Much excellent work is done, and remains yet to be done by women, as inspectors of schools. They alone are really fitted for the task of ascertaining the conditions under which children are made to study, and they are not likely, while examining infant classes, to make such ponderous statements as that passed by a certain male inspector, who, according to an amusing story told me by Sir John Gorst, found the babies (not above five years old) “deplorably deficient in mental arithmetic!” It takes a man to deplore “lack of mental arithmetic” in a baby. A woman would never be capable of such weighty stupidity. Perhaps it will be just as well to glance casually at the state of things in this country respecting the education of mere infants, as arranged by certain laws drawn up by men, laws in which women, who are the mothers of the race, are not allowed to have a voice.
1. The law allows them to enter at three years old, and compels them to enter at five years old.
2. Men inspectors constantly examine children of four years old in arithmetic, and the “mental arithmetic of the baby class,” is constantly mentioned in reports.
3. Needlework is taught before five years old; two to three hours form the staple instruction. Needlework injures the eyesight at such a tender age, and two or three hours are a cruelty and a waste of time for tiny children.
4. Desks, blackboards, slates and books are everywhere in excess of “Kindergarten” occupations, and the “development of the spontaneous activity in the child” is twisted into the development of uniformity. To differ from the usual is to be naughty; every one must do the same thing at the same time. Every one must build a like house, a like table, a like chair; each brick must be on the table at the same minute.
5. Despite male inspectors, the babies sleep. They fall off their seats and bump their foreheads against the desks, and their spines are twisted and crooked as they lie on their arms, heads forward, upon the hard supports. Curvature must be produced in many cases, solely from these causes.
6. To maintain order, corporal punishment is habitual, and “fear” the chief motive for right-doing. To quote from a letter of Sir John Gorst’s:—
“The reform of this system is not a matter of sentiment. These babies are the future scholars of our improved schools that the Education Act is intended to produce, and the future citizens by whom our Imperial position is to be maintained. If we prematurely addle their intellects by schooling—for which their tender years are unfit; if we cripple their bodies by cooping them up in deforming desks; if we destroy their sight by premature needlework, and confuse their senses by over-study of subjects which they are too young to understand, we shall neither have fit scholars for our future schools, nor fit citizens to uphold the Empire.”
Starting on these premises it will surely be acknowledged that women have an indisputable right to be inspectors of schools. They have the natural instinct to know what is best for the health and well-being of children, and they are also capable of correctly judging by that maternal sympathy which is their inherited gift, how a child’s mental abilities should best be encouraged and trained.
I have often been asked if I would like to see women in Parliament. I may say frankly, and at once, that I should detest it. I should not like to see the sex, pre-eminent for grace and beauty, degraded by having to witness or to take part in such “scenes” of heated and undignified disputation as have frequently lowered the prestige of the House of Commons. On the same lines I may say that I do not care to see women playing “hockey” or indulging in any purely “tom-boy” sports and pastimes. They lose “caste” and individuality. One of the many brilliant and original remarks of mankind concerning the female sex is that women should be cooks and housekeepers. So they should. No woman is a good housekeeper unless she understands cooking, nor can she be a good cook unless she be a good housekeeper. The two things are inseparable, and combine to make comfort with economy. A woman should know how to cook and keep house for herself, not only for man. Man says to her: “Be a cook,”—because of all things in the world he loves a good dinner; loves it better than his wife, inasmuch as he will often “bully” the wife if the dinner fails. But a woman must also eat, and she should learn to cook for her own comfort, quite apart from his. In the same way she should study housekeeping. If she lives a single life, she will find such knowledge eminently useful. But to devote all her energy and attention to cooking and housekeeping, as most men would have her do, would be a waste of power and intelligence. As well ask a great military hero to devote his entire time to the canteen.