More life and fuller, that we want!
Such were, I believe, the feelings and the thoughts of those who initiated just fifty years ago the great movement, which found its first visible expression in the foundation of Queen’s College by Maurice and Kingsley and Trench and others like-minded and less known. This was soon followed by the opening of Bedford College, 1849, and the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, 1853. Miss Buss and her brothers, in association with Mr. Laing, established the first great High School, and Mrs. Grey and Miss Shirreff carried on the movement in that direction; from the Union founded by them grew up the G.P.D.S. Co., while Miss Davies with far-seeing wisdom won over Cambridge professors (amongst whom I may specially mention Professor Henry Sidgwick and James Stuart) to offer the highest culture to women.
The leaders had to ask and answer many questions. What direction, what shape should the new movement for higher education take? Should there be two sorts of education for girls and boys? The Schools’ Inquiry Commission had shown that a specially feminine education had not produced very successful results, and the leaders said: Let us give to girls the solid teaching in languages and mathematics and science, which are found to strengthen the powers of boys, and prepare them to do good work of many kinds. If it was objected that women were to rule in the home, and men in the larger world, they argued, that for girls as for boys, the right course was to give a liberal education. The boy does not learn in the school the things which will be required in his future business or profession, but he brings to these the cultivated mind, the power of work, the disciplined will.
And the world is more and more recognising that the leaders were right, and schools have arisen in all our great towns. Fifty years ago there were dismal prophecies—an outcry that study would ruin health. Results physical and moral.Now it is a common remark that there is a general improvement in physique. Women too are more conscious of their responsibilities in the life of the family, as well as in that of the country, especially in social and church life. They feel, that though they may have but the “smallest scruple” of excellence, they must render for it “thanks and use”. Besides, another good has been more and more realised; as Mrs. Jameson, in her beautiful lecture,[2] set forth, girls taught on the same lines, and women who can enter into the subjects of study and thought which occupy the minds of their fathers, husbands, sons, have more understanding, more sympathy, more power to make the home what it should be; the only healthy intellectual companionship is communion between active minds, and the highest purposes of marriage are unfulfilled, if either husband or wife lives in a region of thought which the other cannot enter. Besides, those many women who remain unmarried can, if well educated, find in some form of service the satisfaction of their higher nature. Surely women trained in good schools and colleges have as wives and mothers shared the labours and entered more fully as companions into the lives of husbands and children. The names of many will occur to my readers, but one cares not to name the living. We see every year at the Conference of Women Workers, that the seed sown in faith has brought forth fruit; that the whole aspect of the woman’s realm has changed since the days of Evelina and Miss Austen.
[2] “Communion of Labour.”
But none of us may rest in that which has been attained. We ask for the “wages of going on and not to die”. There is earnest endeavour on the part of all engaged in the work of education, which has found expression in such societies as the Parents’ Educational Union, the Child Study Society, and the Teachers’ Guild. Teachers are not content with the school year, but holiday courses are the order of the day, and many are seeking training, and others ask for a year or a term to improve, and books on education are pouring from the press, and some of us, who have gained experience which may be helpful to others, feel bound, though much hindered by the calls of active life, to share those experiences, and say what we can about the ideals, the principles, the methods, which, we trust, have already, in spite of the gloomy portents of years gone by, improved the physical, the intellectual and moral vigour of those who have shared the larger life, entered into the higher intellectual interests, and undergone the strengthening discipline of our large schools.
CurriculumWith these preliminary remarks, I enter upon the subject of the curriculum; I have drawn up a table which I shall proceed to discuss. I have classed the subjects of education under five heads, and divided the pupils in a general way also into five classes. But before I deal with the practical, let me speak of the ideal. There is nothing so practical as ideas—these are the moving power of all our acts.
If what I have said is true, the subject cannot be treated in reference to girls only; not because I would assimilate the teaching of girls to that of boys, but because the teaching of both should aim at developing to the highest excellence the intellectual powers common to both. The teaching of modern science tells us that both pass through the same lower stages, that they may rise into the higher, and all history tells us that men and women
Rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free.