“One phase of this catholic way of looking at things was her insistence, always very emphatic, on the idea that school and the teacher have to do in some way or other with the whole of life. She would not allow it to be supposed that any condition of the well-being and good growth of her pupils was no concern of hers. I do not mean that she at all denied the function of the home in education. On the contrary, she attached the greatest weight to it, but she held that whether the home did its duty or not it was the business of the school to aim at supplying conditions essential for the development of the pupil on all sides—to hold itself responsible for failure even when fathers and mothers had neglected their part. When parents were wrong-headed, or negligent, or mistaken, then it seemed natural to her to set about educating them. Many mothers learned priceless lessons of wisdom from her in the pleasant audiences of her “Blue room” at school; and few, I think, were ungrateful for them. She was full of ready resource in cases of difficulty, and she ever held that the moral was much more essentially her business than the intellectual salvation. When there was trouble with a girl, she gave herself to its cure with the most absolute self-devotion, and one great remedy was to send for the mother, to take counsel with her, and to give her counsel. In all matters of behaviour, such as foolish talk and unladylike—or shall I not rather say unwomanly—conduct she was strict and vigilant. Such things never escaped her, and her manner of dealing with them individually has made an epoch in the life of many a girl, the transition from an irreverent to a reverent state of feeling for social relationships.
“We are of course all familiar with the view that education is threefold, that it concerns itself with moral, intellectual, and physical welfare. But there was a strength and elasticity in Miss Buss’ feeling about school education as all-embracing that marked it as more than the consequence of a view. Each girl was a clearly imagined whole to her, with whose deficiencies and needs she had the mother’s no less than the teacher’s sympathy. She was wonderfully patient, and sympathetic, too, with foolish mothers, of whom there are some. She had a kind word and thought for ‘fads,’ strenuously as she resisted them. Forty years—thirty years—ago, the ‘fads’ that had to be resisted were many indeed.
“So she taught us, her teachers, the duty of infinite pains, infinite hope in the training of character. She never gave a girl up as hopeless. If one way failed, then another must be found. She had great belief—a belief well justified by facts—in the salvation of character by way of the rousing of intellectual interests. It was curious to note how a naughty girl improved if she grew to like her lessons. Naughtiness is often unsteadiness of will, and intellectual discipline is a steadying influence. Irrationality, moreover, is the cause of much moral evil, and thoughtful study makes for rationality. It may be—I am much disposed to think it is—that intellectual training effects greater moral improvement in women than it does in men, because a woman’s faults of character, on an average, turn more on irrationality and lack of nerve control, while the man’s faults centre in his profounder self-absorption and slower sympathies.
“Character as the prime aim of education soon became the key-note of the North London practice. It fell in with this that great attention should be paid to punctuality, accuracy, order, method, and the cultivation of the clerkly business abilities generally. Nor should we forget that simple quality of respect for property, so despised of boys, on which the head-mistress laid much stress as essential for girls, and, indeed, a part of honesty. In very early days, girls spilt ink on their dresses, so ink ceased to be part of the regular school furniture, and is only given out when required, e.g. for examinations, by the mistress in charge of the form. It is part of the tradition of the place—a tradition that will now be a tender memory—that the giving out of the ink is a serious responsible act, the weight of which should never be thrown on a monitor or even a prefect. The spilling of the ink is an evil so great that its risk should be laid only on the shoulders of authority. But, seriously, this is symbolic of the leading idea that the duty of taking proper care of the furniture should be taught at school as well as at home.
“Nobody but a school-mistress—except, indeed, a schoolmaster—knows to what depths of disorder the youthful mind may descend in writing out its lessons. I remember how it astonished me when, even at the North London Collegiate School, the original sin of literary untidiness caused itself to be seen. Well, from the beginning, serious war was made upon irregularities and disorder of this kind, a whole system of school routine growing up in consequence, much of which has become general in girls’ schools.”
“Order, Heaven’s first law,” was certainly the first law of school-life. The place was duly provided, and everything had to be in its place, an arrangement greatly helped by the Swedish desks—one for each girl, of suitable size—which Miss Buss was the first to introduce into England.
Wherever Miss Buss’ influence reached, order reigned. Everything bore witness to her power of organization, and everything throughout the place, down to the work of the lowest servant, was arranged by the head who said of herself, “I spend my life in picking up pins!”
The highest illustration of this quality comes in the story of Lord Granville’s admiration of the perfect arrangements on the Prize Day when he was in the chair. He could not forget it, and spoke of it to Dr. Carpenter, in reference to the giving of Degrees at Burlington House. Dr. Carpenter wrote to Miss Buss to ask her secret, and in reply she went herself to Burlington House and discussed with him all the arrangements, which consequently went off in perfect order.
No girl in either school, who had been long enough to enter into the spirit of the place, will ever during the longest life be able to look with indifference on an ink-spot, or to suppress a feeling of lofty superiority, if she ever has occasion to pass through a boys’ school, and cast a glance at desks or floors there. And few will be able to read without a sympathetic smile or sigh a little narrative of one of their number showing what came of inadvertence on this point—