In some of the public schools which I have visited in Germany, the lessons for children eleven and twelve years old seemed to me more difficult than the lessons set for children of the same age in our public schools; and our children are not in school nearly so many hours in a day as the children in German schools, which are so often referred to, not only as model educational institutions, but conservators of health as well. Children in Germany go to school at seven o'clock in the morning. In very early morning walks, I have often met scores of German children, with their little soldier-like knapsack of books strapped to their shoulders, and have stopped them to examine their school-books, and inquire about their schools. In a little valley in Switzerland, seeing a bevy of children starting, so many in one direction, before it was light in the morning, I inquired where all those children were going. “To the school, to be sure,” I was answered. “But they cannot see to read or study,” I said. “O, sie müssen Licht mitnehmen” (they must take a light with them), was the reply.
Our modes of education will be changed; there are defects to be remedied, evils to be cured, which affect both sexes; but women will be educated. All the tendencies of the age are towards a higher intellectual culture for them. Women's clubs, classes, library and literary associations, are, throughout our cities and villages—in little country neighborhoods, even—furnishing women with means of intellectual growth and advancement. There is no more marked feature of the age than these associations. The Babe of Bethlehem is born, and has even now too far escaped the search of Herod to be overtaken.
Nor is there anything in the spirit of the times which betokens the revival of the nunnery and monastic systems. Women already tread almost every avenue of honest thrift and business, unchallenged. The shrines of Minerva will not be desecrated by their presence. Their intellect will be developed, and their affections will be cultivated, and all truly womanly virtues fostered in the innermost penetralia even, of that temple where all wisdom, and all art, and all science, are taught; whose patron deity was prophetically made by a mythology, wise beyond its own ken, not a man, not a god—but a goddess, a typical woman.
As surely as girls persistently breathe the same air their brothers breathe, eat and drink as they do, go with them to church, public lectures, concerts, plays, and social entertainments, so will they, in the new and more truly Christian era that is dawning, come, more and more, to study with them, from youth to old age, in the academy, the sacred groves of philosophy, halls of science, schools of theology—everywhere and “persistently.”
Lucinda H. Stone.
Kalamazoo, Mich.