“Sighs amid her narrow days,
Moving about the household ways
In that dark house where she was born.”
Indeed, the supposition of Dr. Clarke that psychical influences may have caused diseases which he describes, casts light upon some sad cases of invalidism which I have known, and where disease may quite as probably have been induced by soul-loneliness—intellectual starvation—as by the brain-work which, in his cases, he assumes to be the cause.
In the new education which is preparing for our girls, I trust regard will be paid to training physicians for the souls of women, as well as for their bodies, and there will surely be needed that very “feminine subtlety” that divines, if it does not reason out, a cause. “I believe in educating women to be physicians since I have read that book, if I never did before,” has been the exclamation of many women who have read it. We want women physicians, educated to habits of thinking, logical, as well as physiological—capable of tracing psychical, as well as physical, causes. We want teachers so educated, women drawn to study the science of teaching through a love of it, as Florence Nightingale was led through seven years' preparation for her work—as a naturalist or an artist is drawn to his work. We want women on our School Boards and among our visiting committees, who know how to estimate the trust committed to them, and who will give time, thought, and study to their duties.
The science of education is, to-day, where the science of geology was fifty years ago. We are just beginning to think of it as a science. Men and women are waking up to its demands. Children, with their infinite variety of organizations, temperaments, and idiosyncracies, can no more be educated at random than plants, gathered from the four quarters of the earth, can be perfected through the same culture, and in the same climate and soil. Each child in the great crowd that gathers in our schools, is in some respects like a particular musical instrument, designed by God, in its complicated mechanism, to perform its particular part, to yield its own particular tone in the diapason of life; and I shudder when I think how rudely it is often played upon by untaught teachers—teachers who have drifted to their work, or resorted to it as a temporary occupation, for its profits, but who have never thought of studying its principles, as physicians, lawyers, artists, study the principles of their professions. Played upon by the unskilled hands of those who have never troubled themselves to study the physical, much less the psychic delicacy of this wonderful human instrument, the only wonder is, that society should yield the harmonies it does. No! women need to think more, not less; to increase, not diminish brain-work; to overlive the drudgery of it, whether it involve teaching, writing, study, the work of a profession, or house-work, by breathing into it the living spirit of love, which sanctifies and ennobles whatever the hands or the brain find to do.
As regards different methods of education and their results, the old New England Academies may furnish some useful lessons. These began to be established from fifty to seventy-five years ago, and are now mostly displaced by Union and High Schools. But they were the initiate of a very important revolution in the status of the education of girls. In their earliest educational plans, our fathers had not taken their girls much into account. But these academies, though not planned with any special reference to giving the girls of the New England villages and the rural districts the opportunities of education, at once established a system of co-education, where the girls and the young men met on terms of as entire equality as any co-educational plan has ever since contemplated. The academy edifice was most frequently built by voluntary subscription from persons of all religious sects, and the school was in charge of trustees, so chosen as to avoid any sectarian bias or rivalry in its management. The building generally crowned some hill, or stood in the midst of a grove where spacious grounds could be obtained. The school was usually under charge of a gentleman teacher—some college graduate—and a lady assistant. The course of study, aside from a course designed to fit young men for college, was largely elective. These schools were as perfect educational republics as can be imagined. The young men and the young women met in their classes, on terms of entire equality and respect for each other. There were few rules in the school, and as to government, the pupils were mostly put upon their honor. The course of study was frequently identical, and with the exception of the Greek—sometimes the Latin—designed to fit young men for college—largely so.
My own course was precisely that of the young men in every study, though Greek, to which I was persuaded by my minister, led me through a cruel martyrdom of jokes from my companions. Repeating at school what their mothers said at home, they even then satirized me with proposals to get up petitions to open the doors of our State University to girls “who wanted to be men” I felt these jokes so keenly, that at first I pursued my study of Greek covertly, reciting out of school. But, cheered by my minister's encouragement, I lived down jokes, and went into the class with the young men, kept up with them, and continued the study until they went to college, and beyond, until a call from one of our Female Seminaries for a teacher “who had been educated by a man,” broke up a course that I would have been glad to have extended through college. And that without “wishing to be a man,” without wishing for anything but to gratify a love of study, which was just as natural to me as to those I had thus far studied with. The daily hours of school were more than in our High schools, and we had recitations always, as usual, up to twelve o'clock on Saturday, while the number of recitations a student was allowed to have, nearly always exceeded the number allowed in our High schools. I have never in any schools known more thorough and persistent study than was performed by students in these academies, and the standing of the girls was invariably as high as that of the young men. Such recitations as we had in History, Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, were like a life elixir; we went from them, not wearied, exhausted, but rested, exhilarated. We had gained bodily strength as well as mental clearness and force. They had infused life.
And where are the girls, who, forty, even fifty years ago, made trial of “persistent” study, of the dangerous system of co-education in the Academies? There has surely been sufficient time to test its physical effects on them. Where are they? Scattered throughout the world, a host of noble women, many of them doing brain-work still.
If my limits would permit, I could give the history of scores of them who were educated mostly in those academies, and who have continued study and brain-work ever since—who have borne children, reared families, and are yet strong and healthy, far beyond the average of women who have lived in ease and idleness—quite as healthy as women devoted alone to domestic cares.
The invalids on a long list of old associates which Dr. Clarke's book has led me to call to mind and look up, are, I have been surprised to find, among those who did “run well for a time,” but they have turned back and ceased mental labor. Some have fallen into worldliness and a fashionable life, and are broken down under it. Others, restricted to some narrow creed of thought, have not dared to open their eyes to the light of any new day that is dawning on the world, until, ceasing to grow, they have, according to a law of nature, fallen into decay, invalidism, and “nervous prostration.” Bringing this subject before several experienced persons, teachers, and one a physician, in the light in which I have aimed to bring it before my readers, I have asked, “And were these cases of invalidism (cases of which we have been speaking) from your best scholars? Were they, in short, persons still continuing to grow?” Stopping a moment to think, they have, in two instances at least, given precisely the same answer: “I never thought of that before, but they were not.”
There are some other things that characterized methods, of study in those academies of forty or fifty years ago, that may instruct us. While the girls studied harder, had more recitations, extending through more hours in a day than are required in any of our High schools, they seldom studied in school, but at their homes or at their boarding places. This gave them freedom of position, liberty to sit or stand or walk, when they were at work on a difficult problem, or engaged in close thinking—an advantage which any one who has been a close student in later life, must appreciate—an advantage which I have recently heard young ladies in our university say, they could hardly conceive of before they went to the university from the high school where they fitted. This also led them almost every hour into the open air, and to take a little exercise, as the girls in our university and in some of our colleges are forced to do, effecting a visible and marked improvement in the standard of health among the girls in the university above that of the girls in the High schools.