II.
HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION FOR GIRLS.[2]
It is a real pleasure to find myself in Bath on an educational mission. I have ancestral and personal educational connections with Bath of very old standing. My father was curate of St. Michael's before I was born; my grandfather and uncle were in succession head-masters of the Grammar School here, fine scholars both, of the old school. My first visit to Bath was when I was nine years old, and on that occasion I had my first real stand-up fight with a small Bath Grammar School boy. I think that if the old house is still standing I could find the place where we fought, and where a master brutally interrupted us with a walking-stick. Since those days, my relations with Bath have been rare, but peaceful; unless, indeed, the honourable competition between Clifton College and its brilliant daughter, Bath College, may be regarded as a ceaseless but a friendly combat between their two head-masters whom you see so peaceably side by side.
I propose, first, to say a few words about the condition of schools twenty years ago, before the present impulse towards the higher education of women gave us High Schools and Colleges at the Universities, and other educational movements. There is a most interesting chapter in the report of the Endowed Schools Commission of 1868 on girls' schools, and some valuable evidence collected by the Assistant Commissioners. It is not ancient history yet, and therein lies its great value to us. It shows us the evils from which we are only now escaping in our High Schools: evils which still prevail to a formidable extent in a large section of girls' education, and from which I can scarcely imagine Bath is wholly free.
The report speaks of the general indifference of parents to the education of their girls in our whole upper and middle class, both absolutely and relatively to that of their boys. That indifference in part remains. There was a strong prejudice that girls could not learn the same subjects as boys, and that even if they could, such an education was useless and even injurious. That prejudice still survives, in face of facts.
The right education, it was thought, for girls, was one of accomplishments and of routine work, with conversational knowledge of French. The ideal of a girl's character was that she was to be merely amiable, ready to please and be pleased; it was, as was somewhat severely said by one of the Assistant Commissioners, not to be good and useful when married, but to get married. There was no ideal for single women. They did not realize how much of the work of the world must go undone unless there is a large class of highly educated single women. This view of girls' education is not yet extinct.
Corresponding to the ideal on the part of the ordinary British parent was, of course, the school itself. There was no high ideal of physical health, and but little belief that it depended on physical conditions; therefore the schools were neither large and airy, nor well provided with recreation ground; not games and play, but an operation known as "crocodiling" formed the daily and wearisome exercise of girls. That defect also is common still. There was no ideal of art, or belief in the effect of artistic surroundings, and therefore the schools were unpretending even to ugliness and meanness. The walls were not beautified with pictures, nor were the rooms furnished with taste. There was no high ideal of cultivating the intelligence, and therefore most of the lessons that were not devoted to accomplishments, such as music, flower-painting, fancy work, hand-screen making, etc., were given to memory work, and note-books, in which extracts were made from standard authors and specimen sums worked with flourishes wondrous to behold. The serious study of literature and history was almost unknown. The memory work consisted in many schools in learning Mangnall's Questions and Brewer's Guide to Science—fearful books. The first was miscellaneous: What is lightning? How is sago made? What were the Sicilian Vespers, the properties of the atmosphere, the length of the Mississippi, and the Pelagian heresy? These are, I believe, actual specimens of the questions; and the answers were committed to memory. About twenty-five years ago I examined some girls in Brewer's Guide to Science. The verbal knowledge of some of them was quite wonderful; their understanding of the subject absolutely nil. They could rattle off all about positive and negative electricity, and Leyden jars and batteries; but the words obviously conveyed no ideas whatever, and they cheerfully talked utter nonsense in answer to questions not in the book.
Examinations for schools were not yet instituted; the education was unguided, and therefore largely misguided. Do not let us imagine for an instant that these evils have been generally cured. The secondary education of the country is still in a deplorable condition; and it behoves us to repeat on all occasions that it is so. The schools I am describing from the report of twenty years ago exist and abound and flourish still, owing to the widespread indifference of parents to the education of their girls, to the qualifications and training of their mistresses, and the efficiency of the schools. Untested, unguided, they exist and even thrive, and will do so until a sounder public opinion and the proved superiority of well-trained mistresses and well-educated girls gradually exterminates the inefficient schools. But we are, I fear, a long way still from this desirable consummation.
What were the mistresses? For the most part worthy, even excellent ladies, who had no other means of livelihood, and who had no special education themselves, and no training whatever. Naturally they taught what they could, and laid stress on what was called the formation of character, which they usually regarded as somehow alternative with intellectual attainments and stimulus, and progress in which could not be submitted to obvious tests.
I suppose most of us think that there is no more valuable assistance in the formation of character than any pursuit that leads the mind away from frivolous pursuits, egotistic or morbid fancies, and fills it with memories of noble words and lives, teaches it to love our great poets and writers, and gives it sympathies with great causes. But this was not the prevailing opinion twenty years ago. The influence of good people, good homes, good example—in a word truly religious influence, as we shall all admit—is the strongest element in the formation of character; but the next strongest is assuredly that education which teaches us to admire "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, and whatsoever things are of good report;" and this ought to be, and is, one of the results of the literary teaching given by well-educated mistresses.
I have been describing the common type of what used to be called the "seminaries" and "establishments for young ladies" of twenty years ago. And it may give you the impression that there was no good education to be got in those days, and that the ladies of my generation were therefore very ill-educated. Permit me to correct that impression. There were homes in which the girls learned something from father or from mother, or, perhaps, something from a not very talented governess; but in which they educated themselves with a hunger and thirst after knowledge, and an enjoyment of literature that is rare in any school. Do not imagine that any school education under mistresses however skilled, or resulting in certificates however brilliant, is really as effective in the formation of strong intellectual tastes and clear judgment and ability as the self-education which was won by the mothers of some of you, by the women of my generation and those before. Such education was rare, but it was possible, and it is possible still. Under such a system a few are educated and the many fail altogether. The advantage of our day is that education is offered to a much larger number. But I cannot call it better than that which was won by a few in the generation of your mothers. If we would combine the exceptional merits of the old system with the high average merits of the new we must jealously preserve the element of freedom and self-education.
To return to the report. The indifference of parents and the public, the inadequacy of school buildings and appliances, the low intellectual ideals of mistresses, were the evils of twenty years ago, prevailing very widely and lowering school education, and we must not expect to have got rid of them altogether. An educational atmosphere is not changed in twenty years.
But our High Schools are a very real step in advance. The numbers of your school show that there is a considerable and increasing fraction of residents in Bath who do care for the intellectual quality of the education of their girls; and the report of the examiners is a most satisfactory guarantee that the instruction given here is thoroughly efficient along the whole line. Bath must be congratulated on its High School for Girls, as it must be congratulated on its College for Boys.
But are we therefore to rest and be thankful in the complacent belief that we have now at length attained perfection, at least in our High Schools? I am called in to bless High School education, and I do bless it from my heart. I know something of it. My own daughter was at such a school; I have been vice-president of a High School for ten years. I wish there were High Schools in every town in England. They have done and are doing much to lift the standard of girls' education in England. But I will again remind you that High Schools are educating but a fraction of the population, and that the faults of twenty years ago still characterise our girls' education as a whole.
And now, having said this, I shall not be misunderstood if I go on to speak of some of the deficiencies in our ideals of girls' education which seem to me to affect High Schools as well as all other schools. One point, in which the older education with its manifold defects had a real merit, is that there was no over-teaching, no hurry to produce results, and therefore no disgust aroused with learning and literature. At any rate, the girls, or the best of them, left school or governess "with an appetite." Now I consider this is a real test of teaching at school or college, in science or literature: does it leave boys and girls hungry for more, with such a love for learning that they will go on studying of themselves? If the teaching of some science is such that you never want to go to another science lecture as long as you live: your lessons on literature such that your Shakespeare, your Spenser, your Burke, your Browning will never again descend from your shelves: then, whatever else schools may have done, they have sacrificed the future to the present. It is on this account that the pressure of external examinations and its effect on the teaching of mistresses must be most carefully watched. To get immediate results is easy, but it is sometimes at the cost of later results. Our aim should be not so much to teach, as to make our pupils love to learn, and have methods of learning; and every teacher should remember that our pupils can learn far more than we can teach them; and, as Thring used to say, "hammering is not teaching." With a system of competitive examinations for the Army and Civil Service, boys must sometimes sacrifice the future to the present. Girls need never do so, and therefore girls' schools need not copy the faults as well as the excellences of boys' schools.
I have ventured to say so much for an intellectual danger in High Schools. I do not doubt that your head-mistress is aware of it, and on her guard: I speak much more to the public, to the parents, and to the Council (if I may say so), as an expert, because I know that the public sometimes want to be satisfied that the education is good at every stage, and they ought to be content if it is good at the final stage. Another point on which I would venture to say a word to parents is this. Do not take your girls away from school too early. Every schoolmaster knows that the most valuable years, those which leave the deepest marks in character and intellect, are those from sixteen to eighteen. It is equally true with girls, as schoolmistresses know equally well. It is in the later years that they get the full benefit of the higher teaching, and that much of what may have seemed the drudgery of earlier work reaps its natural and deserved reward. Let your children come early, so as to be taught well from the beginning, and let them stay late.
I do not myself know what your buildings may be; but a friend to whom I wrote speaks of them as inadequate and somewhat unworthy of the city. May I venture to say to a Bath public that it is worth while to have first-rate buildings for educational purposes? No money is better spent. If the Bath public will take this up in earnest it cannot be doubted that the Girls' School Company would second their efforts in such an important centre. Come over and see our Clifton High School, with its spacious lawns and playgrounds and pleasant rooms, and you will be discontented with a righteous discontent.
And now I will point out another defect in High School education which parents and mistresses may do much to remedy. There is usually—and I am assuming without direct knowledge that it is the case here—no system by which any one girl is known through her whole school career to any one mistress; nothing corresponding to the tutor system of our public schools. It follows that a girl passes from form to form, and the relation between her and her mistress is so constantly broken that it is morally less powerful than it might be. The friendly and permanent relation of old days is converted into an official and temporary relation. It will be obvious to any one who reflects that the loss is great. The cure for it is twofold. The parents may do much by establishing a friendly relation with the form mistresses of their girls. I have known parents who had never taken the trouble to inquire even the names of their girls' mistress. If parents wish to get really the best out of a school, I would say to them (and I am speaking specially to mothers), you are delegating to the form mistress a very large share of the responsibility for the formation of your daughter's character; the least you can do is to be in the most friendly and confidential communication with her that circumstances permit. And I would say to the mistresses that, as far as is possible, you should be to the girls what form masters are in a good school to their boys—friends in school and out of school, acquainted with their tastes, companions sometimes in their games or their walks, and in all ways breaking down the merely formal relation of teacher and pupil. The ideally bad master, as I have often said to my young masters on a first appointment, is one who as soon as his boys clear out of the class-room, puts his hands in his pockets and whistles, and thanks Heaven that he will see no more of the boys for so many hours. I do not know what the corresponding action on the part of a mistress may be, as I believe they have no pockets and can't whistle, but there is probably a corresponding state of mind. I venture, therefore, to suggest that in our High Schools there should be a greater rapprochement than is usual between parents and mistresses and girls in order to make the system more truly educational in the best sense.
I am now going to turn to a wholly different subject; and I am going to talk to the girls. In the crusade against the lower type of education that prevailed twenty years ago, and still exists, who are the most important agents? It is the girls who are still in the High Schools, or who are passing out of them, or who are otherwise getting the higher education in a few private schools. "Ye are our epistle, known and read of all men," and read of all women too, with their still keener eyes.
There is a very real danger in our High Schools that the intellectual side of education may be overestimated and overpressed, not by mistresses, but by yourselves; and that the natural, human, domestic, and family elements in it may be undervalued. What are you yourselves at home, in society, with parents, brothers, sisters, children, friends, schoolfellows, servants? Is the better education, that you are undoubtedly getting, widening your sympathies, opening your heart and mind to all the educational influences which do not consist in books or in work? Is it giving you greater delicacy of touch? Is it opening new channels for influences, streaming in on you or streaming out from you? Your daily life may become a higher education, and is so to the truly noble-minded and well-educated girl or woman. Do not regard as interruptions, and as teasing, the calls of household, the duties to parents, visitors, children, and the rest; it is part of the education of life to fulfil all these duties well, delightfully, brilliantly, joyously, enthusiastically; these things are not interruptions to life, they are life itself. There was a pitiful magazine article written the other day by some lady complaining that social duties, the having to see her friends, her cook, her gardener, her dress-maker, etc., prevented her from reading Herbert Spencer, and developing her small fragment of soul. Social duties, rightly done, are one of the developments of soul. Let it be seen that you girls who can enjoy your literature, and your history, and your music, and your drawing with keen appreciation are not made thereby selfish or unsociable; but that you are more delightful creatures than those who have no such independent resources and joys. A girl who gets her certificate or prize and is cross or dull at home, and does not think it worth while to be kind and agreeable to a young brother or an old nurse, to every creature in her household down to the cat and the canary, is a traitor to the cause of higher education.
Again, it has been observed that the practical and artistic elements in school education have been, in general, more thoroughly developed of late years since they were put into a secondary place. This is as it should be. Such subjects as music, drawing, cooking, housekeeping, wood-carving, nursing, needlework, when they are studied at all, are studied more professionally and thoroughly and intelligently, and less in the spirit of the amateur and dabbler. So I would say to you, both now and when you leave, show that your education in intelligence has given you wide interests and powers to master all such subjects. Take them up all the more thoroughly.
Closely akin to this merit of thoroughness is the large spirit of unselfishness that ought to come, and certainly in many instances does come, with wider interests, a more intelligent education, and a more active imagination. Women in our class have more leisure than men; they can actually do what is impossible by the conditions of life for us men to do, link class to class by knowledge and sympathy and help and kindness. They can be of immense service in this way. There is a story in the life of an American lady, Mrs. Lynam, that occurs to me. There was much conversation about a certain Mr. Robbins, who had lately died; he had been such a benefactor, such a good man, and so on. A visitor asked, "Did Mr. Robbins found a benevolent institution?" "No," was the reply, "he was a benevolent institution." Women of our class may be, they ought to be, "benevolent institutions." And such women exist among us; pity is there are so few of them. They can unobtrusively be centres of happiness, and knowledge, and generous attitudes of mind. Now there ought to be more of such women, and I look to our High Schools with hope. They ought to make girls public-spirited and large-minded.
There is another element in girls' education which is only imperfectly as yet brought out, and which you yourselves can do something to develop. I mean the better appreciation of an education which is not in books, and not in accomplishments, and not in duties, and not in social intercourse. How shall I describe it? Think of the old Greek education of men. There was a large element of literature and poetry and natural religion and imagination in it; and a large element of gymnastic also; but besides all this it was an education of eye and ear; it was a training that sprang from reverence for nature, as a whole, for an ideal of complete life, in body and mind and soul; and not only for complete individual life, but also for the city, the nation. It was a consummate perfection of life that was ever leading the Athenian upward, by a life-long education, to strive for a certain grace and finish in every one of his faculties. And we see to what splendid results in literature and art and civic and personal beauty it led them.
This element is still wanting in our higher education; it is the ideal of nobility of life and perfection. We lack it in our physical education. That is still far from perfect. If we all, parents, children, boys and girls, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, had some of the Greek feeling of high admiration of physical perfection of form and grace and activity, we should not see so many boys and girls of very imperfect gracefulness, nor should we see fashions of dress so ruinous to all ideals of perfection and grace. We cannot make up for the want of this national artistic ideal of beauty of figure by artificial gymnastics, scientific posturings, and ladders and bars. They are better than nothing, they are a protest, they certainly remedy some defects and prevent others. But do not you be content with them. By self-respect and self-discipline, by healthy life, early hours, open air, natural exercise, the joyous and free use of all your powers, by dancing, playing games, by refusal to give way to unhealthy and disfiguring fashions, and, above all, by an aspiration after grace and perfection, do what you can to remedy this national defect in our ideals for girls.
Did you ever read Kingsley's "Nausicaa in London"? Do you all know who Nausicaa was? If not, let me advise you to borrow Worsley's "Odyssey" and read Book VI., and read Kingsley's Essay too. Nausicaa was a Greek maiden who played at ball; and I think you are doing more to approach the old Greek ideal when you play at lawn tennis and cricket and hockey, and I would add rounders and many another game, than when you are going through ordered exercises, valuable as they are, or even than when you are learning Greek or copying Greek statues.
This leads me to say that games contribute much to remedy another deficiency in our ideal. There is a defective power of real enjoyment of life, of healthy spirits among us moderns. There is more enjoyment now than there was. I think my generation was better than the one that preceded us in this respect; we had more games, more fun, more abandon in enjoyment than our fathers and mothers, your grandfathers and grandmothers, had, if we may judge from letters published and unpublished. And they too often thought we were a frivolous generation, not so staid and decorous as we might be, and repressed and checked us; while we on the contrary urge on you to enjoy more fully the splendour of your youth and vitality. We desire to see you dance and sing and laugh and bubble over with the delicious inexhaustible flow of vital energy; we know that it need not interfere with the refinement of perfect manners and decorum, and we know too that there is the force which will sober down and do good work, and there is the health-giving exercise, the geniality, and the joy that will make you stronger and pleasanter, more patient and more persuasive to good in years to come. So it is with boys: men are made in our playgrounds as much as in the class-room; so, too, is it with you. I must give you a quotation from "Fo'c's'le Yarns," that delightfullest of volumes—
"It's likely God has got a plan
To put a spirit in a man
That's more than you can stow away
In the heart of a child. But he'll see the day
When he'll not have a bit too much for the work
He's got to do. And the little Turk
Is good for nothing but shouting and fighting
And carrying on; and God delighting
To make him strong and bold and free
And thinking the man he's going to be—
More beef than butter, more lean than lard,
Hard if you like, but the world is hard.
You'll see a river how it dances
From rock to rock wherever it chances:
In and out, and here and there
A regular young divil-may-care.
But, caught in the sluice, it's another case,
And it steadies down, and it flushes the race
Very deep and strong, but still
It's not too much to work the mill.
The same with hosses: kick and bite
And winch away—all right, all right,
Wait a bit and give him his ground,
And he'll win his rider a thousand pound."
There is a word in German which has no English equivalent; it expresses just the missing ideal I am speaking of. It is a terrible mouthful, as German words often are—Lebensglückseligkeit—it is the rapture and blessedness and happiness of living. Carry the idea away with you, and make it one of your personal ideals, and home ideals, and school ideals, and life ideals, this Lebensglückseligkeit.
"'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that I want."
You can carry this idea with you into society, and use it to brighten its conventional sociabilities, and stimulate them into positive enjoyability by more of intelligence and animation.
We had a visit the other day from an American gentleman, Mr. Muybridge, who came to give a lecture at Clifton College. I believe he also lectured in Bath. He remarked to Mrs. Wilson in the lecture-room that he was glad to see some ladies present. "I like ladies at my lectures; they are so intelligent." "Yes," she replied, "but I fear you are attributing to us the qualities of American ladies; we are not particularly intelligent." "You are joking!" was his reply. "No," she went on, "we are always told how much more intelligent American ladies are than English." He paused for some time, and then slowly said, "Well, I'll not deny they are smarter."
Well, this quality that Mr. Muybridge describes as "smartness" is an American equivalent of Lebensglückseligkeit; it is a sort of intensity of life, of vivacity, of willingness to take trouble, to interest and be interested, that is a little lacking in our English ideal of young ladies: and we must be on our guard lest any school ideals of study and bookishness should actually increase this deficiency. Any one, mistress or girl, who makes good education to be associated with dulness and boredom and insipidity is again a traitor to the cause of higher education.
I have run to greater length than I intended, and I will conclude.
It should be the aim of us all, Council, parents, mistresses, and girls, to show that our ideal of education includes both the training of the intelligence and reason, and the storing the mind with treasures of beauty and instruments of power for opening new avenues into the storehouse of knowledge and delight that the world contains; and also the development of the practical ability, the benevolence and sympathy, the vivacity, the enjoyment of life, the fulness of activity, bodily and mental, that makes the Lebensglückseligkeit I spoke of, and the superadding, or rather diffusing through it all, an unobtrusive but deep Christian faith and reverence and charity.
The Archbishop of Canterbury lately said in his charge that "public schools were infinitely more conducive to a strong morality than any other institution." He was thinking of boys' schools, of which he speaks with intimate knowledge; but I believe that, where girls' schools have at their head one who in the spirit of Dr. Arnold recognizes the responsibility for giving an unostentatious, unpartisan-like, but all-pervading and intelligent religious tone to the life, the aims, and the ideal of the school, and where the Council and parents value this influence, there the influence of girls' High Schools may be more conducive to strong morality and true religion in England than even that of our great public schools. For the High Schools are training more and more of the most influential class among the women of England, as the public schools are training the men, and the influence of women must of necessity be of the first importance; for it is they who determine the religious training and the atmosphere of the home, and thus profoundly affect the national character. Let us all alike try to keep before ourselves from day to day and from year to year these high ideals of education which can nowhere be so well attained, both by mistresses and girls, as in a High School.
And in particular let me appeal to you, the inhabitants of Bath, to be proud of this school, to foster it, to assist it in every way, and be assured that in so doing you are conferring a lasting benefit on your famous city.>
[2] An Address delivered at the High School, Bath, and the High School, Clifton, Dec. 1889.