If college and boarding-school exercise a beneficial influence upon the development of a girl’s mind and manners, travel is a happy third in the list. Unfortunately travel is an expensive luxury. If, however, the financial circumstances of a girl’s parents are such that she may travel for six months or a year after her schooling is over, this puts the finishing touch upon her educational opportunities. Travel is the easiest, the quickest and the most delightful manner of gaining knowledge in the world, while, at the same time, it is what study is not always, an encouragement to social facility.
The young girl must be educated at home as well as away from home. The foundation for such accomplishments as she has a preference for must be laid there and she must prepare there, in however slight a way, for the responsibilities that may rest upon her shoulders when she has a house of her own. For her own training, as well as the relief of her mother, every girl should assume some household duty or duties. But these, unless necessity commands, should not be severe, and occasional laxity in performance should not be dealt with harshly. Young girlhood is a growing time and a dreaming time; and a too stern insistence upon household duties sometimes blights important capabilities of mind and body.
ACQUIRING ACCOMPLISHMENTS
It was an old-fashioned idea that every girl should be equipped with an accomplishment, should cultivate some definite ability to please. The idea was much abused, and resulted in the torture of many innocent persons who were compelled to look at crude sketches, to admire grotesque embroideries and to listen to mediocre performances on the piano. But there was at the bottom of the idea something sound and wholesome. It is vitally important that women should please, should help to make the wheels of life go easily. That was not an ignoble epitaph discovered on an old tombstone in an English churchyard, “She was so pleasant.” Perhaps in the matter of education we are now swinging too far away from the old-fashioned ideal and are too much inclined to regard as trifling a young girl’s special efforts to please. Do we not somewhat puritanically regard the studies one does not like as necessarily more efficacious than those pursued with joy? Drawing, music, the modern languages, the art of reciting or conversation—we speak of these usually not only as secondary in importance to the study of Greek, Latin and mathematics, but as involving little in the way of labor, while the truth is that the pursuit of these subjects not only involves endless labor but a labor that in the end unveils personality and individuality, and makes for original interpretation of life to a degree far exceeding results from the so-called severer branches.
THE DILETTANTE
The theory is generally disseminated that those studies which give most pleasure to one’s self and to others when actually transformed into accomplishments are easy of attainment and demand only the careless and dilettante touch. The elders as well as the youth are much impregnated with this idea. Let a girl understand when she begins to study drawing, the violin, the pianoforte or the art of singing that no success is possible without hard work, that the privilege of lessons will be withdrawn if she does not put effort and determination into her work, and results of a correspondingly good character may be forthcoming.
THOROUGHNESS NECESSARY
For the happiness of themselves and their friends, it is well that young girls should pursue any accomplishment toward which they may have a leaning. Certainly such a pursuit, if entered into with delicacy and vivacity, must increase the sweetness of life by adding to one’s sense of beauty; and it is never trite to say that a thing of beauty is a joy forever.