If educated into a civilized being, she learns to subject her own natural and unregulated—her savage will, we might say—to the customs and habits of civilized society. If educated into a moral being, she learns to subject her will, not to the idea of what is agreeable or useful, but to the idea of what is simply right. If educated into a religious being, she learns to submit her will to the Divine Will, and in her relation to God, she first becomes freed from the bonds of all finite and transitory things, and attains to the region where perfect obedience and perfect freedom coincide.[24] A woman who is virtuous, so to speak, with regard to the first, might be characterized as polite; she who is virtuous in regard to the second, as conscientious; and she who is virtuous in regard to the third, as humble. She who is all these may be said to have been thoroughly educated as to her Will. The culture of the Will may be, then,
- Social,
- Moral,
- Religious.
In this realm, as in that of the intellect, the process of education consists in developing a spiritual being out of a natural being. It is the clothing, or rather, the informing of the natural with the spiritual. The part of education which relates to the social life is almost entirely given to the parents; and generally, from the great demands which business makes on the father, it falls almost wholly into the hands of the mother. It is she who must train the little girl into habits of neatness, of obedience, of order, of regularity, of punctuality—small virtues, but the foundation stones of a moral character, and into habits of unselfishness and of politeness.
Social Culture.—Neatness in person, as in dress, is not natural to the woman of a savage tribe, neither is it a characteristic of hermits. It is the product of civilized society. It is a recognition, in some sense, of the equality of others to one's self, a bending of the undisciplined will to the pleasure and satisfaction of others. Like all other habits, it becomes, in time, agreeable to the person who practises it, but the first training into it, is a painful struggle.
Do we not all remember that in the picture painted by the melancholy Jacques of the shadow side of human existence, the “shining morning face” of the child was not forgotten as one of the shadow tints of that stage of life?
The education into habits of neatness is almost entirely in the hands of the mother or of her deputies. She herself then must be thoroughly educated into it, and it were well that she remembered and taught her daughters to remember, that real neatness includes the unseen as well as the seen. Neatness has a moral significance not to be despised, for though it is true that the dress is an index of the character, and that external neatness habitually covering untidy underclothing, is only typical of some moral unsoundness, it is equally true that there is an influence in the other direction, from the external, inwards. The habit of neatness furnishes soil in which the tree of self-respect may begin its growth. Do we not all know that a child behaves better in clean clothes than in soiled ones? And has there not been a perceptible elevation in the real character of the city police since they were dressed in neat uniforms? I know that the fact that they are in uniform touches another point, and yet it is not all. If instead of setting the beggar on horseback, we clothe him in clean and neat garments, we all know that we have given him an impulse in the direction of the good.
Obedience is perhaps the next habit to be spoken of. Unquestioning obedience we must demand from the child for her own safety. It may often be a question of life and death whether the little girl runs when she is called, or throws away something which she has in her hand, instead of putting it into her mouth. But has not this habit of obedience a higher office than this? It is the first yielding of the untrained will to rightful authority, and as such, has an immense significance. The mother who cannot train her daughters and sons to obedience were better childless, for she is but giving to her country elements of weakness, not elements of strength. She is furnishing future inmates for jails, penitentiaries, and prisons, and putting arms into the hands of the enemies of law and order. And yet, how can a woman who has no clear ideas herself of what should be demanded and enforced, and hardly a sufficient command of language to express directions clearly, who was never taught herself to obey, and who has no definite idea of what end she really wishes to attain, educate her children into obedience? A sense of exact justice, a persistent attention, and a consistent thought are necessary. Has the education which we have been giving our girls tended to develop these? Are they not “developed only by mental work in those very directions which have scarcely heretofore formed a part of the education of our girls?” Does not the welfare of the country imperatively demand that we give those who are to be the only educators of the children in their first and decisive years, a thorough, slow, a well-founded and finished education?
Order, in any of its manifestations, is not natural to the race. But the very nature of civilization forces it upon us. We may yield our will at first to its demands, or we may oppose, but it will not take a very long time in the latter case for the demands of social life to give us so great an amount of annoyance, that the pain of the inconvenience incurred will far outweigh the pleasure of lawlessness in this respect. Here, also, the mother is supreme, though the teacher should come to her aid very effectually when the school-days begin, and here I touch a subject which demands a little more attention than has hitherto been paid to it, for too much cannot be said of the great significance of rules as educators in girls' schools. It is allowed in very large schools, and where boys and girls are brought together, that there must be strict rules, because large masses cannot be successfully managed without; but it is generally taken for granted in a girls' school, and where the numbers are small, that very little or no discipline is required or even desirable. This view follows logically enough if one assumes that the object of discipline is the present good of the school as a whole. But if we assume that its prime object is the future benefit of the pupils, individually, it will follow that the size of the school is not an element which should enter into the question at all, and this is the basis which I assert to be the only true one.
I do not deny that there may be too many rules. One may endeavor to hedge pupils around with arbitrary prohibitions, but any attempt at this, like any other unreasonable action, will soon result in its opposite, so that the two extremes are ultimately the same in effect. Many persons speak and act as if they believed rules to be in themselves only a necessary evil, of which the less we have the better, and an entire absence of which would be the desirable state. Rousseau might be said to be the leader of this class, educationally speaking, for this is pre-eminently the doctrine which he teaches, though I fancy that those who object most to rules are not often aware that they are arraying themselves under his banner.
That school-work should go on in regular routine, that a regular order should be established, and that no slight cause should be suffered to break this, that there should be some well-defined and regular order in which pupils should come to and go from their hourly duties—the importance of these things to quiet and economy of time is as nothing, compared to the results of regulations like these on the intellectual and moral character. The daily and hourly habit in external observances repeats itself in habits of thought and study. Unconsciously, facts are learned, and thoughts take on regular habits, and the impress made by the silent work of years is ineffaceable. It will show itself, in years to come, if we refer only to so-called “practical” things—and this is what our condemners of rules are seeking for,—in well-ordered homes, where each duty has its appointed time, and where the necessary labor goes on so regularly that it is hardly noticeable, except in an absence of all confusion and a permanent sense of quiet;—homes where, because of this regularity, time will remain for higher culture, and the whole family will be elevated thereby.