CHAPTER IX.
PRACTICAL WORK.
“No one who has been brought into contact with Miss Buss, no one who has even seen her portrait, can have failed to be struck by her transparent integrity, her absolute sincerity, her single-mindedness of purpose. However much one might differ from her on a question of policy, one felt certain that the judgment was never warped by personal bias, that it was never prompted by ambition or jealousy, or any vulgar motive.... As an organizer she was unrivalled.”—Journal of Education, January, 1895.
The summary of Miss Buss’ practical work, for which I am so deeply indebted to Mrs. Bryant, is best given in her own words, with merely an interpolation illustrating that law of order on which these schools are so firmly based.
Mrs. Bryant begins with an important reminder—
“Teachers are not inapt to forget that the most important factor in education is the personality of the learner. The next most important is the personality of the teacher. So far as others make our education for us, the mind of the educator is more important by far than his method. And this is the more true the greater the teacher.
“Of Frances Mary Buss this was specially true, so much was intuition and sympathy in the concrete inwoven with her thoughts on the educational ideal. The ideal of her action was an emanation of her nature as a whole, not a pure product of thought. She could have told many things about it, but she could not tell it all. Her vision was wide, but her wisdom was wider. Hence there never was any danger that her mind would harden into a net of secondary principles in the solution of any individual problem. Practical questions were always unique, each one in itself, to her; and, rapid as she was in action, she could give time to deliberation and careful thought.
“To understand, therefore, the ideal of education under which so much good work has been done, we need to understand, not a theory true once for all, but the type of mind that is creative of right ideas as occasion requires. Nor is a subtle delineation of character needed here. The leading features are well marked, and a brief sketch may give the clearest conception.
“Breadth and elasticity of imagination, indomitable energy of will, boundless faith, unwearied sympathy—these are the great facts of character which lie behind her work and mark its ideals. They are all very obvious facts, but the first named, in the nature of the case, though the rarest and most remarkable, is the easiest to miss in its full significance. One clear mark of it is the memory she has left with each of her friends, of being interested specially in that phase of thought and work which she shared with them. The effect of it on her educational work was that extraordinary catholicity of view which distinguished her, and through her has influenced in many ways the theory of the girls’ school, and the tone of the educational question in the days which follow her.