Work and Play in Girls' Schools / By Three Head Mistresses

by Dorothea Beale; J. F. Dove; Lucy Helen Muriel Soulsby

(a) They re-enforce home teaching.Mothers need not feel that the school lesson displaces theirs—rather it enforces what they say, since the child probably listens with increased interest to what they say when it is unconsciously echoed by an outside authority.

(b) Avoid the danger of personalities.It is very difficult at home not to omit certain sore points in these moral lessons, for fear of seeming to aim at special children. In a series of lessons at school, this difficulty is obviated and the victim can feel that the arrow has hit home, without the indignity of being watched by home eyes to see if it has taken effect.

(c) Give large views of duty.It is easier, also, in speaking to a number to take larger views of life and its duties, than might seem suitable in any individual family. Social duties, good citizenship, high ideals of future usefulness can be held up to elder girls at school as a part of religion; while such faults as partisanship, political or otherwise, narrow-mindedness, family selfishness can be discouraged without any danger of personality.

These moral lessons should serve a distinct purpose in the school by imbuing the girls with high ideals; the fact of belonging to a large public body such as a high school should assist them in assimilating wider ideas of life. But it must not be forgotten that moral lessons in no way supersede the necessity for definite religious instruction; abstract ideals will have little power against future temptations unless they are supported by sound Biblical knowledge and religious belief.

(d) Put school discipline on the true basis.From one point of view, it may be said that parents should feel responsible for this instruction, but surely the teacher would not be content to give up such a hold on the child as is furnished by the religious lessons. It must be almost impossible to maintain real control over the tone of the school, if the deepest part of the child’s nature is left outside the school’s jurisdiction.

(e) Give religion its right position in the curriculum.Besides, though the responsibility and the pleasure of this branch of education do belong primarily to the parent, yet, when the claims of school eat up so much of the day, it is very hard for the mother to get enough time to deal fully with the subject. Also, the better the school and the more fully it employs the mental faculties of the child, and wins its allegiance, the more important it is that such a great authority in the child’s world should proclaim itself supremely interested in this branch of learning. Children often have to learn music at school, merely because they only attend to their practising when it is done for a school authority. Much as we may wish home to be supreme in all cases, we must recognise that children often go through a phase in which they yield more unquestioning submission to school rules than to home wishes, and give keener energy to school lessons than to the extra ones devised by the mother, and secretly resented by the child as an unjust addition to its burden.

Besides, it is possible there may be homes, we will hope they are rare, where religious teaching is not sufficiently attended to; certainly our better-class children are often more ignorant of their Bibles than those who have been to a good Sunday school.

Let us assume, therefore, that the school must have a definite and fairly complete course of religious instruction, including Biblical and moral lessons; church schools would of course add doctrinal and prayer-book lessons.

(f) Leaven the school life.But the Bible lesson is not only a subject in the curriculum, it should be a leaven in the school. This can only be the case if the children feel that, in spite of all imperfections and shortcomings, the Bible lesson really is the truest outcome of the teacher’s own nature, that it is to her the most interesting lesson of the week, bearing on the whole of life, instead of being an isolated subject in one pigeon-hole of her mind.

Let us take it as a principle that these lessons should have the first and freshest hour of the morning given to them, that they may be felt as a continuation of school prayers, as a further consecration of the day, not as a mere lesson to be sandwiched in with French and algebra, as if all were of equal importance.[29] Let the children realise that religion comes first in arranging a time-table, and that no pressure of examination work can be taken as a valid excuse for curtailing these lessons. Children sometimes think that because no marks are given for divinity it will pay to get an excuse for this, and to devote the time to lessons which tell in their weekly class-list. This is only a crude force of a temptation common to every stage of life, and it would be one of the most valuable of all school lessons could such a child be taught that religion, if real, must come first in Monday’s lessons as well as in Sunday’s services.