Public School Education

by Michael Müller

As mothers, they not only neglect, but disdain, the retired and simple domestic virtues, and scorn to be tied down to the modest but essential duties—the drudgery, they call it—of mothers; they manage to be relieved of household cares, especially of child-bearing, and of the duty of bringing up children. They repress their maternal instincts, and the horrible crime of infanticide before birth now becomes so fearfully prevalent, that the American nation is actually threatened with extinction. If they condescend to have one or two children, they set them an ill example; for if children see that their mother, as a wife, forgets to honor and obey her husband, and always wants to have her own way with him, they soon lose all respect for her, and insist on having their own way with her, and usually succeed.

As housekeepers they devote their time to pleasure or amusement, wasting their life in luxurious ease, in reading sentimental or sensational novels, or in following the caprices of fashion; thus they let the household go to ruin, and the honest earnings of the husband becomes speedily insufficient for the family expenses, and he is sorely tempted to provide for them by rash speculation or by fraud, which, though it may be carried on for a while without detection, is sure to end in disgrace and ruin at last.

There is indeed nothing which more grieves the wise and good, or makes them tremble for the future of the country, than the way in which our daughters are educated in the Public Schools. When they become wives and mothers, they have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children properly. Hence arise that growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; that insubordination, that lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America; that almost total lack of filial reverence and obedience with the children of this generation. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any proper training or discipline at home is fearfully large, and their evil example corrupts not a few of those who are well brought up. The country is no better than the town. As a rule, children are no longer subjected to a steady and firm, but mild and judicious, discipline, or trained to habits of filial love, respect and obedience. These habits are acquired only in a school of obedience, made pleasant and cheerful by a mother's playful smile and a mother's love. The care and management of children during their early years belong specially to the mother. The education of children may be said to commence from the moment they open their eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of the world about them; and of these sights and sounds the words and example of the mother are the most impressive and the most enduring. Of all lessons, those learned at the knees of a good mother sink the deepest into the mind and heart, and last the longest. Many of the noblest and best men that ever lived, and adorned and benefited the world, have declared that, under God, they owed everything that was good and useful in their lives to the love of virtue, and truthfulness, and piety, and the fear of God instilled into their hearts by the lips of a pious mother. It is her special function to plant and develop in their young and impressible minds the seeds of virtue, love, reverence, and obedience, and to train her daughters, by precept and example, not to catch husbands that will give them splendid establishments, but to be, in due time, modest and affectionate wives, tender and judicious mothers, and prudent and careful housekeepers. This the father cannot do; and his interference, except by wise counsel, and to honor and sustain the mother, will generally be worse than nothing. The task devolves specially on the mother; for it demands the sympathy with children which is peculiar to the female heart, the strong maternal instinct implanted by nature, and directed by a judicious education, that blending of love and authority, sentiment and reason, sweetness and power, so characteristic of the noble and true-hearted woman, and which so admirably fit her to be loved and honored, only less than adored, in her own household. But though the duties and responsibilities of mothers in this matter are the heaviest and most important for themselves, and for the society of all others, yet there are none which are more neglected.

Now wives and mothers, by neglecting their domestic duties and the proper family discipline, fail to offer the necessary resistance to growing lawlessness and crime, aggravated, if not generated, by the false notions of freedom and equality so widely entertained. It is only by home discipline, and the early habits of reverence and obedience to which our children are trained, that the license the government tolerates, and the courts hardly dare attempt to restrain, can be counteracted, and the community made a law-loving and a law-abiding community.

Why is it that the very bases of society have been sapped, and the conditions of good government despised, or denounced under the name of despotism? Why is it that social and political life is poisoned in its source, and the blood of the nation corrupted? It is because wives and mothers have failed in their domestic duties, and the discipline of their families. And they have failed in this, because the State did not, and could not, bring them up to it.

The evils we have to cure cannot be reached by the reading of the Bible, by Sunday-school training, nor by any possible political or legislative action. Men or women cannot be legislated into virtue. That the remedy, to a great extent, must be supplied by woman's action and influence, we not only concede, but claim. But it is only as woman, as wife, as mother, that she must do the work: as woman, to soften asperities, and to refine what else were coarse and brutal; as wife, to sustain with her affection the resolutions and just aspirations of her husband, and render home bright and cheerful—"the sweetest place on earth"; as mother, to direct and inspire the noble and righteous aspirations of her sons—to train and form her children to early habits of piety, filial love and reverence, of obedience to God's law, and respect for authority.

There are, in our day, comparatively few mothers who are qualified to do this. But what they can and should do is to see that they have a better and more thorough system of education for their sons, but especially for their daughters—a system of education that specially adapts them to the destiny of their sex, and prepares them to find their happiness in their homes, and the satisfaction of their highest ambition in discharging its manifold duties, so much higher, nobler, and more essential to the virtue and well-being of the community, the nation, the society, and to the life and progress of the human race, than any which devolve on king or emperor, magistrate or legislator. We would not have their generous instincts repressed, their quick sensibilities blunted, or their warm, sympathetic nature chilled, nor even the lighter graces and accomplishments neglected; but we would have them all directed and harmonized by solid intellectual instruction, and moral and religious culture. We would have them, whether rich or poor, trained to find the centre of their affections in their home; their chief ambition in making it cheerful, bright, radiant and happy. Whether destined to grace a magnificent palace, or to adorn the humble cottage of poverty, this should be the ideal aimed at in their education. They should be trained to love home, and to find their pleasure in sharing its cares and performing its duties, however arduous or painful.

There are, as I have said, comparatively few mothers qualified to give their daughters such an education, especially in our own country; for comparatively few have received such an education themselves, or are able fully to appreciate its importance. They can find little help in the fashionable boarding-schools for finishing young ladies; and, in general, these schools only aggravate the evils to be cured. The best and the only respectable schools for daughters that we have in the country are the conventual schools taught by women consecrated to God, and specially devoted to the work of education. These schools, indeed, are not always all that might be wished. The religious cannot, certainly, supply the place of the mother in giving their pupils that practical home-training so necessary, and which can be given only by mothers who have themselves been properly educated; but they go as far as is possible in remedying the defects of the present generation of mothers, and in counteracting their follies and vain ambitions. With all the faults that can be alleged against any of them, the conventual schools, even as they are, it must be conceded, are infinitely the best schools for daughters in the land, and, upon the whole, worthy of the high praise and liberal patronage their devotedness and disinterestedness secure them. We have seldom found their graduates weak and sickly sentimentalists. They develop in their pupils a cheerful and healthy tone, and a high sense of duty; give them solid moral, religious instruction; cultivate successfully their moral and religious affections; refine their manners, purify their tastes, and send them out feeling that life is serious, life is earnest, and resolved always to act under a deep sense of their personal responsibilities; meet whatever may be their lot with brave hearts, and without murmuring and repining.

The editor of the New York Herald prefaces an account of a Catholic academy with the following remarks:

"However divided public opinion may be as to secular and religious schools—no matter what differences in opinion may exist in the community as to the policy of aiding or discouraging purely sectarian systems of education—there can be but little opposition from any quarter to the verdict of experience given by many thousand families, that these devoted women—the Sisters of the Catholic Church—are the best teachers of young girls, the safest instructors in this age of loose, worldly, and rampant New Englandism. Those matters of education which make the lady, in their hands, subordinate to the great object of making every girl committed to their care a true woman, are imbued with those principles which have made our mothers our pride and boast. Those of us who cavil at Catholic pretensions, sneer at their assumption, and ridicule their observances, must acknowledge that the Sisters are far ahead and above any organization of the sort of which Protestantism can boast. The self-sacrifice, the devotion, the single-mindedness, the calm trust in a Power unseen, the humility of manner and rare unselfishness which characterize the Sisters, has no parallel in any organization of the reformed faith. The war placed the claims of the Sisters of Charity fairly before the country; but these Sisters of the different branches have, in peace, 'victories no less renowned than in war.' Educating the poor children, directing the untutored mind of the youthful alien savage in our midst, or holding the beacon of intellectual advancement bright and burning before the female youth of the country, and beckoning them to advance, they are ever doing a good and noble work."