"These words of Herbert Spencer may be taken as a rule of life for the whole world. Until this also is made the thing of most importance in schools, other subjects will not fall into their right places in the whole scheme of instruction or the arrangements subsidiary thereto. But the task of learning self-restraint, of learning to guide our offspring, this is the moral aim and the only stable ground of all instruction.
"If at an early age you obtain adequate knowledge of how your body is constructed and how it works, and if you also learn to know how you can benefit or injure it, and through yourself those who will be born to you, or who may be dependent on you, this knowledge not only becomes your greatest safeguard if you will use it, but as a rule it gives you a desire to do so.
"A feeling of self-respect is aroused more strongly by knowledge than in any other way, but that this may be the result, the knowledge must not be imparted too late. I need not say that ordinary schools give far too little instruction of this kind, and that little not as it should be given. The pupils must understand why it is given; the teacher must be open, thorough, with no concealments, for the very things which are usually kept out of sight are the most important.
"I speak of that period of life to which I have before alluded. Is the child ever told what that is which is beginning? I mean, has it full, absolute knowledge? does it know what temptations will come, or why they will come? Has it learned how they are to be met? or how at that time it can create conditions for health, and through its health its character, good-humour, happiness?--that on that time hangs its future life, nay, that of its offspring? Is that taught in such a way as to be branded, so to say, into the child's will? Have the subjects of which I spoke been raised to a level of one which here, and now, might guide the scholar's fancy by noble incentive, strong purpose, enthusiasm? for children, especially young girls, can be made enthusiastic.
"Or, to come down to what every one is capable of forming a judgment about, do the parents at home know that at that age certain sorts of food, certain seasonings, are baneful to some natures? That for some a special diet is necessary? What sort of diet that should be? Is it known in schools that a special course of gymnastics may be of great assistance? Children are not all alike in respect to the amount of watchfulness and management which they require; some few require no special attention. But that most do need it, is a fact upon which I confidently appeal to the experience of this meeting, whose members have all been young once and have had young companions."
[He made a pause and looked round the room; a little bird could be heard twittering in the distance.]
"A further question: Is it not at that period of life that those, who had not learned to do so before, now learn to deceive? To act secretly, with a bashfulness which wounds the sense of honour and thus injures the character? If one thing can be admitted, another cannot--to the destruction of the character. Quietly, and as a rule quite unsuspected, at that age the powers of self-destruction begin to work in body and character; no one will dare to contradict me."
[The terrible pauses which he made were almost worse than anything he said; here he made one again. But he now passed on to something else.]
"But is there no place in the world," he asked, "where the schools are arranged as these experiences demand?"
[He answered this question by fully describing several schools in America and England: some for girls alone, some for girls and boys together. He also described several colleges for young women alone, and some for young men and women; he did not consider that any one of them, singly, offered all that he wished, but each one had something, many a great deal. He spoke at some length on a medical college at Boston, where an unmarried woman was professor of anatomy, and that, for students of both sexes; he mentioned that she further endeavoured to get her female pupils appointed as teachers in the girls' schools in the city. This lady professor was of opinion that every school should have a doctor as a teacher, and that he, or some other person, well instructed in Natural Science, should overlook the whole of the children's studies on this subject; the lessons must always be given so as to make a deep impression.]