be- 
 came aware of the existence of institutions 
 after which their own might profitably be 
 modelled. The political, social, industrial, 
 
134 
 
 and educational condition of nations be- 
 came of more vital interest than the hours 
 of dining and retiring of capricious sov- 
 ereigns. 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 genera- 
 tion, are established in the second, become 
 respectable in the third, while in the fourth 
 temples are raised in their honor." Scepti- 
 cism 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 writ- 
 ing which has made history pre-eminent in 
 
the world of letters in our own century. It 
 has not been forgotten that there were im- 
 mortal 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 in- 
 dividual, not the age. 
 
 If history has thus been affected by the 
 credulity of one period and the indiscrimi- 
 uating love of facts of another, now by 
 speculative tendencies and again by scien- 
 tific movements, is it not a chameleon un- 
 worthy 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 teach- 
 ers of history. 
 
 The first danger is the failure to recognize 
 the individuality of history. This is often 
 due to a desire to acknowledge the indebted- 
 ness 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- 
 
136 
 
 book in history is used, but that one is being 
 prepared by the professor and advanced stu- 
 dents 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 f Must our study- 
 table give place to a more scientific article 
 of furniture yet to be produced in some other 
 historico-scieutific workshop ? The true stu- 
 dent and teacher of history is ever foremost 
 to confess his obligation to scientific methods, 
 but he will never recognize in history a sub- 
 division of physics or biology, or look for- 
 ward to an historical Newton who will re- 
 duce the events of the past to mathematical 
 formulas or physical laws. 
 
 A second phase of the same danger as- 
 sumes 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 his- 
 tory is a reaction against that spirit which 
 saw in the events of the past only an enu- 
 meration of facts, a skeleton without flesh 
 and blood. This reaction has been inevita- 
 ble, 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, Avhose 
 knowledge of history and of philosophy is 
 based on Hegel's Philosophy of History, sup- 
 plemented 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 fol- 
 lows the reconciliation, which is the in- 
 trospective 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 nine- 
 teenth century, had been the despair of his 
 instructor, when asked what material he 
 would select for a class in history in the 
 grammar grades, replied promptly, " I would 
 teach them the philosophy of history." It 
 
138 
 
 is this spirit that teaches in our acad- 
 emies 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 conies 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 semi- 
 nary is often used with us to characterize a 
 form of instruction affording special freedom 
 of intercourse bet ween professor and student, 
 and in this sense its use is not objectionable, 
 
139 
 
 but the typical German seminary in an 
 American college is an anomaly. 
 
 A fourth danger comes from another adap- 
 tation 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 con- 
 sideration of military and political aifairs, it 
 lias become the fashion to decry every his- 
 tory 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 com- 
 pelled 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 con- 
 stitution, as of our physical body, only when 
 it is out of order, and that the study of pre- 
 ventive 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 con- 
 
140 
 
 sideration 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 rela- 
 tion to other phenomena of society. 
 
 These four dangers, the loss of the in- 
 dividuality of history in, first, the scientific 
 tendencies, and, second, the philosophical as- 
 pirations of the times, the attempted trans- 
 planting of foreign methods to American 
 soil, and the recent ignoring of certain vital 
 portions of history, all grow out of the prone- 
 ness 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 rela- 
 tion 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 
 
lil 
 
 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 dan- 
 gers, 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 uni- 
 versity 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 understand- 
 iu'g of American history, American institu- 
 tions, American ideals. This does not im- 
 ply 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 recoguize the 
 importance of historical study. Not until 
 the Civil War had made possible a true na- 
 tional 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 for- 
 eigners annually coming to our shores, the 
 early age at which many American boys and 
 girls leave school, and the grave political 
 problems yet unsettled and demanding the 
 serious attention of every mature mind. 
 Bishop Potter, in his recent Phi Beta Kappa 
 address on " The Scholar and the State," 
 has shown the necessity of keeping ever 
 present, even in the higher paths of learning, 
 the plain truths that history teaches, if we 
 are not to be wrecked on the shoals where 
 
143 
 
 other nations have gone down . From strange 
 localities the encouragement comes to begin 
 and to continue this work. On Rivington 
 Street, in the slums of New York, in a dis- 
 trict from which comes one -tenth of the 
 criminals of New York City, a college settle- 
 ment 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 " some- 
 thing about George Washington." If a re- 
 cent 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 vouch- 
 safed 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 Monu- 
 
rnent 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 be- 
 gin 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 his- 
 tory, as well as in pure and applied science, 
 the student must become familiar with the 
 terminology employed. The words state, 
 constitution, law, pure democracy, representa- 
 tive government must be as clearly under- 
 stood 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. " Taxa- 
 tion 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 di- 
 
vect 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 Decla- 
 ration 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 origi- 
 nal 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 Con- 
 temporaneous Writers, and Documents Illus- 
 trating American History, wh/le the instruc- 
 tor can find compensation for oue of his trials 
 10 
 
iii 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, how- 
 ever, 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 nmst be ap- 
 plied 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 accumula- 
 tion 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 
 I'icl lesen." The principle applies to work 
 in the secondary schools. But here the in- 
 structor 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, care- 
 ful, 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 recep- 
 tacle 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 histori- 
 cal mill, but it is here also that the student 
 
148 
 
 must learn that " there is no northwest pas- 
 sage to the intellectual world." 
 
 The special province of the normal school 
 is to emphasize the classification of histori- 
 cal knowledge. To the average normal- 
 school student a fact is a fact. His knowl- 
 edge 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 in- 
 formation 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 young- 
 est soldier iu 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 be- 
 tween the ideal of a nation and the actual 
 produces the process of history." The nor- 
 mal-school student must first of all be taught 
 historical perspective, and, second, that there 
 is no historical multiplication-table or sys- 
 tem of mechanical memorizing either of de- 
 tails or of general principles that can be ap- 
 plied to the solution of historical problems. 
 
149 
 
 If the secondary school is to encourage the 
 accumulation of historical knowledge, and 
 the normal school the classification of histor- 
 ical 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 some- 
 thing 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, ho 
 must be an omnivorous reader, but he must 
 also be a critical reader. Hume and Free- 
 man are to be to him not merely names of 
 historians, but of historians representing dif- 
 ferent schools of thought. Macaulay's every 
 school-boy knows that taxation without rep- 
 resentation was the cause of the Revolution, 
 but the college student must know, if the 
 school -boy does not, why but one of the 
 twenty-seven complaints in the Declaration 
 of Independence refers to the subject of 
 taxation. The college student must know 
 that Magna Charta is the corner-stone of 
 English liberty, not because Bishop Stubbs 
 
150 
 
 and all the historians say so, but because ho 
 has himself studied that great instrument 
 and the subsequent development of consti- 
 tutional 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 com- 
 pound. He must be able to see that into it 
 enter, as component parts, politics, economics, 
 statistics, finance, sociology, jurisprudence, 
 archeology, philanthropy, comparative phi- 
 lology every subject that concerns itself 
 with the life of the individual or the nation. 
 He must be familiar not only with the 
 process of analysis, but also with that of 
 composition. 
 
 What results are we justified in thinking 
 should follow our best efforts in secondary 
 school and college ? 
 
 In the first place, history can do more 
 than any other subject except science to 
 break down the barrier that too often rises 
 between the instructor's desk and the class- 
 room seats. No subject except science lends 
 itself so readily to co-operative methods of 
 work. Professor and student, teacher and 
 pupil are alike seekers after truth, and the 
 
151 
 
 library door swings outward for all. If, as 
 has been said, aristocratic politics broke 
 down with the French Revolution, and aris- 
 tocratic 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. Caesar's " first im- 
 pressions "of Britain, and Cicero's arraign- 
 ment 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 Caesar, but to 
 Mommsen's chapter on the lt Subjugation of 
 the West," which in its narrative portion is 
 but a paraphrase of the Commentaries. Noth- 
 ing is more difficult to overcome than this be- 
 lief that each branch of knowlege 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 seem- 
 
ingly isolated parts a compact whole. His- 
 tory 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 philoso- 
 phy are related ; and that the study of San- 
 scrit 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 dif- 
 ficult. 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 mirid to take hold of the 
 truth to be conveyed. The maker of Da- 
 mascus blades cannot tell you how he knows 
 that the steel has had exactly the required 
 amount of heat. He sees the color and he 
 
154 
 
 knows ; that is all there is of it. If you do 
 not see it, he cannot help you, any more 
 than the laundress can tell you how hot the 
 iron must be for the material she is going 
 to put it on. She holds it to her face, or 
 touches it with wet finger, and decides. 
 The cook puts her hand into the oven and 
 says that we must wait a little longer be- 
 fore setting the bread in, and she is right. 
 The problem of real teaching is of this or- 
 der, only more complicated because of the 
 material ; for steel and cloth and dough can 
 be depended on to answer a certain quanti- 
 ty 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 de- 
 pends upon the circumstances at the very 
 time when she has to act, and those her in- 
 structors cannot by any possibility know. 
 The only rule without exception that oc- 
 curs to me is that she should never punish 
 when she is angry ; but this would be a 
 very slender stock to go into business with, 
 and the imparting of it would hardly justify 
 a legislature in building normal schools. 
 The truth is that education, having no 
 
155 
 
 principles of its own, must use those fur- 
 nished by the sciences, especially by psy- 
 chology. But the conclusions and the gen- 
 eralizations of psychology, so far as it is an 
 empirical science, are drawn from observa- 
 tions on the adult mind, and therefore are 
 not always to be depended on in our deal- 
 ings with the child mind, which is, as Pro- 
 fessor Royce says, " possessed by an inca- 
 pacity of a relatively diseased sort ;" and he 
 adds, " the wise teacher is a sort of physi- 
 cian who is to help the child towards get- 
 ting that kind of health which we call ma- 
 turity." 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 an- 
 swer to which determines whether she be a 
 teacher or not. The problem in the educa- 
 tion of every child's mind is like the prob- 
 lem 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 wait- 
 ing 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 intelli- 
 gence we were feeling for. Perhaps the 
 best training any ambitious girl could have 
 for teaching would be found, not in a nor- 
 mal 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 intelli- 
 gence 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. 
 
157 
 
 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 per- 
 sons of the growth and development of the 
 young " which takes place in school. The 
 girl gains information at home or in travel- 
 ling, 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 hap- 
 hazard. She cannot be said to be educated 
 unless her mind has been worked upon in a 
 systematic way, the proper food for its nat- 
 ural growth given to it at the suitable time, 
 its activity rendered orderly, and itself sup- 
 plied with categories under which it can ar- 
 range 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 con- 
 sequence, 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 sum- 
 mer, 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 ar- 
 ranges 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 tbat 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 anoth- 
 er time or for another patient. Many peo- 
 
pie seem to imagine that it is only tbe 
 number of beats in a minute that the phy- 
 sician considers when he feels the pulse. If 
 ifc were so, the science and art of medicine 
 would be reduced to the level of a trade. 
 What tlie physician learns from the pulse is 
 the very thing which his experience has ren- 
 dered 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 res- 
 piration 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 teach- 
 er. "The habit of merely judging minds 
 as good or evil, without observing what 
 state it is, what mental coloring, what in- 
 ner live process, that makes them good or 
 evil," is the habit of the unprofessional 
 mind ; and, as Professor Royce goes on to 
 say, " this habit is so ingrained in most of 
 
160 
 
 us that it is always hard to learn to sub- 
 stitute diagnosis for mere estimation, and a 
 loving study of the process for mere exter- 
 nal liking or disliking of the person." A 
 teacher might he defined as one to whom 
 everything that children do or say has he- 
 come a sign. She thereby loses much care- 
 less 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 tin 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 phe- 
 nomena, and gains thereby much more pain 
 than pleasure ; for, like a surgeon contin- 
 ually 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 igno- 
 rant and unthinking practitioners. Hu- 
 man vivisection is by no means rare in 
 many an American home, where most of the 
 time is spent in exploiting growing chil- 
 dren for the amusement or interest of the 
 parents or visitors. The child is interest- 
 ing to its parents, and many a question is 
 asked of it "just to see what it will say." 
 
161 
 
 Thus many a subject is suggested before 
 the mind is in the proper state for its re- 
 ception, 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. Pro- 
 fessor 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. Ear- 
 lier, 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 al- 
 low 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 ex- 
 press language, and passively protests 
 against the unsuitable labor. Equally 
 11 
 
 
162 
 
 wrong are those teachers who fancy that be- 
 cause 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 diifer 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 de- 
 sirable 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 mat- 
 ter how many pupils we have. We must in 
 some way keep our teachers fresh, or we 
 lose the whole game. A London astrono- 
 mer* remarks, in the preface to his recent 
 book, " Virtually, the observer himself consti- 
 tutes the most important part of the tele- 
 scope ; 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, 
 
 * William F. Denning, F.R.A.S., in Telescopic Work 
 for Starlight Evenings. 
 
163 
 
 the teacher is the observer ; the school, if 
 properly organized, is the tube ; the sub- 
 jects 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 rela- 
 tions 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 re- 
 ward she is looking for, and if she have the 
 power of the teacher, she can never fail of 
 it. Professor James, in his Psychology, rec- 
 ognizes the great pleasure generated by a 
 real conviction by characterizing conviction 
 as a lofty emotion. To be able to create 
 this loffcy pleasure, and to repeat the proc- 
 ess 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 ; 
 
aud "the faculty of voluntarily bringing 
 back a wandering attention over and over 
 again is the very root of judgment, charac- 
 ter, 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 hu- 
 man 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 re- 
 sponsible 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, be- 
 cause they are hers, but in the school she 
 first learns to judge action in and for itself 
 as right or wrong, expedient or inexpe- 
 dient, and this not alone for her, but for the 
 
165 
 
 community of which she finds herself a 
 component part. Then, too, the affairs of 
 the home cannot he carried on with that re- 
 gard for ahsolute 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 feel- 
 ing 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, in- 
 structing 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 her- 
 self and her own people by putting her into 
 relation with the members of other families, 
 makes of her a responsible member of a 
 community, holds her strictly to regularity 
 and punctuality, gradually leads her to the 
 thought of real individual responsibility by 
 making her bear with strict impartiality 
 the legitimate results of all her actions, 
 
166 
 
 makes a steady demand upon her voluntary 
 attention for periods of time suited to her 
 age, gives her rest at proper times, but de- 
 mands 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 al- 
 ways 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 conies 
 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 con- 
 tinuance in well -doing to attain. As she 
 goes on, she finds other children in classes 
 below her, who seem to her very small, and 
 who are puzzling over difficulties which she 
 has surmounted, and who, if, as I have said 
 before, the school be a successful one, find 
 
167 
 
 more difficulty in self-control than she. 
 Thus, iu the daily and intertwined life of 
 the whole school, she is living over again 
 her past, and taking glimpses of the prom- 
 ised laud of her own future, and all this, of 
 incalculable value to her, could not be at- 
 tained in her own home. 
 
 The managing a school so that it may be 
 in this way a unit, an organic unit the in- 
 terweaving of all its parts by the teacher 
 who holds it all in her consciousness is 
 one of the most important things which she 
 has to do. In comparison with this, the 
 selection of text - books is a very minor 
 matter. One thing, however, is essential, 
 and that is, that in this her assistants shall 
 work intelligently with her. They must be 
 of original character and have their Own 
 ways, for otherwise they would not be 
 teachers at all, but they must be plastic 
 enough to be moulded into some degree of 
 conformity with the thought of the head 
 teacher, and they must have the capacity 
 for growth which will bring them finally to 
 seize the principles underlying the whole 
 fabric, after which they may safely be left 
 entirely to their own devices, for then they 
 will work in harmony with the school. 
 Nothing is sadder than a school where no 
 
168 
 
 two roads meet, where the girls go from one 
 teacher, with a certain set of requirements, 
 to another who makes entirely different de- 
 mands, till all rules take on the appearance 
 of arbitrariness and caprice, and nothing 
 has any fixed value. No lesson could he 
 worse than this for a girl, who is by nature 
 or shall I say by all her education in- 
 clined to look upon law without any com- 
 prehension of its tremendous significance, 
 and to regard her own whims and fancies as 
 of equal value with law, because she is ac- 
 customed 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 lat- 
 ter 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 un- 
 yielding till we strike against it. Almost 
 as bad is the school that puts the little girl 
 
169 
 
 in a class-room and keeps her for a whole 
 year under the exclusive influence of one 
 teacher. The child needs to come under 
 differing influences, the more the better, if 
 the underlying controlling principle be the 
 same. The school must be composed of 
 classes in sufficient number to cover the 
 whole school life of the girl, and none of 
 these classes should be too small ; for the 
 class must be used as a means of influence 
 on each individual in it, both intellectually 
 and morally. The differences of opinion 
 among its different members, the different 
 experiences of the little gii'ls, 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 car- 
 ried out, first, with energy, in order that 
 
170 
 
 interest may be awakened; second, with 
 breadth, in order that interest may be 
 many-sided ; and, lastly, with unity of pur- 
 pose, 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 nec- 
 essary. It is required of the teacher, and 
 not unreasonably, since she must be an 
 artist, that she shall continually do the im- 
 possible that is, that while she gives her 
 whole attention to the one child who is re- 
 citing, she shall at the same moment be ful- 
 ly 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, iu 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 teach- 
 er's experience, for while she dominates, she 
 
171 
 
 must also leave free. That the impossible 
 is done, however, can never be doubted by 
 any one who has watched the work of a 
 recitation in skilful hands, and has had 
 enough insight to feel the delicate recipro- 
 cal play which goes on all through it be- 
 tween teacher and class. Indeed there 
 must always be " a function of authority 
 which exceeds any given stage of the dis- 
 ciple's experience." So the teacher must al- 
 ways be in two places at once her own men- 
 tal 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 hu- 
 man 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 adjust- 
 ments are continually to be made. Espe- 
 cially is this the case in a private school for 
 girls, where the pupils come to us from all 
 sorts of teaching ancl worse than no teach- 
 
172 
 
 ing, 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 har- 
 monized; and as the conditions are contin- 
 ually changing, so a constant adjustment 
 becomes necessary. All parts must contin- 
 ually work together for one common end. 
 It is of no more significance to the teacher 
 of a school like this that a thing is impossi- 
 ble than it was to Beethoven that the hu- 
 man voice was not capable of singing the 
 chorus in his Ninth Symphony. He had 
 nothing to do with the capacity of the hu- 
 man voice ; the music demanded that the 
 chorus should be written so, and so accord- 
 ingly he wrote it. A changeless school 
 programme cannot be arranged for an en- 
 tire 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 tilings 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 un- 
 der control of a competent head. 
 
In a school thus managed, disorder be- 
 comes impossible, and the problem of gov- 
 ernment an insignificant factor. For, in 
 the first place, there is no time for the wan- 
 dering 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 wander- 
 ing 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 cur- 
 rent is not running; that is all there is of it. 
 To a certain degree, every one who address- 
 es an audience has this consciousness, feels 
 the connection between himself and his 
 hearers as a mass, and is inspired or dead- 
 ened 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 im- 
 portant in girls' schools, where the popu- 
 lar mind thinks it to be of small conse- 
 quence. 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 princi- 
 pal in every smallest detail of its manage- 
 ment. 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 suc- 
 cess 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 employ- 
 er 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 cer- 
 tain university. For a girl to have been at 
 some schools for any length of time is a cer- 
 tificate of frivolity, lack of consistent pur- 
 pose 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 Ho 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 bet- 
 ter 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 sec- 
 ond, the stress which Dr. Fitch lays npon 
 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, per- 
 haps, 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, aud be able 
 to meet any demands, no matter how unex- 
 pected, which may front her in the years to 
 12 
 
178 
 
 come. Professor James says, and truly, 
 " To give power to suspend belief in pres- 
 ence of an emotionally exciting idea is the 
 highest result of education." But Professor 
 William G. Hale had said this before him, 
 aud 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 connec- 
 tion 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 Amer- 
 ican women, how it would transform Amer- 
 ican homes ! 
 
 The girls who go to private schools are, 
 as a rule, from families of at least moderate 
 
179 
 
 wealth. But in our fluctuating country this 
 is no proof that they will go through their 
 lives without feeling the necessity of doing 
 something at some time for their own sup- 
 port or the support of others. What that 
 will be we cannot tell, for the march of in- 
 vention 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 pro- 
 bably 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 posi- 
 tions 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 prov- 
 ince 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 un- 
 natural, 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 tin- 
 
reasonably 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 every- 
 thing 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 affect- 
 ing the play of the feelings ; nor can there 
 be in the life of man or woman any great 
 moral lapse without tbe intellect's suffer- 
 ing. 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 affect- 
 ing the soul with a lively sense of what is 
 
182 
 
 truly its perfection, and exerting the most 
 ardent desires after it." We can find no 
 wiser word in all tlie 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 t What shall I have 
 when I am forgotten T but 'What shall I be 
 when I forget ? When all I know has van- 
 ished, leaving only its effect on character, 
 what shall I have T Shall the inner man re- 
 call his aliment any more than the outer I 
 In both alike it passes away, for its function 
 is fulfilled; it was not to be stored, but as- 
 similated. 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, consti- 
 tute the profession, and they need no di- 
 ploma from any school of pedagogy. The 
 rest belong more or less to a trade-union, 
 
183 
 
 which seasons its talk with the usual 
 amount of cant. Next to religious cant, 
 there is nothing so disgusting as education- 
 al cant. Tbe members of the profession are 
 all artists, and they live in regions and par- 
 take of divine pleasures of which the world 
 knows not. In the great future profession- 
 al Verein, if this ever exist, they will asso- 
 ciate 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 consid- 
 er 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 can- 
 not test the worth of their effect on their 
 pupils by abstract arithmetical signs. They 
 know that the girl is not an arithmetical 
 problem, but a living soul, and they are ever 
 aiming at moral and educational influences, 
 to which marks and daily percentages are 
 only impediments. Sometimes they labor 
 
184 
 
 for these ends under fetters \vhich 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 can- 
 not 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 ten- 
 dency 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 conversa- 
 tion, 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 cau 
 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 be- 
 low 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 oif. 
 
 I am sure that I utter the simple truth 
 when I say that if the private schools for 
 girls are failing to-day, they are failing not 
 primarily because of the low aims or the 
 lack of insight of the women who stand at 
 their heads. I know, and pretty well, a 
 great many principals of girls' schools, and 
 I know that in a large majority of cases they 
 want and try to do better things for their 
 girls than the mothers will let them do. 
 They deserve that some one who knows 
 should make widely public this testimony 
 to their character and their aspirations, as 
 well as to the discouragement under which 
 they are forced to do their daily work. An 
 Englishwoman said lately, in the London 
 
186 
 
 Journal of Education, with a keenness of 
 insight for which every teacher will respect 
 her : " In England the choice of schools is 
 almost entirely in the hands of the parents ; 
 but here [in America] it is very frequently 
 entirely left to the children, and as at the 
 end of every school year pupils are free to 
 leave without notice, the principal is obliged 
 to depend for her school connection on the 
 whims and caprices of the girls. This ne- 
 cessitates a constant attention to their com- 
 fort and happiness, which, though beneficial 
 in many respects, is apt to allow the consid- 
 eration 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 
 gi rls. 
 
 The conditions under which the girls' 
 private school must exist remain t'o 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 phil- 
 
187 
 
 osophical point of view the treatment which 
 is needed, taking into account the different 
 nature of the child, the different circum- 
 stances, and the different influences which 
 are around her, and then making and work- 
 ing 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 fam- 
 ily 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 ex- 
 citing 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 some- 
 thing 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 be- 
 longing to them. 
 
 Parents may be roughly divided into two 
 classes those, to use a proverbial expres- 
 sion, 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 confi- 
 dence 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 sug- 
 gest anythiug, 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 ar- 
 ranged 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 par- 
 
alleled over and over again from the re- 
 membrance 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 some- 
 times looks back longingly to the caste 
 system in India. It is easy to remember 
 the time when many a New England vil- 
 lage, at least, had circles of what was real- 
 ly " 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 cur- 
 rents 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 
 w r hich 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 oif its feet by the 
 mad rush of the currents around it, fascinat- 
 ed by the glitter, and loses all its own char- 
 acter by becoming one more of the strug- 
 
191 
 
 gliug 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 par- 
 ents 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 tbe 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 ex- 
 pect American girls to be bright, witty, 
 apparently intelligent, and possessed of suf- 
 ficient knowledge to conceal an ignorance 
 of which they may or may not be con- 
 scious." The President of Wellesley Col- 
 lege once showed a foreign gentleman who 
 was supposed to have a great interest in ed- 
 ucation, 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, re- 
 marked, 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.' 7 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 in- 
 sult. 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 consola- 
 tion 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 dis- 
 covery has been made. 
 
 The girls that attend private schools 
 mostly from the moneyed class have scarce- 
 ly 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. Mauy 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 dif- 
 ficult 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 an- 
 cestors 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, amuse- 
 ment-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." 
 13 
 
194 
 
 Few people realize in the least degree the 
 change iu the popular philosophy which, hi 
 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 con- 
 structive power of the mind j and for passive 
 creations we have substituted the theory of 
 active development. Once we thought rath- 
 er of the child as acted upon ; now we think 
 much more of making her active, of invig- 
 orating, 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 iu the land. There 
 could be no more beautiful and striking ex- 
 ample 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 pene- 
 trate 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 per- 
 son to be at the head of the school, or, in- 
 deed, 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 pres- 
 ent excited state of the public mind with re- 
 gard to education. This produces, to supply 
 a constantly increasing demand for better 
 results, a vast number of new " systems" and 
 " crazes," towards which the teacher is 
 pushed, if she have not strength enough to 
 keep steady in her course. The schools do 
 not depend so much as of old on the services 
 of teachers or lecturers who come in only 
 for special hours, and who therefore cannot 
 work into the general effect of the whole 
 school, and this is well. But, on the other 
 
196 
 
 hand, we have all sorts of so - called Dew 
 ways presented. I thiuk if Pestalozzi and 
 Froebel were now living, they would ask for 
 new names, so weary would they he of hav- 
 ing all sorts of crude and absurd labor as- 
 cribed 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 wide- 
 ly 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 a way 
 his tools and build houses with his hands, or 
 the implements which he should be able to 
 fashion for himself,, not those which the prac- 
 tice 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 al- 
 
most of different stuff, ami insist upon teach- 
 ing 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 knowl- 
 edge 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 can- 
 not also be secured without it, if the school 
 be what it ought to be. The colleges for 
 
198 
 
 women were expected to raise the level of 
 teaching in the girls' schools, and some prin- 
 cipals have gone so far as to say that in fut- 
 ure they will have none but college-trained 
 women for teachers. JBut it is a great dis- 
 advantage 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 ma- 
 ture minds, in the form of lectures, not of 
 recitations, and generally the college gradu- 
 ate 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 want- 
 ing in anything that can be called imagina- 
 tion. 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 de- 
 lightful work, unless it be giving a child its 
 
199 
 
 first lessons in language, than to have the 
 management of such a school; hut 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 aver- 
 age American home were properly fed, prop- 
 erly 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 ain sure uo teacher of girls who may 
 read these pages will he ahle to see without 
 a sinile. It is this: " Health is the first con- 
 sideration." 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 con- 
 ditions under which the teacher of a private 
 school for girls has to live. If she have uo 
 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 in- 
 fluence must have no power to make her 
 think of surrendering a principle; failure 
 
201 
 
 arising from causes entirely beyond her con- 
 trol 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 ham- 
 pered 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 ham- 
 pered, 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 allow- 
 able. 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 hand- 
 ful of incense into the flame perpetually 
 burning on the altar of " society." And yet 
 this cannot be done. To hold a school up 
 to the highest standard of excellence, and 
 this by unceasing vigilance, is one thing ; to 
 manage it so as to make the most money and 
 
202 
 
 to gain the most friends, is another. The 
 teacher who tries to do both will proba- 
 bly 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 mathemat- 
 ics, 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 mathe- 
 matics, perhaps, more than in any other 
 branch, we too seldom have children intrust- 
 
203 
 
 ed 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 care- 
 fully 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 col- 
 lect or to learn facts, which, because it has 
 
204 
 
 no means of classification, soon drop out of 
 the memory. Fortunate is it that they do 
 so ; it is difficult to imagine where we should 
 get sensible women enough to run the world 
 for the next generation if God had not mer- 
 cifully given to children the power of for- 
 getting. The main thing to be gained by 
 lessons in natural science is a feeling of rev- 
 erent 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 ecomony, 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 teach- 
 ing. But the disciplinary value of these 
 studies for young children is greatly exag- 
 gerated ; and we must never forget that 
 with children it is the disciplinary value of 
 a study that we, as teachers, have first to 
 consider. The main part of education comes 
 after the school days are over. If the school 
 succeed in putting the girl in possession of 
 herself, so that she may be able to use her 
 faculties intelligently for her future growth, 
 if it open to her paths of rest and refuge 
 from the too pressing care, or perhaps the 
 otherwise overpowering sorrow which may 
 come to her. it has done its work. As an 
 
205 
 
 English educational writer asks, is the value 
 of natural science teaching practical, cult- 
 ural, 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 g'ven to 
 natural science has probably not been aware 
 of their existence, and yet sets her opinion 
 over against yours with an amusing assump- 
 tion 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 va- 
 ried manifestations, we have reached a sub- 
 ject which affords unlimited scope for dis- 
 ciplinary work, while at- the same time it 
 opens fields of pleasure and profit that are 
 practically infinite. It is often said with 
 great unction that to study natural science 
 is to become acquainted with the works of 
 God, while to study language is to spend 
 our time over the works of man. But it is 
 hard to see why the nest of the bird and the 
 cell of the bee are more divine, or can do 
 more good to the mind, than the wonderful 
 vessel of language which man has shaped 
 and fashioned to save and bear down the 
 stream of time for the advantage of those 
 who are to come all that he has done and 
 
206 
 
 thought, "that nothing be lost." In lan- 
 guage we have, as has been said, " a con- 
 densed 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 larg- 
 est part in the school course, not only because 
 of its unequalled disciplinary power, but be- 
 cause 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 ac- 
 quired, 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,* 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 af- 
 
 * "Both Latin and German are at a stage in which 
 structure is more exposed to view than it is in the ma- 
 turer languages of Greek and French." Carte's English 
 Prose, p. 508. 
 
fords 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 it- 
 self on it, and comparisons between the idi- 
 oms of the three languages offer unlimited 
 advantages for all sorts of perceptions, and 
 for the training of the growing judgment. 
 When by-aud-by German is added, these op- 
 portunities are still more enlarged. But by 
 that time the girl is reading with facility 
 difficult French constructions, and her Eng- 
 lish 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 con- 
 tinue it for her own pleasure). When such 
 a result is reached, we may feel measurably 
 satisfied. There is no more valuable train- 
 ing than translation, by which I do not mean 
 substituting one word for another, but the 
 " reducing of the actual to fluidity by break- 
 ing up its literal sequence," and then crys- 
 tallizing it again in another idiom. There 
 is no school task more valuable in inducing 
 the state of mind which suspends the judg- 
 ment, waiting till all the circumstances 
 
208 
 
 which can by any possibility bear -upon its 
 conclusion have been fairly recognized and 
 weighed a habit of rniud 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 aesthetics, history, and literature. 
 But I should say all in one word in saying 
 that the main object oTf all teaching in a pri- 
 vate school for girls should be disciplinary, 
 and tbat the proportion in which different 
 studies are able to serve this end should de- 
 cide 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 read- 
 iness of the pupil. To decide this is the 
 function of the teacher, and her diagnosis 
 must shape the prescription. There is, how- 
 ever, one more consideration of prime im- 
 portance the mental advance should be al- 
 ways 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 al- 
 
209 
 
 most none on language ; neither should she 
 study even language to the exclusion of his- 
 tory or natural science. Every branch of 
 human knowledge should supplement, con- 
 firm, 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 understand- 
 ing and constant harmony of the teachers, 
 she does not find the same persistent thoughts 
 corning 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 rec- 
 itations, and not by lectures ; and a recita- 
 tion does not consist in asking questions and 
 receiving answers which have been learned 
 beforehand, as many seem to think. In or- 
 der 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 Educa- 
 
210 
 
 tion. 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 di- 
 rection 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 ex- 
 ercises her power of thought under the guid- 
 ance of the teacher. The function of the 
 teacher is intellectual stimulation and di- 
 rection j that of the pupil is free exercise of 
 her powers, receiving aid only when she can- 
 not 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 conscious- 
 ness 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 coucep- 
 
211 
 
 tions." In other words, the object of a rec- 
 itation 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 cir- 
 cumstances, but if in unfavorable by circuit- 
 ous 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, 
 110 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 neces- 
 sity of thoroughness in girls' schools. In 
 the abstract meaning of the word there can 
 be no such thing as thoroughness with a 
 
212 
 
 child; her kuo w ledge, from the very nature 
 of the case, must be fragmentary, and there- 
 fore lacking in thoroughness. If her teach- 
 ing is to consist, as in old-time schools, of 
 pages of the dictionary learned by heart, or 
 simply of arithmetical rules and algebraic 
 formulae, 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 w r hole. 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 de- 
 termine 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 pul- 
 verizing 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 pres- 
 ent. 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 divid- 
 ing it into departments, for in so doing we 
 sacrifice the opportunity for comparison iu 
 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 iu this way that 
 the individual can be cared for. Human 
 society must be content to work on the in- 
 dividual not immediately but mediately, 
 and the teacher is not freed from this neces- 
 sity iu the small society to which she must 
 be a minor providence. 
 
 I can do no more here than to point out 
 some of the conditious of the girls' private 
 school in our large cities, and briefly to hint 
 at its possibilities. It must always hold 
 
2U 
 
 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 charac- 
 ters 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 grati- 
 tude and love," is the only one that has done 
 its work. 
 
LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
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GENERAL LIBRARY - U.C. BERKELEY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF TH!