Three Addresses to Girls at School

by J. M. Wilson

I have ventured to say so much for an intellectual danger in High Schools. I do not doubt that your head-mistress is aware of it, and on her guard: I speak much more to the public, to the parents, and to the Council (if I may say so), as an expert, because I know that the public sometimes want to be satisfied that the education is good at every stage, and they ought to be content if it is good at the final stage. Another point on which I would venture to say a word to parents is this. Do not take your girls away from school too early. Every schoolmaster knows that the most valuable years, those which leave the deepest marks in character and intellect, are those from sixteen to eighteen. It is equally true with girls, as schoolmistresses know equally well. It is in the later years that they get the full benefit of the higher teaching, and that much of what may have seemed the drudgery of earlier work reaps its natural and deserved reward. Let your children come early, so as to be taught well from the beginning, and let them stay late.

I do not myself know what your buildings may be; but a friend to whom I wrote speaks of them as inadequate and somewhat unworthy of the city. May I venture to say to a Bath public that it is worth while to have first-rate buildings for educational purposes? No money is better spent. If the Bath public will take this up in earnest it cannot be doubted that the Girls' School Company would second their efforts in such an important centre. Come over and see our Clifton High School, with its spacious lawns and playgrounds and pleasant rooms, and you will be discontented with a righteous discontent.

And now I will point out another defect in High School education which parents and mistresses may do much to remedy. There is usually—and I am assuming without direct knowledge that it is the case here—no system by which any one girl is known through her whole school career to any one mistress; nothing corresponding to the tutor system of our public schools. It follows that a girl passes from form to form, and the relation between her and her mistress is so constantly broken that it is morally less powerful than it might be. The friendly and permanent relation of old days is converted into an official and temporary relation. It will be obvious to any one who reflects that the loss is great. The cure for it is twofold. The parents may do much by establishing a friendly relation with the form mistresses of their girls. I have known parents who had never taken the trouble to inquire even the names of their girls' mistress. If parents wish to get really the best out of a school, I would say to them (and I am speaking specially to mothers), you are delegating to the form mistress a very large share of the responsibility for the formation of your daughter's character; the least you can do is to be in the most friendly and confidential communication with her that circumstances permit. And I would say to the mistresses that, as far as is possible, you should be to the girls what form masters are in a good school to their boys—friends in school and out of school, acquainted with their tastes, companions sometimes in their games or their walks, and in all ways breaking down the merely formal relation of teacher and pupil. The ideally bad master, as I have often said to my young masters on a first appointment, is one who as soon as his boys clear out of the class-room, puts his hands in his pockets and whistles, and thanks Heaven that he will see no more of the boys for so many hours. I do not know what the corresponding action on the part of a mistress may be, as I believe they have no pockets and can't whistle, but there is probably a corresponding state of mind. I venture, therefore, to suggest that in our High Schools there should be a greater rapprochement than is usual between parents and mistresses and girls in order to make the system more truly educational in the best sense.

I am now going to turn to a wholly different subject; and I am going to talk to the girls. In the crusade against the lower type of education that prevailed twenty years ago, and still exists, who are the most important agents? It is the girls who are still in the High Schools, or who are passing out of them, or who are otherwise getting the higher education in a few private schools. "Ye are our epistle, known and read of all men," and read of all women too, with their still keener eyes.

There is a very real danger in our High Schools that the intellectual side of education may be overestimated and overpressed, not by mistresses, but by yourselves; and that the natural, human, domestic, and family elements in it may be undervalued. What are you yourselves at home, in society, with parents, brothers, sisters, children, friends, schoolfellows, servants? Is the better education, that you are undoubtedly getting, widening your sympathies, opening your heart and mind to all the educational influences which do not consist in books or in work? Is it giving you greater delicacy of touch? Is it opening new channels for influences, streaming in on you or streaming out from you? Your daily life may become a higher education, and is so to the truly noble-minded and well-educated girl or woman. Do not regard as interruptions, and as teasing, the calls of household, the duties to parents, visitors, children, and the rest; it is part of the education of life to fulfil all these duties well, delightfully, brilliantly, joyously, enthusiastically; these things are not interruptions to life, they are life itself. There was a pitiful magazine article written the other day by some lady complaining that social duties, the having to see her friends, her cook, her gardener, her dress-maker, etc., prevented her from reading Herbert Spencer, and developing her small fragment of soul. Social duties, rightly done, are one of the developments of soul. Let it be seen that you girls who can enjoy your literature, and your history, and your music, and your drawing with keen appreciation are not made thereby selfish or unsociable; but that you are more delightful creatures than those who have no such independent resources and joys. A girl who gets her certificate or prize and is cross or dull at home, and does not think it worth while to be kind and agreeable to a young brother or an old nurse, to every creature in her household down to the cat and the canary, is a traitor to the cause of higher education.

Again, it has been observed that the practical and artistic elements in school education have been, in general, more thoroughly developed of late years since they were put into a secondary place. This is as it should be. Such subjects as music, drawing, cooking, housekeeping, wood-carving, nursing, needlework, when they are studied at all, are studied more professionally and thoroughly and intelligently, and less in the spirit of the amateur and dabbler. So I would say to you, both now and when you leave, show that your education in intelligence has given you wide interests and powers to master all such subjects. Take them up all the more thoroughly.

Closely akin to this merit of thoroughness is the large spirit of unselfishness that ought to come, and certainly in many instances does come, with wider interests, a more intelligent education, and a more active imagination. Women in our class have more leisure than men; they can actually do what is impossible by the conditions of life for us men to do, link class to class by knowledge and sympathy and help and kindness. They can be of immense service in this way. There is a story in the life of an American lady, Mrs. Lynam, that occurs to me. There was much conversation about a certain Mr. Robbins, who had lately died; he had been such a benefactor, such a good man, and so on. A visitor asked, "Did Mr. Robbins found a benevolent institution?" "No," was the reply, "he was a benevolent institution." Women of our class may be, they ought to be, "benevolent institutions." And such women exist among us; pity is there are so few of them. They can unobtrusively be centres of happiness, and knowledge, and generous attitudes of mind. Now there ought to be more of such women, and I look to our High Schools with hope. They ought to make girls public-spirited and large-minded.

There is another element in girls' education which is only imperfectly as yet brought out, and which you yourselves can do something to develop. I mean the better appreciation of an education which is not in books, and not in accomplishments, and not in duties, and not in social intercourse. How shall I describe it? Think of the old Greek education of men. There was a large element of literature and poetry and natural religion and imagination in it; and a large element of gymnastic also; but besides all this it was an education of eye and ear; it was a training that sprang from reverence for nature, as a whole, for an ideal of complete life, in body and mind and soul; and not only for complete individual life, but also for the city, the nation. It was a consummate perfection of life that was ever leading the Athenian upward, by a life-long education, to strive for a certain grace and finish in every one of his faculties. And we see to what splendid results in literature and art and civic and personal beauty it led them.

This element is still wanting in our higher education; it is the ideal of nobility of life and perfection. We lack it in our physical education. That is still far from perfect. If we all, parents, children, boys and girls, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, had some of the Greek feeling of high admiration of physical perfection of form and grace and activity, we should not see so many boys and girls of very imperfect gracefulness, nor should we see fashions of dress so ruinous to all ideals of perfection and grace. We cannot make up for the want of this national artistic ideal of beauty of figure by artificial gymnastics, scientific posturings, and ladders and bars. They are better than nothing, they are a protest, they certainly remedy some defects and prevent others. But do not you be content with them. By self-respect and self-discipline, by healthy life, early hours, open air, natural exercise, the joyous and free use of all your powers, by dancing, playing games, by refusal to give way to unhealthy and disfiguring fashions, and, above all, by an aspiration after grace and perfection, do what you can to remedy this national defect in our ideals for girls.

Did you ever read Kingsley's "Nausicaa in London"? Do you all know who Nausicaa was? If not, let me advise you to borrow Worsley's "Odyssey" and read Book VI., and read Kingsley's Essay too. Nausicaa was a Greek maiden who played at ball; and I think you are doing more to approach the old Greek ideal when you play at lawn tennis and cricket and hockey, and I would add rounders and many another game, than when you are going through ordered exercises, valuable as they are, or even than when you are learning Greek or copying Greek statues.