3. Want of proper proportion in arranging subjects.
4. Poor quality of the teaching, due to the inferior education of the teachers themselves.
5. Lack of an external standard to act as a stimulus to the learner and help to the teacher.
Mr. Bryce’s recommendations are of special interest, since they mark out the lines on which the chief reforms have proceeded. They are these:—
1. The establishment of schools for girls under proper authority and supervision. ‘It would be at all events most desirable to provide in every town large enough to be worthy of a grammar school a day school for girls, under public management, where a plain, sound education should be offered at the lowest prices (from £5 per annum or upwards) compatible with the provision of good salaries for teachers, and which should be regularly examined by competent persons thereto appointed.’
2. Considerable changes in the course of instruction for girls of all classes. ‘It would be proper to lay more stress upon arithmetic, to introduce mathematics everywhere, and Latin where there is a fair prospect of a girl’s being able to spend four hours a week upon it for three years.’
3. The foundation of institutions which should give to women the same opportunity of obtaining higher education which the Universities give to boys. The lack of this higher training injures the school education by lowering its tone, and opening up no wider field of knowledge to the more studious and eager scholars. An even worse result is ‘the low standard of education and of knowledge about education among schoolmistresses and governesses.’... ‘It is from the advent of more highly educated teachers that the first improvement in the education of girls is to be hoped for.’
Such was the verdict of this famous Commission, whose ‘revelations’ have figured in so many prizegiving speeches. The report filled twenty stout volumes, which were duly relegated to their place on official shelves, to accumulate dust; and there, thirty years after, they have been joined by the nine volumes drawn up by our latest educational Commission. Truly has it been said that the best way to shelve a question in England is to let a Royal Commission sit upon it. But even a Royal Commission and a twenty-volume report could not shelve the subject of girls’ education; the reformers were too much in earnest. Miss Beale extracted from these ponderous blue tomes all that related to girls, and reprinted it in a compact little volume. Even before its appearance action had been taken. The Cambridge Local Examinations had drawn schoolmistresses together and given them a common interest. They now began to form associations in different parts of the country. One was started in London, with Miss Buss as President and Miss Davies as Secretary. The North of England proved a specially congenial sphere for this form of union. The Ladies’ Honorary Council of the Yorkshire Board of Education was an outcome of the introduction into that county of the Local Examinations, but it soon extended its operations over wider fields, e.g. domestic economy and sanitary science, as well as the extension of endowments to girls.
Even more far-reaching in its results was the North of England Council. This too originated in Schoolmistresses’ associations, among which Miss A. J. Clough was a moving spirit. In 1865 she contributed to Macmillan’s Magazine an article setting forth certain schemes for improving girls’ education. One of these was to establish in other large towns courses of lectures similar to those given at Queen’s and Bedford Colleges, to be attended by the older pupils from schools and by teachers. Co-operation between several towns would make it possible to engage really able lecturers from Oxford and Cambridge. The experiment was first tried at Liverpool, and spread to Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield. Associations were formed in these four towns, and by the election of two representatives from each, the ‘North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women’ was constituted in 1867, with Miss Clough as secretary and Mrs. Butler as president. The lectures proved a phenomenal success. In the autumn of 1868 the numbers of the combined audiences in nine towns amounted to 1500, and Mr. F. Myers writing of them in Macmillan, enumerated their advantages thus:
‘1. They contain within themselves the germ of university extension.